St Johns with St Barnabas

Do you have faith in the Easter story?

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The most fundamental aspect of a relationship with Christ is faith. We learn a lot about Christian faith through the Easter story, specifically the events narrated by John on that first Easter morning (read John 20 v 1-18). On reading this passage we discover that faith is impossible yet rational!

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Faith is impossible. This does not mean that it is impossible to have faith, but that this is impossible without outside intervention or help, and it is God who provides this. Jesus has repeatedly told the disciples that he is going to die and rise again. Yet when Mary sees the empty tomb, she exclaims to the disciples following her, “They’ve taken the body!” If she had a morsel of faith she might have thought “Jesus said he would rise, perhaps he has!” But within her culture, Mary along with all the Jews, couldn’t conceive that ‘dead men rise again!’ Anyway, hadn’t she seen Jesus die upon a cross less than 72 hours earlier?

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Then along comes the outside help, an encounter with the ‘dead man’! She thinks he is the gardener, but when he speaks her name “Mary…” faith floods in. Jesus clears her mind and assures her heart. Faith begins to grow. Faith is impossible without outside intervention.

Faith is rational. It is based on evidence. Modernists, that is people of my generation and older, view some of the interpretations of the events of 2,000 years ago as little more than fairy tales. However, several post-modern scholars have looked at the evidence of the resurrection and support the view of Lee Strobel that “…the evidence was so compelling that Jesus really is the one-and-only Son of God who proved his divinity by rising from the dead.” (from ‘The Case for Christ’).

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Maybe the most compelling biblical evidence for the resurrection is that the first eyewitness to the resurrection recorded is Mary, a woman. If these stories had been fabricated, they almost certainly would have included a man as the first eyewitness. Yet in all four gospel accounts the first eyewitnesses to the resurrection are women. For me, this evidence tops all the rest, like the cherry on top of the cake, and leads me to this conclusion; I believe that Jesus was raised from the dead.

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May this strengthen you in your faith in Christ this Easter, and for eternity.