Medway Messenger column, 28th March 2002: Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Had? (Easter)

So the Queen is in Medway today. Would she, or wouldn’t she come to Medway during her Golden Jubilee year? She loves us, she loves us not … she loves us. Apparently. Buckmore Park asked her to delay, but the university site was a different matter. 

Somehow I imagine that if the same debate had happened during her Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977, the feelings would have been more impassioned. Many of us are deeply underwhelmed by the Golden Jubilee, me included. 

I have vivid memories of the Silver Jubilee, and I don’t anticipate that my memories of this year’s celebrations will compete. In 1977 I was in Sixth Form, and punk rock was at its height, dividing our heated opinions. We’ll get some echo of that this year when the Sex Pistols reissue ‘God Save The Queen’ in time for this June’s celebrations. 

I was in the ‘anti’ camp at school when it came to punk, but there was one quote from the then-Johnny Rotten that lodged in my mind: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?” he asked. 

“Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?” are words that seem particularly appropriate as we approach Easter. I think we’ve been had when it comes to celebrating Easter. 

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against chocolate – believe me! – but the idea that we can sum up Easter with chocolate eggs, fluffy bunnies, and a bank holiday seems particularly shallow. We’ve been had. 

We’ve also been had by those who want to take the Resurrection of Jesus out of the picture. On the one hand, they may be technically correct when they say that the Resurrection cannot be proved scientifically. But that is only because science depends on repeatable observable events, and so far, the Christian claim is, there has only been the one resurrection. 

But there is other evidence, and it is pretty strong. I’ll outline it in relation to common objections to the Resurrection. 

Some try to explain things by saying, Jesus didn’t actually die on the Cross, he merely swooned, and then came round in the tomb. That won’t stand up: he died. Roman centurions in charge of crucifixions had to ensure the prisoners died, or their own lives were in jeopardy. Not only that, but Jesus had been cruelly tortured before his execution, and often even that was enough to kill a man. To revive quickly after that beggars belief. 

Others say that the women who discovered the empty tomb went to the wrong tomb. But that is fairly silly. Even if they did, the early Christians quickly had many opponents. The Christians were preaching about the Resurrection, and it just needed one opponent to go to the correct tomb and produce the body. Nobody did, though. 

Then there is the question of the resurrection appearances. Were they hallucinations? It hardly seems so. The people who saw the risen Jesus blatantly weren’t expecting to see him, according to all the accounts. And hallucinations are more usually solitary experiences, but so many of the resurrection appearances were to groups, including one of five hundred people. 

The final question is why the lives of Jesus’ disciples changed so much. Throughout history many people have died for a cause that has proved to be a lie, but fewer have died for what they knew to be a lie. You could include some cult leaders in the latter category, but there is nothing cultish about the behaviour of the early Christians. They were loving and sacrificial, and nobody gathered vast sums of money for themselves. They don’t sound like the sort of people who would die for what they knew to be false. 

Don’t be had this Easter. Jesus is alive today – for you, for me, for all people.

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.