There is no more striking contrast than that between the absolute
non-receptivity of the disciples in regard to all Christ's plain
teachings about His death and their clear perception after Pentecost
of the mighty power that lay in it. The very fact that they continued
disciples at all, and that there continued to be such a community as
the Church, demands their belief in the Resurrection as the only
cause which can account for it. If He did not rise from the dead, and
if His followers did not know that He did so by the plainest
teachings of common-sense, they ought to have scattered, and borne in
isolated hearts the bitter memories of disappointed hopes; for if He
lay in a nameless grave, and they were not sure that He was risen
from the dead, His death would have been a conclusive showing up of
the falsity of His claims. In it there would have been no atoning
power, no triumph over sin. If the death of Christ were not followed
by His Resurrection and Ascension, the whole fabric of Christianity
falls to pieces. As the Apostle puts it in his great chapter on
resurrection, 'Ye are yet in your sins.' The forgiveness which the
Gospel holds forth to men does not depend on the mercy of God or on
the mere penitence of man, but upon the offering of the one sacrifice
for sins in His death, which is justified by His Resurrection as
being accepted by God. If we cannot triumphantly proclaim 'Christ is
risen indeed,' we have nothing worth preaching.
We are told now that the ethics of Christianity are its vital centre,
which will stand out more plainly when purified from these mystical
doctrines of a Death as the sin-offering for the world, and a
Resurrection as the great token that that offering avails. Paul did
not think so. To him the morality of the Gospel was all deduced from
the life of Christ the Son of God as our Example, and from His death
for us which touches men's hearts and makes obedience to Him our
joyful answer to what He has done for us. Christianity is a new thing
in the world, not as moral teaching, but as moral power to obey that
teaching, and that depends on the Cross interpreted by the
Resurrection. If we have only a dead Christ, we have not a living
Christianity.