In the resurrection of His Son Jesus, God blows apart the understanding of who He is. God does this through the work of Jesus. On the cross and in the resurrection a new world was born.
In his ministry Jesus taught, that death as indifference to God. He taught that spiritually dead people even if physically alive can could not know God. This became clear to all his disciples when Jesus appeared raised, demonstrating that God's love for his son could not be effected by death and that love could carry on in both directions even through death.
Let me try to be clearer. The resurrection of Jesus shows us that God has nothing to do with death, that God is not effected by death, people believe in death, God and his Son do not. When Jesus spoke to the Jews who did not believe in resurrection, the Sadducees, Jesus said to them that, "they were sadly mistaken."
The resurrection showed the unimagined strength of God's love. A man who was dead is now alive. Jesus who died as a result of religious people being too religious and the government loving order too much, is back again to demonstrate God's total love for his Son as well as his complete disregard of our invented structures, beliefs and laws.
Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 is speaking to people who say that the resurrection of the dead is impossible. Paul replies that he and everyone else who preaches that Jesus is risen are the most miserable people on earth, because then we would be staking our hope on a fantasy, if Jesus were not risen.
Jesus is more than a good man, a great teacher, who was murdered. We know him as alive and not only as a teacher who encourages us to live lovingly in this world. He is not only past he is present.
Paul was writing to Corinthians who did not believe in immortality. I am fairly sure that even though most people today say they believe in eternal life, that they really don't. In our time we are ruled by death, motivated by it, afraid of it. We bury death in our unconscious where it rules our life and keep us from truly living.
Our view of reality is a closed circle. There is no breaking out. Life has no place in our pseudo-scientific world view. God does not intervene. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:37 wrote that "if he was wrong about the resurrection and there was no substance to it, that we might just: "eat, drink and be merry." There is no point in striving for goodness, no point in facing the lions in the arena, no point in virtue.
This is Paul's opinion, if Jesus was not resurrected, then we are fools to be pitied. Those, even those inside the church, who say that Jesus is resurrected in your heart or that the resurrection is wishful thinking and that belief in it is not really necessary are enthralled by their past and by the old religion that Jesus came to replace. Why do we look so much like the rest of our neighbors who do not believe in the resurrection? We look just like them because we do not see the resurrection for what it is; a break, a rupture of time and space. The resurrection is the breaking in of God's reality, it is his new creation.
God's world is not a closed circle. God has broken into my life more than once to free me from my past deadness to my sin. He broke into my life to wake me up with the power of his life. The risen Christ has defeated my life and self and shown me, His new way by shining his light into my darkness. I have been saved from my former self by a living and risen savior, so that I can resist temptation, have moments of true joy, experience love and realize the way the truth and the life that is Jesus.
The same power that in the beginning made the heavens and the earth keeps me living every day. It is the power that would not let Jesus stay dead, this same power I believe also keeps those who have died and gone before us alive eternally. Our circle is not closed, but it is open to the source of life. God ruptured that closed circle when he raised Jesus and filled that circle with abundant life. The circle is opened by a living appearing Lord who continues to make us new every day.
The raising of Jesus is the victory of God's life over the world's bondage to death. It had to be that God's victory would be expressed in the conquest of death, the illusion that enthralls the world. Death challenged life and death lost. Jesus is risen and we are created anew. The risen Christ redefines everything we know about ourselves.
Everyone who met the risen Jesus went from being one person to becoming a new person. That experience totally took each one of them apart and screwed them back together in the image and likeness of Jesus' father. Easter means that all things are made new.
Now we are each brothers and sisters in the Lord's family. You are no longer bound but are set free from the fear of oblivion, the circle is broken, you are free to live as the disciple of your liberator Jesus the Christ. He goes ahead of you into every place that you do and he will be there ahead of you, already waiting for you when you arrive.