The Risen Jesus - Fact or Fiction?

1 Cor 15:12, 16-20

Brothers and sisters:
If Christ is preached as raised from the dead,
how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead?
If the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised,
and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain;
you are still in your sins.
Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.
If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,
we are the most pitiable people of all.

But now Christ has been raised from the dead,
the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

It would have been so simple for the authorities to repudiate the Christian thing that I believe it is the work of God that caused them to mess it up.  The temple gang knew that they had problems because they could not produce the body of Jesus to show that the pious faker, the blasphemer, the pretender to the throne of God was dead as a crucifixion nail could make one. The authorities paid the guards to say that they fell asleep and that the comrades of the criminal came in the night and stole the body away. That story was completely plausible and to their minds solved the issue at hand. They could not have been more incorrect because Jesus did appear to people and the fact that he rose from the dead was believed more than the paid for official version.  The Jesus movement was here to stay and it would not be able to be stopped no matter how hard they tried to do so. 

It makes a difference that Christ rose from the dead.  No other leader of a religious movement could ever claim that he had survived death, a death on a cross that was presided over by the official execution squad who made very sure that the person on the cross was certifiably dead as he could be and  that this fact was officially recorded by the Roman occupiers of Israel as a legal execution ordered by the procurator himself.   All was legal and correct except that the pesky Jesus rose from the dead and defeated sin and death for all time. 

For us, the fact that Jesus rose from the dead makes all the difference to us.  Had He not risen from the dead, if we, today, could make a pilgrimage to see His bones, well, it would not be worth going to see them for it would prove that He was nothing but a charlatan, a deceiver, and a corruptor who was in the savior business for reasons known only to Himself. 

The news that death has been defeated is news even more joyful than the news that Jesus was born!  It means that our lives do not end when we take our last breath on this blue rock we call earth.  It means that our life continues in the kingdom of God and that one day our souls will rejoin our bodies as we are resurrected from the dead and take our place in the kingdom. 

We need to always be ready to explain why we see the world so differently than do our unconverted and unchurched friends.  We need to be ready to lead them to the empty tomb to show them that He is not there but He has risen as He said.  If we do not believe this then we must remove our baptismal garment and don the clothing of a jester for there is no one as sad as us.