When I was a relatively new Christian I remember spending one Easter on a weekend away with friends. We were staying in the Blue Mountains in NSW at a stately old home, or at least it had been stately once, that was available for small groups to hire.

At about 5.30am on Easter Day, through the murky pre-dawn darkness I heard the sound of singing from outside – confident, joyful and insistent – piercing the quiet, and putting an end to hopes of a sleep-in. “Up from the grave he arose, with a mighty triumph o’er his foes… He arose, he arose, Hallelujah, Christ arose!”

Well, it was enough to raise the dead I dare say, although most of my weekend companions managed to sleep through. And here’s the moral of my little parable: don’t sleep through Easter. The resurrection of Jesus is a bolt from the blue, a jolt in history. We’ve done our best to sentimentalise and trivialise Easter, but the truth of the resurrection of Jesus refuses to be tamed.

Notice how hard-nosed the Apostle Paul is in writing to the Corinthians:

“... if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith… And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins… If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied (1 Corinthians 15: 14, 17, 19).

It’s hard-nosed. It’s adamant. It’s confrontational. It’s all or nothing. Paul doesn’t say, “If Christ is not raised then at least we’ve got his teaching and example”. He doesn’t say, “If Christ is not raised we’ve still got some rousing hymns and inspiring artwork”. He says, “If Christ is not raised, Christianity is a house of cards”.

The resurrection is not an optional supernatural add-on to the moral teaching and personal example of Jesus – it is the linchpin of Christian faith and without it, the apostles’ preaching is empty, the Christians’ faith is futile, there is neither forgiveness nor freedom from sin, those who have died are lost forever and those who have left father and mother and boats and fields to follow Christ are hopelessly deluded.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is, of course, an utterly unprecedented event in human history. It has no peer and many share the opinion of one theologian who says, “I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life”.

Islam denies that Jesus was crucified; Judaism denies that he was raised; ancient Greeks found the resurrection of the physical body an utterly unattractive view of the afterlife. At no time has Christian preaching of the resurrection been less than incredible but the simplicity, straightforwardness and unspectacular Gospel accounts of the resurrection of Jesus continue to have power – if for no other reason than that no one can deny that something happened.

Jesus left a disparate collection of demoralised and frightened followers, with no claim to religious authority, military power, political influence or economic resources. And yet.

Tom Holland, historian and author, has argued in his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind that in contemporary Western, liberal, secular and mostly atheist society our values of the dignity of the human person, the equality of men and women, the equality of people of diverse ethnicity, the virtue of humility and service, and the primacy and value of the individual regardless of their physical capacity or economic potential – even our idea of the separation of church and state – all derive from the teaching of the apostles who proclaimed that a man nailed to a cross was Victor, Saviour, Judge and King of all people everywhere.

On what basis did they make such a claim? They said it was because on the first Easter, the world and history and their own lives and the future were forever changed when Jesus walked out of the tomb – and they were witnesses of it.

Something profoundly and permanently changed them so that global history continues to feel their impact. They said it was that Jesus had been raised from the dead. What do you think it was?