But God raised Him from the dead, and for many days He appeared to those who had come up with Him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now His witnesses to the people. Acts 13:30-31
This is of course the true crux of Christianity. Anyone can die, but to come back to life, there’s the rub. And it’s not so much that when the Pharisees said to Jesus, “Prove you are who you say you are,” He told them that they were going to kill him and that He was going to rise from the dead.
It’s the impact His resurrection had on His followers. They did not want to believe in His resurrection. Peter and John did not believe Mary. Thomas certainly did not want to believe. It was the truly inconvenient truth. All of them were shocked and scared and wanted to hide and return to the way that things had been. But what they had seen and heard and thrust their hand into wouldn’t let them.
And sometimes I forget that this is not some murky tale that I am choosing to believe, because, well, it’s there. This is a story of real people who struggled with fear and doubt and emotions and what they had always thought and what turned out to be. This is Peter who didn’t have the well, huevos to confront a cleaning maid by a flickering bonfire but somehow managed to stand up in front of a Pentecost multitude of Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians and lift his voice and say, “No we are not drunk. It is only nine in the morning.”
And may I be once again caught by the freshness of the story, passed down throughout history, one transformed life after one transformed life, and the drama and intensity and very tangibility of it all. May I, like the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, a man of intelligence, be astounded by the teaching of the LORD.
And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.
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