4 God the Son: His Death and Resurrection
4
God the Son
His Death and Resurrection
In this chapter we continue our exploration of what the creed has to say about Jesus Christ by looking at the sections dealing with his death and resurrection.
The Ideas Explained
A. He suffered under Pontius Pilate
Some Christians find it surprising that Pontius Pilate should be mentioned in the creed. A few even find it offensive. Nevertheless, the governor (or procurator) of Judea from A.D. 26 to 36 has found his way into the creed. And it is very important that he should be there! The fifth-century writer Rufinus wrote as follows: “Those who handed down the Creed showed great wisdom in emphasizing the actual date at which these things happened, so that there might be no chance of any uncertainty or vagueness upsetting the stability of the tradition.” The reference to Pilate firmly anchors the creed to history. It affirms that we are dealing with an event—the crucifixion of Jesus Christ—that actually happened in history. The gospel is not like some fairy tale that happened “long, long ago and far, far away.” Its central event happened in a definite place and at a definite time (Luke 3:1-3).
Why is it so important to emphasize this point? Because you and I both live in history. The gospel affirms that God himself entered into that history, in order to meet us and redeem us. God came down to meet us where we are, in time and space. The doctrine of the incarnation tells us that God came down to our level in order to bring us up to his. There is a certain down-to-earth realism about the Christian faith. And this is partly grounded in the fact that God came down to our earth from heaven to meet us and bring us home. The gospel is not just about ideas; it is about God acting, and continuing to act, in history.
Mention of Pilate also brings out the public nature of Jesus’ trial, suffering and crucifixion. Pilate here represents the witness of the world to the suffering and death of its unacknowledged Savior. The final days of Jesus’ ministry took place in full public view, where all could see what was happening. The crucifixion, for example, took place in public, under the gaze of the citizens of Jerusalem. It was thus impossible for anyone to deny that these things had happened.
Pilate is also of importance in another respect. Within the creed Pilate represents the rejection of Jesus Christ by his world—a major theme of the New Testament. The disowning of Jesus is seen as representing the rejection of the Creator by his creation. The New Testament portrays that rejection in many ways: Jesus is rejected by those who had known him from his youth at Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30). He was condemned as a blasphemer by the leaders of the Jewish people (Matthew 26:59-66). And by Pilate he was condemned as a political threat to the stability of the pax Romana in the region.
It would be wrong to isolate any of these groups and place the burden of Jesus’ crucifixion on them and them alone. In the New Testament the behavior of the synagogue congregation at Nazareth, the Jewish leaders and the Roman procurator all point to the same thing: the sinfulness of human nature. All human beings, no matter who they are or when they live, are sinners needing God’s forgiveness and reconciliation. It is sinful human nature itself that led the creation to crucify its Creator. Sin bites so deep into human nature that it comes close to destroying our ability to recognize God when he comes among us.
So deep-rooted is sin that without help we are incapable of breaking its stranglehold. It enslaves us. It is like an addictive drug that destroys people’s will and ability to break free from its grip. The gospel affirms that God has acted to break sin’s hold on us. Through the death of Jesus Christ, God is able to transform our situation. The guilt of sin is forgiven; its power is broken; its stain is cleansed.
But the creed asks us to consider the cost of this breakthrough. Forgiveness is a costly business that demanded the suffering and death of the Son of God. Jesus Christ really suffered in order that our real sins might really be forgiven.
The close relation between suffering and redemption is clearly brought out in Isaiah 52:13—53:12. This powerful and moving passage describes a mysterious suffering servant. He was innocent; he suffered on behalf of the guilty. Through his sufferings others will be healed.
He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering....
Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all....
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.
(Isaiah 53:3-6, 12)
The New Testament writers saw this passage fulfilled in the suffering of Jesus Christ (see, for example, 1 Peter 2:21-25). His sufferings on the cross were not pointless or accidental, but the mysterious and wonderful means by which God was working out the salvation of the world.
The sufferings of Jesus also have a direct bearing on the mystery of human suffering in general. The twentieth century has witnessed previously unimagined horrors of human suffering in the trenches of World War I, in the extermination camps of Nazi Germany, and in the programs of genocide established by Nazi Germany and Marxist Cambodia. A movement known as Protest Atheism grew up in response to these developments. “We cannot believe in a God who stays safely in his heaven,” it declared, “while all this suffering goes on. We cannot take that sort of God seriously. If he doesn’t know what it is like to suffer, he cannot know anything about us.” But as we have seen, the gospel declares that God does indeed know what it is like to suffer. He is not uninvolved with its pain and misery. It is certainly true that any view of God that denies the incarnation and speaks of God as far off and distant is very vulnerable to the charges of Protest Atheism—a point that reminds us of how important and relevant the doctrine of the incarnation is. The creed, however, as we have seen, knows of God subjecting himself to the evil and pain of the world at its worst in the grim scene at Calvary, bearing the brunt of that agony itself. God suffered in Christ, taking upon himself the suffering and pain of the world he created.
B. He was crucified, died and was buried. He descended to the dead
This next section of the creed calls to mind the scene at Calvary. It was perhaps the darkest moment the disciples had ever faced, as Jesus died on the first Good Friday.
Jesus was crucified. The word crucified would have sent a shudder down the spine of any educated person in the ancient world. Crucifixion was familiar as a form of execution to Roman and Greek, to Gentile and Jew. It was perhaps the most barbaric form of execution known, ideally suited as a deterrent. It seems to have been used especially by the Romans in the suppression of rebellious provincials such as the Cantabrians in northern Spain and the Jews in Judea. Josephus’s accounts of the crucifixion of countless Jewish fugitives who attempted to escape from besieged Jerusalem make horrifying reading. In the view of most Roman jurists, notorious criminals should be crucified on the exact location of their crime, so that “the sight may deter others from such crimes.” Perhaps for this reason Quintillian crucified criminals on the busiest thoroughfares, in order that the maximum deterrent effect might be achieved.
In crucifixion the sadism of executioners was given full rein. It is difficult to give a description of what a “normal” crucifixion would have looked like; however, there are ample descriptions of the practice dating from Roman times to allow us to build up a picture of the various possibilities open to Roman executioners. (It is, incidentally, interesting that classical Roman writers are often reluctant to write in any detail on the subject, apparently on account of its gruesome nature. The Roman writer Seneca wrote briefly of his experience of crucifixions: “I see crosses there, not just of one type, but made in different ways: some hang their victims head downwards, some impale their private parts, others stretch their arms out on them.”) The detailed accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion given in the Gospels agree well with contemporary Roman practice.
The victim would usually be flogged and was often forced to carry the crossbeam to the place of execution. When this place was reached, the victim’s arms were generally nailed to the crossbeam. This was then raised up. Some commentators have wrongly suggested that crucifixion was an essentially bloodless form of execution; actually the victim would have bled profusely. Only if he had not been flogged or tortured previously, and if he had been bound rather than nailed to the cross, would no blood have been spilled.
But death did not usually come through loss of blood. The victim found it increasingly difficult to breathe, due to the strain placed on his chest by the sheer weight of his body. Eventually he would die from exhaustion, unable to breathe. The Roman executioners often prolonged his agony by providing a small wooden seat (known as a sedile) on the main upright beam of the cross. The victim still died, but it now took much longer.
The Gospel descriptions of Jesus’ crucifixion match our knowledge of traditional Roman practices. The Gospels portray a man who is dying from lack of breath, who finally cries his memorable and moving last words (John 19:30) and then breathes no more.
Jesus, then, was given over to “the utterly vile death of the cross” (to quote the words of Origen, an early Christian writer). To say that Jesus “died,” or just that he “was executed,” misses the barbarism of the way he died. The full sadism of human nature was brought to bear on him. It was a shameful and degrading death.
Small wonder, then, that the pagan world of the first century reacted with disbelief or disgust to the Christians’ suggestion that they should obey and worship “an evil man and his cross” (to quote an early critic of Christianity). Crucifixion was a punishment reserved for the lowest criminals; thus Jesus’ death by crucifixion clearly implies that he was one of their number. Jesus “endured the cross, scorning its shame” (Hebrews 12:2). It is not surprising, then, that many regarded the Christian gospel as utter foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:23-25).
But the gospel is not merely about the fact that Jesus died, nor even that he was executed, nor yet that he was crucified. He died for us. Paul makes this point as follows: “What I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3). Christianity is not just about the historical fact that Jesus was crucified; it is about the astonishing and thrilling truth that he died in order that we might be forgiven. Paul makes a clear distinction between the event of the death of Christ and the significance of this event. That Christ died is a simple matter of history; that Christ died for our sins is the gospel itself.
The vital distinction between an event and its meaning can be brought out if we consider an example. In 49 B.C. Julius Caesar crossed a small river with a single legion of men. The name of that river was the Rubicon, and it marked the boundary between Italy and Cisalpine Gaul. As an event, the crossing was not particularly interesting; the Rubicon was not a particularly wide river, and it had been crossed countless times before. But this seemingly unimportant event had a deeper meaning. The Rubicon marked a national frontier. By crossing it, Caesar declared war against Pompey and the Roman senate—with momentous results. The event was the crossing of a river; the meaning of that event was a declaration of war.
In many ways the death of Christ may be said to parallel Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon. The event itself appears unexceptional, except to those who know its significance. Jesus died on a cross. On the basis of contemporary records, we know that an incalculable number of people died in this way at that time. Lots of other people had died unjustly in history before then—think of Socrates, for example. Anyway, we all have to die at some point. As an event, Jesus’ death hardly seems important or noteworthy. On the other hand, those aware of the meaning of an event saw behind the mere external event itself to what it signified, the reason why it was important. Pompey and the Roman senate were not interested in the mechanics of how Caesar crossed the Rubicon—for them it meant war. Paul was not particularly interested in the mechanics of the crucifixion of Jesus—for him it meant salvation, forgiveness and victory over death. Thus the “word of the cross” was not just the proclamation of the simple fact that Jesus was crucified but carried also the significance of this event for us.
We pause now to look at the final sentence in this section: “He descended to the dead.” What does this mean? It is a statement of the belief that Jesus really did die. For the New Testament writers, Christ was not raised “from death” (an abstract idea) but “from the dead” (Acts 2:24; Romans 1:4; Colossians 2:12). The Greek term literally means “out of those who are dead.” In other words, Jesus shared the fate of all those who have died. Again, we find the same point being stressed: Jesus really was human like us. His divinity does not compromise his humanity. Being God incarnate did not mean he was spared from tasting death. He did not merely seem to die; he really did die and joined those who had died before him. And in the glorious act of resurrection, God raised him from the dead!
C. On the third day he rose again
The creed now moves on to recount the momentous events of the first Easter Day, and it asserts that Jesus really was raised on the third day. As we have just seen, the creed stresses that Jesus actually did die. But what happened next?
Some critics of Christianity, in an attempt to discredit the resurrection accounts of the New Testament, have suggested that he merely fainted or swooned on the cross, and when he recovered, his disciples thought he had been raised from the dead. Here’s the theory that H. E. G. Paulus put forward in 1828: In first-century Palestine it was quite common for people to be buried when they weren’t actually dead. And this is exactly what happened with Jesus. He fainted on the cross. Jesus’ body was then taken to a grave. The smell of the spices in which he was wrapped and the coolness of the tomb combined to revive him. So on Sunday morning he was able to leave the tomb. (Fortunately, the great stone that had blocked the entrance had been moved by an earthquake.) After that Jesus put in occasional appearances to his disciples. These disciples, of course, being unsophisticated and backward peasants, thought that he was risen from the dead.
Now it is possible that someone who is deliberately determined not to believe in the resurrection may find this a convincing explanation. Even many critics of Christianity, however, find it totally implausible—a fact that says little for the credibility of those who suggest it. It is just not an adequate explanation. Is it really likely that experienced Roman executioners would have botched Jesus’ execution? It seems that an executioner who allowed his victim to survive would have been put to death in his place. Would such executioners have been likely to confuse fainting and dying? The reference to “blood and water” when Jesus’ side was pierced after the crucifixion (John 19:34) would seem to suggest separation of the blood into clot and serum, indicating that Jesus was unequivocally dead. As blood’s tendency to separate at death seems not to have been known at the time John’s Gospel was written, this detail is unlikely to have been included to make the account seem more plausible.
No fundamental criticism, no decisive argument, has yet to be made which obliges Christians to give up faith in the resurrection of Jesus. For everyone who tries to discredit the resurrection, others have arisen to defend it with equal force.
Why is the resurrection of Jesus so important? Basically, it is important because it gives us crucial insights about God, about Jesus and about ourselves. Let us explore these three areas.
1. It tells us about God. Scripture often defines God in terms of what he does. Someone might ask, “What God do you believe in?” Of course, one answer might be that there only is one God and that is all there is to it. But a more helpful answer to the question would go something like this. The God of Israel is the God who revealed himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who led the people of Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land with great signs and wonders. In other words, we tell a story about God, which helps us understand who he is. The Old Testament identifies God from the history of his people. The great stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of the exodus from Egypt and so on, are told in order to identify God. Question: Who is God? Answer: Whoever got us out of Egypt! (See Exodus 19:4-5; Deuteronomy 26:5-9; Ezekiel 20:5-26.)
Now we turn to the God whom Christians worship and adore. Who is this God? To answer this question the New Testament tells a story—perhaps the most famous story in the world: the story of Jesus Christ. And as that story reaches its climax in the account of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, we learn that God, for Christians, is the One who acted in this way to raise Jesus. Question: Who is the God whom Christians worship and adore? Answer: Whoever “raised Jesus our Lord from the dead” (Romans 4:24). Of course the New Testament writers make it abundantly clear that the One who “raised Jesus our Lord from the dead” is the same God who got Israel out of Egypt; but the New Testament emphasis falls on the resurrection of Jesus. Christians believe in a living and active God: the God who raised Christ from the dead and will one day do the same for us. He is a God who acts.
2. It tells us about Jesus. Jesus Christ “was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4). The resurrection singles out Jesus as unique. It demonstrates his vital unity with God himself. The central and decisive Christian doctrine of the divinity of Jesus Christ is grounded in his resurrection from the dead. The resurrection answers the question “Who is it who died on the cross of Calvary?” It declares that the Jesus who died on the cross is none other than the Son of God. Jesus is not merely another human being suffering unjust and cruel execution at the hands of an oppressive government; he is the Son of God, suffering pain and rejection for us.
For Paul, the cross reveals the tender love of God for sinners such as himself (Romans 5:8; Galatians 2:20). This crucial insight, however, depends on recognizing that it is indeed the Son of God who died on the cross. Without this truth—grounded and revealed in the resurrection of Jesus—the cross loses its saving significance. For if it is not God who is dying on the cross, then it is not the love of God that is demonstrated. It is the love of a man for his fellow human beings—an especially splendid man, who may be ranked with others in history who have made equally great sacrifices for those whom they loved. But the gospel is not about the love of one human being for another; it is about the love of God for us, which stimulates a new love of human beings for one another (1 John 4:10-11).
To lose sight of the divinity of Christ is to lose forever the insight that it is God himself who shows his love for us on the cross. C. S. Lewis wrote on this matter to his friend Arthur Greaves on December 11, 1944: “The doctrine of Christ’s divinity seems to me not something stuck on which you can unstick but something that peeps out at every point so that you’d have to unravel the whole web to get rid of it.” The love of God revealed in the death of Jesus Christ (John 3:16) is a case in point.
3. It tells us about ourselves as believers. The New Testament makes it clear that believers share in the fate of their Lord (Romans 6:1-10). Faith binds us to Jesus Christ, so that we share in his inheritance. Through adoption, we are the children of God and entitled to the same riches that Christ gained. And that includes resurrection and glorification. Christ is the “firstfruits” of the resurrection harvest (1 Corinthians 15:20); we shall follow in due course. Those who, through faith, are united to Jesus Christ will one day share in his resurrection. What our Lord is, we shall be as well.
But this must not be regarded as triumphalism. It is not “pie in the sky when you die.” The New Testament reminds us that our place is firmly on this earth. There is no place for a faith that is so heavenly minded that it is no earthly use. There is no resurrection without suffering and the cross. Just as Jesus suffered rejection, pain and death before he was raised, so we must expect to share his sufferings (1 Peter is an especially fine discussion of this theme). There is no cheap grace, no economy road to salvation. Where there is no cross, there is also no resurrection. “We share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory” (Romans 8:17). God’s gift of Christlike glorification is given along with the gift of Christlike suffering.
The Ideas Applied
A. He suffered under Pontius Pilate
Suffering is a mystery that causes anguish to many Christians. It seems to call the love of God into question. The suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross at Calvary does not explain suffering. It does, however, reveal that God himself is willing and able to allow himself to be subject to all the pain and suffering that his creation experiences. We are not talking of a God who stands far off from his world, aloof and distant from its problems. We are dealing with a loving God who has entered into our human situation, who became human and lived among us as one of us. We know a God who, in his love for us, determined to experience firsthand what it is like to be frail, mortal and human, to suffer and to die. We cannot explain suffering, but we can say that in the person of his Son Jesus Christ, God took it upon himself to follow this way. God became the “man of suffering” so that we can enter into the mystery of death and resurrection.
God knows what it is like to be human—an astonishing and comforting thought. God is not like a general who issues orders to his troops from the safety of a bomb-proof shelter, miles away from the front line, but one who leads his troops from the front, having previously done all that he asks them to do in turn. If God asks us to suffer on his behalf, it is because he has already suffered on our behalf.
The suffering and pain of the world simply will not go away, and we have every right to dismiss those who tell us that one day all will be well if we adopt their particular solution to the world’s ills. Realism demands that we work toward the alleviation of misery and suffering, recognizing that the vision of its total elimination is utopian. The idea of a political revolution that will eliminate human misery and suffering has lost what little credibility it once had and has probably caused just as much misery where this hypothesis has become a dogma. Now that Marxism has lost its hold on the countries of Eastern Europe, for example, its total failure to change the human predicament—despite all its promises—has become increasingly obvious.
What, then, may one say about God and suffering? Can anything be said that is of comfort? In the history of the world, four answers have been given
1. Suffering is real and will not go away. But death comes as the end, and death brings an end to suffering and eventual peace.
2. Suffering is an illusion. It simply is not there, but is imagined.
3. Suffering is real, but we ought to be able to rise above it and recognize that it is of little importance.
4. The Christian has the fourth answer: God suffered in Christ. God knows what it is like to suffer. The letter to the Hebrews talks about Jesus being our sympathetic “high priest” (Hebrews 4:15)—someone who suffers along with us (which is the literal meaning of both the Greek-derived word sympathetic and the Latin-derived word compassionate). This thought does not explain suffering, but it may make it more tolerable to bear. For it is expressing the deep insight that God himself suffered at first hand as we suffer. We are given a new perspective on life. Christianity has always held that the suffering of Christ on the cross was the culmination and fulfillment of his ministry. God shares in the darkest moments of his people. God can be found in suffering.
There is a famous saying about the medical profession worth remembering here: “Only the wounded physician can heal.” The God who offers to heal the wounds of our sin has himself been wounded by sinners.
B. He was crucified, died and was buried. He descended to the dead
Many Christians are confused and upset because they do not experience God as present and active in the world. If you feel this way, try to imagine what it was like for the disciples on the first Good Friday. They had given up everything to follow Jesus. Then, in front of their eyes, he was taken from them to be publicly executed. You can feel an immense sense of despair as you read the Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus. Perhaps the disciples were hoping for a miracle. Yet there seemed to be no trace of God’s presence or activity at Calvary. As Jesus became weaker, the disciples must have become increasingly despondent. There was no sign of God intervening to transform the situation.
Finally Jesus died. That would probably have been the darkest moment in the lives of the disciples. They were already demoralized enough, as Peter’s denial of Jesus demonstrates. Now, as they watched the scene from a distance, it must have seemed as if their entire world had collapsed, shown up as a fraud and an illusion.
Of course we know the outcome of that story. We know how the disciples’ sorrow was transformed to joy and wonder, as the news of the resurrection of Jesus became known. But try to imagine yourself standing among the disciples as, without knowing that he would be raised again from the dead, they watched Jesus suffer and die. Set aside your knowledge of what happened later and try to imagine what it must have been like to watch Jesus die on the cross. His suffering seemed utterly pointless. Where was God in all this? It was enough to make anyone doubt whether God existed in the first place. It is easy to get a feel for the sense of despair and bewilderment on that sad day.
All those doubts were resolved through the resurrection. The apparently pointless suffering of Jesus was revealed as the means through which God was working out the salvation of sinful humanity. God was not absent from that scene; he was working to transform it from a scene of hopelessness and helplessness to one of joy and hope. God’s love was demonstrated, not contradicted, by the death of his Son (John 3:16; Romans 5:8).
So thinking about the first Good Friday brings home to us how unreliable experience and feelings can be as guides to the presence of God. Those around the cross didn’t experience the presence of God, so they concluded that he was absent from the scene. The resurrection overturned that judgment: God was present in a hidden manner, which experience mistook for his absence. Do you feel that God is absent from your life, or from certain difficult situations? Are you bewildered by events or in despair over the way things are going? Then think of the first Good Friday, when God also seemed to be absent, only to be shown to have been working in a hidden and mysterious way to transform it in a totally unexpected manner.
The promise of resurrection was there (Matthew 20:17-19). Yet in the desperation of that terrible moment, the promise was forgotten, perhaps even doubted. Experience seemed to suggest it could not be fulfilled. The first Good Friday reminds us of the need to trust in the divine promises made to us, rather than rely on our feelings and experience. Our feelings are influenced by a huge variety of factors: our health, the weather, the state of our bank balance, our personal relationships, our work or career—just to name the more obvious ones! God doesn’t cease to exist just because you’ve had a bad day at the office or had an argument with a friend. Trust in the promises of God—not your emotional state.
C. On the third day he rose again
Many people are terrified at the thought of death. The fact that they will one day cease to exist frightens them. One way of responding is to deny death. In his famous book The Denial of Death Ernest Becker points out how many humans have spent the best part of their lives trying to deny that they are going to die. “Death is something that happens to someone else. It won’t happen to me!’ And so such people build their lives on a grand illusion. In reality they are frightened and anxious, but they project the appearance of success, permanence and calm. Some Christians, too, are anxious about death and wonder what to make of it.
It is here that the gospel has enormous implications. Jesus Christ suffered and died “so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15). We are not talking about some soothing words to ease the pain of death and dying, words with no foundation in reality—such as saying “It’s all right” when in reality things could not be worse. No! We are talking about a real and decisive victory over death, by which its power is broken. A new attitude to death and dying is possible because a new situation has dawned. Through faith we are given the privilege of sharing in die resurrection of Jesus Christ. “Thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:57). “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade” (1 Peter 1:3-4).
Socrates may have taught us how to die with dignity, but after Jesus Christ, human beings are able to suffer and die in real hope. Try to make that hope a visible part of your life, and explain it to your friends (1 Peter 3:15). For as long as human beings must die, the gospel has vital and relevant dungs to say! Make sure it gets a hearing in your circle of friends.
Key Bible Passages
A. He suffered under Pontius Pilate
Isaiah 52:13—53:12: A remarkable prophecy looking forward to the death of the Messiah
Matthew 27:11-56: Part of Matthew’s account of the trial and execution of Jesus
John 19:16: Part of John’s account of the trial and execution of Jesus
B. He was crucified, died and was buried. He descended to the dead
Luke 23:26-56: Luke’s account of the death and burial of Jesus
John 19:16-42: John’s account of the death and burial of Jesus
C. On the third day he rose again
Matthew 28:1-20: Matthew’s account of the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection
John 20:1-23: Part of John’s account of the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection
1 Corinthians 15:1-28: What Paul says about the central importance of the resurrection of Jesus
Questions for Group Discussion
1. After opening in prayer, begin by reading 1 Corinthians 15:1-28 together.
2. Why is it so important that Pontius Pilate is mentioned in the creed?
3. What different answers have been given to the problem of holding together the love of God and the presence of suffering in the world? Which do you find most helpful?
4. In what ways may the death of Christ be said to parallel Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon?
5. How does the story of the cross help us to put our experiences of difficulty and despair into perspective?
6. What does the resurrection of Jesus tell us about God and his Son?
7. What hope does the resurrection of Jesus offer to those who are afraid of death?
For Further Reading
Green, Michael. The Empty Cross of Jesus. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1984. A splendid discussion of the meaning of the cross, the evidence for the resurrection and its relevance for us today.
Hengel, Martin. Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Fully of the Message of the Cross. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977. Perhaps the most detailed study of the way crucifixion was used in the ancient world and how it was regarded by people at the time.
Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain. Reprint, New York: Collier, 1986. A characteristically lucid discussion.
McGrath, Alister. Making Sense of the Cross. Leicester, U.K.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1992. A clear and simple introduction to the meaning of Christ’s death on the cross.
——. Understanding Jesus: Who Jesus Christ Is and Why He Matters. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Academie/Zondervan, 1987. Includes a concise summary of the main lines of evidence for the resurrection.
Morris, Leon. The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1965. A fine study of the New Testament understanding of the significance of the cross.
Stott, John. The Cross of Christ. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1986. Invaluable on the meaning of the cross for Christian doctrine and life.