Christ is risen. This is the claim that Christianity makes today, and has made on every Easter Sunday for two thousand years, and which it regards not as a symbol or a metaphor or an aspirational narrative but as a fact about what happened in Jerusalem on the first day of the week following the Passover of approximately 33 AD.
I believe this claim.
I want to say why, because I think the reasons are more serious than most secular discourse about religion allows, and because I do not hold the belief as a cultural inheritance or a comfort mechanism but as what I think is most likely to be true about the nature of reality.
The Evidence
The resurrection accounts in the New Testament are not the kind of story that mythmakers invent. They are full of the wrong kind of details for a legend — the first witnesses are women, whose testimony was not legally valid in the ancient Jewish world; the disciples are depicted as cowardly, confused, and failing to understand what is happening even as it happens; the risen Christ is described in ways that are strange and that do not map onto standard Jewish or Greek ideas of what an afterlife would look like.
Legends are designed to be convincing. The resurrection narratives have the texture of documents compiled by people who are trying to record what happened, not documents designed to persuade.
The early Christian community, within weeks of the crucifixion, was publicly proclaiming in Jerusalem — the city where it had happened — that Jesus had risen from the dead. The authorities who had executed him were still in power. They could easily have produced the body to end the claim. They did not.
Paul, writing within twenty years of the events, provides a list of witnesses — over five hundred people who claimed to have seen the risen Christ, many of whom were still alive when he was writing. This is not the language of myth. It is the language of historical claim that can be checked.
I am not asserting certainty. I am asserting that the evidence, taken seriously rather than dismissed because the conclusion is inconvenient, is more consistent with the resurrection having happened than with it being a fabrication.
What This Changes
If the resurrection is true, it changes everything.
It changes what death is — not an end but a passage. It changes what suffering is — not meaningless but held within a larger story that moves toward redemption. It changes what human beings are — not accidental products of a blind evolutionary process but persons made in the image of a God who considered them worth dying for.
And it changes what this week means. The darkness of Friday, the silence of Saturday, the audacity of Sunday morning — these are not a religious calendar. They are the shape of reality. The shape that tells you that the worst things that happen are not the last things that happen.
He is risen. And it makes a difference to how I live. To what I hope for. To what I believe is possible.
Alleluia.
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