In the 1970s the British comedy troupe Monty Python performed a sketch which turned a common expression of exasperation at an unwanted series of questions into a comic refrain. In the sketch a man and woman are having a conversation. When she asks him a question about something he responds with, “Well, I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition!” Immediately three red-robed figures burst into the room and exclaim, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise!”
All comedy aside, historically speaking, people did tend to expect the Spanish Inquisition. Their goals and methods were pretty widely known. In fact, in many cases folks wanted them involved in a heresy case because they tended to be both more just and more thorough in rooting out the truth than a local magistrate may have been.
Do you know what people really didn’t expect, though? The resurrection. On the morning of the third day after the crucifixion of our Lord, there was not a single person in the world anticipating the excitement about to burst forth from the grave. Nobody. There was no crowd gathered around the tomb chanting, “Op-en it. Op-en it. Op-en it.” Not the disciples. Not the women who followed Jesus. Not Jesus’ family members. Nobody.
Here’s why this matters: Since the news began circulating that Jesus had come back up out of the tomb fully alive people have accused Jesus’ followers of making the whole thing up. The first story was circulated by none other than the Jewish leaders who had had Jesus put to death in the first place. They had heard Jesus’ claims that he was going to come back from the dead and while they didn’t believe it themselves they worried that the disciples might try something, creating a huge headache for them. As a result, on Saturday “the chief priest and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, ‘Sir, we remember how that imposter said, while he was still alive, “After three days I will rise.” Therefore order the tomb to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away and tell the people, “He has risen from the dead,” and the last fraud will be worse than the first.’ Pilate said to them, ‘You have a guard of soldiers. Go, make it as secure as you can.’”
When the soldiers failed and the tomb turned up empty anyway the Pharisees paid them to claim the disciples had come and stolen Jesus’ body after they went to sleep. They also promised to keep Pilate off their backs should the lie reach his ears and he move to execute them for their failure to do their job. Matthew notes that “this story has been spread among the Jews to this day,” which for him was over 30 years later.
Since then other more interesting theories have been proposed. Some folks have suggested that Jesus never actually died on the cross but was rather slipped a Mickey and later revived. Others have suggested that as the disciples were sometime later sitting around reminiscing about their time with Jesus they were missing him so much that they created a pretend resurrected Jesus to give themselves comfort and to capitalize on his teachings in order to grab cultural power for themselves. Others have suggested the whole thing was a mass hallucination.
The thing all these different theories have in common is that they are all predicated on the notion that Jesus’ followers had sufficient motivation and inspiration to come up with the idea of the resurrection as we know it today on their own. Here’s the problem with this: Jesus’ followers couldn’t have and in fact didn’t imagine the resurrection as we know it today because nothing like the resurrection had ever happened. No one had a mental frame of reference for something like the resurrection because nothing like it had ever happened in the whole history of the world. They didn’t even have a category for something like Jesus’ resurrection. No one had ever been resurrected before. No other world religion yet had any conceptual parallels to this. Those came later, once Jesus introduced the idea to the world by being resurrected. Think about this: How do you make something up out of thin air including a number of minute details when you have no concept of it? How do you do it in three days? How do you do it when you are in fear for your life should someone find out that you are associated with the person you are claiming rose from the dead? The simple answer: you don’t.
No, instead of having a group of Jesus followers gathered around the tomb chanting “Op-en-it. Op-en-it. Op-en-it,” Mark tells us that on the third day the women who followed Jesus, “bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.” That is, they were going to finish embalming him in order to give him a proper burial. You don’t do that for someone you think is coming back. When they saw that the stone had been rolled away they didn’t think, “Woo-hoo! Jesus is alive!” Instead, as John reports, they “ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’”
Later that same evening Jesus appeared to the disciples who had all by this time heard from the women that Jesus was in fact alive again. Do you know where they were? John reports that he and the guys were in a locked room “for fear of the Jews.” Mark’s report of the reaction of the women to the angel’s announcement of the resurrection is even more ominous. They didn’t celebrate. Instead, “they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” In other words unlike Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition, what nobody really expected was the Resurrection.
So why go through all the trouble to prove that on the first resurrection Sunday Jesus caught everybody with their pants down? Simply to make this point: Contrary to every explanation of the resurrection other than that it happened just exactly as the Gospels report, nobody would have made this up. Nobody could have. The resurrection created an entirely new thought category.
There are three major categories of explanation when it comes to the resurrection. Either nothing happened, something other than the Gospels report happened, or the Gospels get it right. Well, the first option there can be rejected out of hand. Something obviously happened. Something took the disciples from cowering in fear in a locked room to boldly proclaiming the resurrection from the rooftops. And, I’ve just made part of the case that the second option can be rejected as well. Any thought that Jesus’ followers made up the resurrection fails to account for the historical evidence.
We are left, then, with the third option. The resurrection happened just exactly as the Gospels proclaim it. Why does this matter? Because you can have confidence in it. You can have confidence in a world more and more hostile to the truth claims of the Christian faith that the foundation points of your faith are sure. It means that the hope and joy brought by the resurrection are real. The total defeat of the power of sin and death really did happen such that we can have freedom from their enslaving grasp. We can have absolute confidence that this life is not all there is. The fear of death that grips so many in this world is totally unfounded. Jesus demonstrated clearly that what comes next for his followers is more life.
And so this Resurrection Sunday when the appropriate category has been firmly established, rejoice and celebrate with confidence. Rejoice with an unshakeable confidence knowing that your hope and the sacrifices you have made to follow Jesus were not in vain. Rejoice for you serve a risen Savior.