Take a Fresh Look at the Resurrection

I hope you're not in a rut about Easter, tired of the old traditions and complacent about the story. If you're like me, chocolate bunnies and Easter egg hunts and eating lamb and ham just kind of miss the mark.

Well, I decided to take a fresh look at the Easter story after I heard someone speak on the radio about the solid proofs from the Bible that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. I don't intend to write about them, though they are fascinating and there are thousands of resources you could turn to if you wanted to study that. I think it's far more important that you take the time yourself to study the biblical accounts of Jesus's death, burial, resurrection, and the interesting things he did in the forty days after that.

So here's what I noticed.

Jesus wasn't the first to rise from the dead. He was the first to rise that week, but when he died many holy people rose from the dead. They waited for him, then walked the streets of the city and appeared to many people.

The Pharisees remembered that Jesus had promised that he would rise from the dead and tried to prevent it, but the disciples didn't believe Jesus.

Jesus had some new and interesting skills, and not just with fishing, cooking, and folding laundry. No, I'm not joking.

Jesus appeared to women first, giving them the greatest legal validity they had ever received. The eyewitness testimony of these women is crucial to the concrete proof of the resurrection.

Not to sound crude, but ghosts and those who might be described as the walking dead or zombies are in the Easter story. Often I think that some of the great myths of all time are perversions of biblical truths because men can't even think of original stories.
Jesus seems very busy and driven in the resurrection accounts. He appears to be focused on demonstrating that he has risen from the dead just as he promised, as well as urging his disciples to wait for supernatural power to do amazing things.

To be sure, the next forty days are a mysterious time. The disciples only saw him a few times. Then, from the Mount of Olives, Jesus promises that he will return in the same way he leaves-as he leaves the ground and takes off up into the sky and beyond! This is the real Superman!

After you read the stories in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, please read 1 Corinthians 15 and contemplate how vitally important the resurrection is to everything about following Jesus.