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April 2008, Page 1.
Index of articles:
by subject,
by date.
In this issue:
(April 2008)
Resurrection,
Hymn,
Annual Meeting,
Question,
Humble Access.
In the Resurrection Season
The Christian Church celebrates the Easter Season for forty days before moving on to Ascension and Pentecost - mainly because of St Luke’s words in the Acts of the Apostles:
“After his suffering, Jesus showed himself to his apostles, and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.” (Acts 1:3)
This year Ascension Day is on 1st May, so we have the whole of April to think about these “convincing proofs” and what Jesus said about the kingdom of God.
What would it take to convince you that Jesus had really come back to life?
There are people who reply that nothing could convince them. Dead men stay dead, and no matter how strong the “evidence” for something impossible is, an impossible thing can’t happen and that’s the end of the matter. I have some sympathy for that view, for I used to be a mathematician and science student.
However, I came to realize I was wrong to say “impossible”. Maths deals in logic: to prove something you start with a set of axioms (assumptions), and if you change them, then the consequences also change. Science also doesn’t tell you about what’s impossible: it tells you what happens in the absence of someone outside disturbing your experiment, but it doesn’t tell you whether it’s possible for someone outside our universe to disturb it. Both maths and science allow for God to exist and change things in our world.
Other people go for historical arguments. Frank Morison, a lawyer, set out to try to disprove the resurrection by historical argument, but he got a rude shock as he discovered he couldn’t twist the evidence away like that. In his book “Who moved the stone?” he explained how he’d come to be convinced by the evidence for the resurrection, as it was very strong.
And some people go for the evidence of changed lives. They’re more bothered about “does it work?” than “is it true?”, so they look for the impact of Jesus on people like you and me. Which brings me to the second question in Acts 1:3. How has the kingdom of God become real in your life? In what ways will listening to Jesus during April change you, so that others will believe that Jesus really is alive?
John Hartley