There is always a tendency to knock off some of the rough edges of our faith. And among those rough edges stands the roughest of them all: the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The resurrection is absurd because in our everyday experience dead people don’t come back to life. Imagine your reaction to a friend or family member who invites you to their home because they want you to meet someone who was dead for three days but is now alive and walks through locked doors and freely eats with his friends. And so, because of its absurdity there is a tendency to domesticate the resurrection. To domesticate something means you tame it or make it ordinary. But Jesus’ resurrection is not ordinary and he is not tame. You see, when the resurrection of Jesus is domesticated—either by a litany of “proofs” about how it actually could happen, offered by the conservatives or by the liberal capitulation that the resurrection was not actually bodily, but one that takes place in the believer—it loses all of its punch.

But there is something else to consider. In presenting the story of Jesus’ resurrection, the New Testament writers use culturally unreliable witnesses: women. Women were “apologetically embarrassing” (N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 55). What’s more, the whole notion of resurrection of the body generally presented a state that was undesirable to those living in the Mediterranean world of the first century. The desire of many—especially Greeks and those influenced by the Grecian milieu—was to get rid of the body, not get it back.

In this worldview, resurrection was not only impossible, but totally undesirable. No soul, having gotten free from its body, would ever want it back. Even those who believed in reincarnation understood that the return to embodied life meant that the soul was not out of its prison. That goal was to get free from the body forever. Once your soul is free of its body, a return to re-embodied life was outlandish, unthinkable, and impossible (Tim Keller, The Reason for God, 207).

Here’s the point of all of this. The N.T. consistently presents something that is absurd and proves it by offering culturally unreliable witness and a culturally undesirable state. And in so doing it does not call into question the validity of the resurrection of Jesus but actually establishes its credibility. In other words, all of this and all of the N.T. writers writing about it independently of one another actually makes the resurrection believable.

This is what we have gathered to sing about and celebrate this Lord ’s Day as we do every Lord’s Day. Today we are reminded that our great champion, our hero, has proved himself victorious against the greatest enemies imaginable. To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb, be blessing and glory and honor and power forever.