But this is as daunting for us, as following Jesus was for the Jews of his own day. Most people would say it would be madness even to contemplate it; and this was what most of the Jews at the time thought about following Jesus. This I suspect is what Christ hoped that Bethsaida and Capernaum would do: be willing to create a new heaven and a new earth. He quickly realized it was beyond them. So what he did instead was to set man’s spirit free; and he saw that only his death could open the doors of the prison house.
Even if the resurrection is beyond our comprehension, yet there are cogent reasons for thinking it did happen. My own view is that the two most cogent arguments are the fearlessness with which the disciples preached the resurrection within weeks of the death, and the failure of the Authorities in Jerusalem to provide an answer to the empty tomb. I have listened intently to men telling stories in the witness box for 40 years: some true, some false; and in my judgement, it is beyond most men’s ability to steal a body from a tomb and boldly assert a few weeks later, falsely, that the body rose from the dead. You might get a few rascals sufficiently brazen to do it, but a rascal would be hardly likely to cling to such a story in the face of the threat of torture and execution. And anyway the public would quickly see through him. People are not such fools as to be taken in for long. The accusation that the disciples stole the body, and then preached the resurrection, is ludicrous; and though I feel sure the accusation was made, I am equally sure everyone in Jerusalem at the time knew it was ludicrous.
When you consider how a group of cringing cowards, hiding for fear after the crucifixion, became the incomparably bold men who preached the resurrection a few brief weeks later, only one conclusion is possible: namely something dramatic had occurred to give them the courage. Unless the entire New Testament is a fictitious novel, the men themselves say it was Christ rising from the dead. No-one has sensibly suggested anything else. I suppose anything in this world is possible, and it may all have been group hysteria; but the Gospel writers go to considerable lengths to make plain it was real, and not illusion. They describe Christ eating a meal, and allowing himself to be touched and handled. Do you believe the evidence of your own eyes; or don’t you? Besides the Authorities never said to the disciples, “Hang on a minute, before you get carried away, please remember we can take you to the tomb, and there will be a body inside”. Nor did they say, “Hang on a minute, we can show you the tomb, and everyone knows you stole the body”. They cannot have said that, if Gamaliel said (as he is reported to have done, Acts Ch.5 v.34), “Leave them alone; if it is from God it will last; if not it won’t”. He would never have said that, if everyone knew they had just stolen the body. Although the accusation was most probably made, everyone knew it was rubbish. The truth is that the Authorities in Jerusalem had no answer to the empty tomb. And the only answer nowadays is to ignore the question, and talk about something else. So I will assume it happened.
What then did God the Father, the Divine Unfathomable Mystery, expect of Jesus? And was he satisfied with the outcome? Did He expect Jesus to have heard of Aristarchus, and to have immediately preferred his opinion that the earth revolved and went round the sun, to the prevailing idea that the sun went round the earth? Or did He expect the Word of God, as he wandered about Palestine talking to simple men, to be fully conversant with the idea that Newtonian gravitation would one day be superseded by a field theory of gravitation, which was better? In other words, was He content that Jesus should be as completely mistaken about contemporary knowledge as all his friends were? Was he content that Jesus’ general knowledge should be that of a well-informed carpenter in Nazareth? The point is not academic. If God the Father was content that Jesus should be mistaken about much of his knowledge of the natural world, and of the world of organised society, then it is inconceivable that God should have expected him to pronounce significantly on these matters.