Easter is the Christian holiday when Christians the world over commemorate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For a lot of people, the holiday is associated with the easter bunny, easter lambs, easter eggs and not much else. For them, it has little or nothing to do with Jesus. That is why some fundamentalists now refer to the day as Resurrection Day instead of Easter.
The thing is, the resurrection did not happen; at least not in a literal sense. Saying things like that is not going to make you popular among your Christians friends, but it is the truth. The resurrection story and, indeed, the creation story are myths that have been debunked long ago, yet, they continue to persist. People do not come back from the dead, at least not physically.
There is evidence that out of body experiences and near death experiences are real, but only in the sense that they are caused by brains under severe stress conditions. The process of dying is no longer considered an instantaneous event, but takes place over a period of time varying depending on the individual. A small number of people have woken up after having been declared dead. They were not really dead. The criteria we normally associate with life just could not be detected. This is unlikely to have been what happened to Jesus, though. The medical expertise to care for such a person is not likely to have been developed yet, but we will never know for sure.
Most of us of any kind of advanced age have lost someone(s) who was close to us, perhaps a family member or someone who we considered an important influence in our lives. The memory of these people tends to stay in our minds for a long time and may even never really go away completely. Sometimes the influence of such people transcends generations, even millennia. History books are full of important people like that. For a small group of people, Jesus was such a person.
Humans are story telling animals. We are pretty sure all animals have ways to communicate with each other to some degree or another, but humans seem to have taken the art to a whole different level with the invention of written language that can be preserved for a long time.
It took several decades before the gospel writers picked up on the significance of what had happened to one of the insurrectionists who opposed the brutal oppression of not only the Roman occupation, but also of the rich and powerful among their own people. He seemed to be living on in the memories of his followers more than usual to the point that perhaps some began to develop a sense of a physical presence. By the time the writers started to write any of it down, myths had already begun to develop about him, one of which is the resurrection.
Despite claims to the contrary, the gospel writers were not historians. Their purpose was not to record historical facts, but to paint a literary picture of the character of an extraordinary person in history. To this day, we admire these literary masterpieces. We would not want to spend another Christmas without angels, lambs, shepherds and wise men, would we?
The significance of these stories for us today is that we can know the heart of God through what they say about Jesus. We can know that the God prehistoric humans developed long ago is a God who wants nothing less than the Garden of Eden to be restored, a heavenly kingdom where love reigns supreme, a world where humans recognize that our very purpose in life is to be a blessing for others. This is the hope we have in Jesus, the promise that if we follow him and his message, a world without suffering, a world without violence will be the result.
So far, no one has adopted a lifestyle as radical as that, but thanks to the gospel writers we have faith that a world like that can exist. Faith is believing without proof. Let us be the proof. Let us get together and create a life like that.
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