“…If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen—nothing else matters.”
– Jaroslav Pelikan

This pithy summary of the meaning of history from historian Jaroslav Pelikan is probably his best known quotation. Its main point—that the resurrection of Jesus Christ two thousand years ago is the single event in the history of the world so important that upon its veracity hangs the meaning of everything before and after it—is laid out in brilliant and bold simplicity.

But, as is sometimes necessary in such a powerful and compact statement, within it is buried an implied clause. It’s not totally accurate that nothing else matters if Christ is risen, but rather that nothing matters apart from the resurrection of Christ. The truth of this historical claim is the linchpin upon which the doctrine of the Incarnation of God—and his project to rescue humanity from the futility of a life that terminates in the shadowing nothingness of hades apart from our Creator and source of being—is completely dependent.

Before the man Jesus of Nazareth walked and talked and gathered followers in Roman-occupied Palestine during the administration of Pontius Pilate, the old Jewish worldview that people in this world generally lived and died and ended up in sheol (though the experience of that afterlife could be better or worse depending on one’s faithfulness to their God Yahweh) wasn’t so very different than most other peoples’ worldviews of life and death followed by a tenebrous afterlife in some corner of hades or wherever (again, being vaguely better or worse depending on one’s virtue or piety). Of course, from the Jewish perspective, it was better to live and die in allegiance to Yahweh (both because of his character and nature) than to the “gods” of the other nations which were just mutinous spirits created by Yahweh. And importantly, there was a strong tradition of promises, of forward looking future expectations of a great triumph of Yahweh over the whole world and a re-creation of everything which helped to further distinguish and set apart the Jews from their pagan neighbors who had no such splendid tradition of apocalyptic promises. But until those promises came to pass, the reality for the Jews was, just like their pagan neighbors, life and death and a dead-end underworld.

But then, following the execution of Jesus by Roman crucifixion, his followers began saying that those apocalyptic promises of the Jewish tradition had been fulfilled in the life of Jesus. They began excitedly giving themselves over to persecution and their own execution, not out of despair or resignation, but because they refused to stop proclaiming joyfully that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day after he was put to death and buried. Even zealous persecutors of the new sect of Jesus worshippers like Saul of Tarsus were soon being converted to the growing community. Saul, who changed his name to Paul, seemed to understand Jesus as the promised king of Israel who was also the true King of all the nations and even of all creation, and who was himself the return of the Presence of Yahweh to his people. And all of this was believed by these people because they were all convinced, through the testimony of dozens and even hundreds of reliable eye-witnesses, of the Resurrection of Jesus.

What the Resurrection meant for them was that Jesus—who was certainly a man—also had the singularly divine power to lay down his human life and to take it up again, meaning, as would eventually be clearly articulated by them, that he was Yahweh himself who had taken on our human nature to hallow it and rescue it from that old futile path of life-death-underworld. Given the nature of Yahweh as the sole Creator and source of existence, Jesus accomplished this with his power over life and death, and threw over the old authority and bureaucracy of the post-mortem reality; and given the character of Yahweh, he did all of this out of love, choosing not to rescue humanity from a distance but by identifying with us as one of us (as a baby, as in poverty, as persecuted, and as dying) and intimately lifting us up from where we were trapped.

Given this new reality accomplished by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the God-Man, the whole story of the world has reached its climax. Humanity is now something new in Jesus. The meaning of life is now set by his pattern: love to the end and without exception. Self-sacrifice is the way to the fullest realization of being. All things are summed up in God who emptied himself out of love, and all things find their true place within that hierarchy of love, with the lower creation lovingly tended by the Saints who offer it and themselves fully to Christ, who himself as the Divine uncreated Son of God offers all things then to his Divine uncreated Father, who originates and reciprocates this love and in whom all things live and move and have their being. Thus the implied clause in Pelikan’s quote, that if Christ is risen, nothing else matters apart from that most “crucial” fact.

And Pelikan was merely following the Apostle Paul’s lead in saying that “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. . . . If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:14, 17-19). Paul knew what was riding on the historical veracity of the Resurrection of Jesus: the veracity of the greatest story of love in all creation. And if the Resurrection were not true, then that story is not true, and God has not come to us; and we’re back to the old pagan reality, and the old unfulfilled longings of the Jewish reality, where a brief life, death, and practical nothingness (if not actual nothingness) is still all that there is.

But are we really back? Once the greatest story of the world has been told, it can’t be untold. The transformative power of the Christian story has unalterably changed every culture it has touched, either by converting it or by putting it in opposition relative to it. Either way, the old systems must reckon with the Great Story and inevitably realize that, in its light, they are actually finite, paltry, incomplete, and waning. Compared to the Great Story, all else collapses. Because while, if Christ truly is risen and in a sense everything finally does matter in relation to that great story, on the other hand, the second part of Pelikan’s dictum has and needs no qualifying clause: if Christ is not risen, then truly nothing else matters. It wasn’t the pre-Christians but the post-Christians who have most clearly seen and articulated the philosophy of nihilism. There’s nothing over the horizon if Christ is not risen. At the heat death of the universe in several trillion years, or at our own death at any moment—it doesn’t really matter which—comes nothing, which is the same thing as saying nothing ever was. If nothing matters at the end, nothing mattered from the beginning. And nothing even matters right now. Feelings to the contrary are produced in the brain by the same blind laws of physics and anatomy that produce hiccups and joint pain.

“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead,” says the utterly convinced Paul, and generations upon generations of Christians have preserved his writings, reading them for encouragement and instruction as they continued to spread the Great Story (the “good news” or “gospel” as they’ve called it) around the world. And everything is finally free to matter within that story.