It has become somewhat fashionable for certain “Christian” leaders to view the physical resurrection of Jesus as a fairy tale. After all, we’re much too sophisticated to believe dead people come back to life. So, for the sake the less informed, these sages of a non-supernatural faith have reinterpreted the primitive writers of the New Testament. Jesus didn’t actually empty the tomb, only his “spirit” lives on among believers; when a person decides to commit his or her life to Jesus (for what, I don’t know), then Jesus rises in that person’s heart—poetic, but meaningless.
The apostle Paul—a sage in his own right—had a different view of Jesus’ resurrection. Read 1 Corinthians 15. Paul claimed salvation depends on Jesus actually rising from the dead—an event witnessed by over 500 people (unless they were all hallucinating). Apparently, Paul was dealing with some skeptics of his own, forerunners of modern sophisticates denying a risen Lord. If they’re right, Paul argued, the apostles were false prophets, and those who believed their preaching had meaningless faith, were still in their sins, and should be “pitied more than all men.” Why? Because a dead Christ means dead disciples, forever. There’s no point being “born again” to live a life of sacrifice and service to God and others, if in the end your dead, and that’s that. If that is the case, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”; in other words, do your own thing now because this is the only life you get. In short, it’s Easter or else nothing!