A Resurrection Mission

It is perfectly clear then that the first Christian missionaries did not come forward with an exhortation; they did not say, 'Jesus of Nazareth lived a wonderful life of filial piety, and we call upon our hearers to yield yourselves, as we have, to the spell of that life.' Certainly that is what modern historians would have expected the first Christian missionaries to say, but it must be recognized as a matter of fact that they said nothing of the sort. Conceivably, the first disciples of Jesus, after the catastrophe of His death, might have engaged themselves in some quiet meditation on His teaching. They might have said to themselves that 'Our Father who are in Heaven,' was a good way of addressing God, even though the One who taught them to do it was dead. They might have clung to the ethical principles of Jesus and cherished the hope that the one who enunciated such principles might have had some personal existence beyond the grave.

Such reflections might have seemed very natural to the modern man, but to Peter, James and John, the certainly never occurred. Jesus had raised in them high hopes, and those hopes were destroyed by the cross; and reflections on the general principles of religion and ethics were powerless to revive them again. The disciples of Jesus had evidently been inferior to their master in every possible way; they had not understood His spiritual teaching; but even in the hour of solemn crisis had quarrled over great places in the Kingdom. What hope was there that such men could succeed when their Master had failed? Even when He had been with them, they were powerless; now that He was taken from them, what little power they may have had was gone.

Yet those same, weak, discouraged men, within a few days of the death of their Master, instituted the most important spiritual movement the world has ever seen. What had produced this astonishing change? What had transformed the weak and cowardly disciples into the spiritual conquerors of the world? Evidently it was not the mere memory of Jesus life, for the was a source of sadness, not of joy. Evidently the disciples of Jesus, within the few days between the crucifixion and the beginning of their work in Jerusalem had received some new equipment for their task. What that new equipment was, at leas the outstanding and eternal element in it, (to say nothing of the endowment which Christian men believe to have received at Pentecost) is perfectly plain. The great weapon with which the disciples of Jesus set out to conquer the world was not a mere comprehension of eternal principles; it was a historical message, an account of something that had happened, it was the message, 'He is risen!'

But the message of the resurrection was not isolated, it was connected with Jesus' death, seen now, to be not a failure but a triumphant act of divine grace; it was connected with the entire appearance of Jesus on the Earth.

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, Pp23-25