During a visit to a friend in Poland, on our way back from Krakow to Warsaw airport we went to the Auschwitz death camp.

It was a bright, warm, end of May morning: yet as we entered under the iron gates above which is that terrible inscription – Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Liberates – an icy coldness and eerie stillness descended upon us.

This small acreage in the suburbs of the town of Oswiecim, witnessed millions of people passing through to their deaths.

The lives and deaths endured in that place were unimaginable; and yet we believe that Jesus died for those victims, their tormentors, and executioners; and more than that He is the Saviour of all humankind.

The deaths endured in that camp, and in so many other arenas of cruelty where humankind has visited terrible suffering on other human beings, are in some ways worse than the physical suffering Jesus underwent.

So why do we believe that the death of this one man, compared to millions of other cruel deaths endured throughout human history, is our salvation?

Why wasn’t His death just that – one death among millions?

Why do we believe that His death wasn’t the end, the final curtain call on a life lived in an insignificant outpost of the Roman Empire?

Because of the Cross and the Empty Tomb.

When Jesus let Himself be taken willingly: “Led like a lamb to the slaughter.”  (Is. 53:7)

to the Cross, He wasn’t just a man being executed.

Jesus was God Incarnate. God had become a person; and for that very reason He was a lamb for the slaughter because He is: “The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (Jn. 1:29)

And we, as Peter tells us in his First Letter: “Were redeemed from [your] empty way of life…with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. (1 Pet. 1:19)

The death of Jesus affects the whole of humankind, and each person who has ever, and will ever live.

That’s how we Christians look at – or should look at – the death of Jesus because we’ve given our lives to Him.

But to someone looking in on us from the outside that belief can be rejected quite easily because a dead Jesus isn’t very demanding.

They can say He was a good man, one among many: but He’s dead so we don’t feel compelled to do anything other than pick and choose what we like about Him, or just ignore the fact He ever lived.

And so often the Christian Church behaves as if Jesus is dead, and that His sacrifice on the Cross counts for very little.

If we leave Jesus fixed to His Cross, or mummified in His Tomb, then we can carry on living out a cosy Christianity that doesn’t give hope to a world, which is suspended in hopelessness. 

We need to keep revisiting the Empty Tomb to be reminded that the stone has been rolled away, that Jesus isn’t there, that He’s risen from the dead.

Not just seeming to die on the Cross, not just resuscitated to die a natural death in old age, but really dead.

Then REALLY rising from the dead, destroying the finality and awfulness of death through His dying and rising.

If you’ve read “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis you’ll remember that Aslan the great lion gives up his life to save Edmund from the clutches of the White Witch. 

When she has him tethered prostrate on the stone table, when she plunges the knife into his heart, she believes she’s defeated him forever.

But no. Aslan, through his dying and rising from the dead to new life, saves Edmund, and defeats the White Witch.

The new life of Spring returns to Narnia, and melts the ice and snow blanketing it.

That’s a really good story for children, but C.S. Lewis also intended it as an allegory for the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

As the Witch thought she’d defeated Aslan, so Satan believed he’d exterminated Jesus: “By hanging him on a tree.” But God: “Raised Jesus from the dead and exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Saviour.” (See Acts 5: 30-31) 

And as we’re promised in Scripture: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sin and live for righteousness; [and] by his wounds [we] have been healed.” (1 Pet. 2:24)

Death didn’t consume and hold on to Jesus, and it can’t do the same to us if we believe and trust in Him as our Prince and Saviour.

“Death has been swallowed up in [His] victory. (1 Cor. 15:55)

The ice and snow is thawing: the spring, welling up to eternal life is here, but we’re still battling: “Against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil.” (Eph. 6:12)

If you’re here today wondering if what Christians believe about Jesus is really true, then I would urge you to look deeply into the Empty Tomb.

And just ask yourself if the eyewitnesses to the Resurrection of Jesus - the women, the Disciples - are lying, deluded, or actually telling the truth.

Could a man have endured the torture and execution Jesus went through and lived or been resuscitated in the tomb as some would have us believe?

And also ask yourself this. Would you have given your life for a man who said He was your Saviour, and would rise again on the third day after His death, only to find He was a fraud because He didn’t?

The followers of Jesus did, and have done down the centuries, because we know He isn’t a fraud. Neither are we deluded, lying, or under some sort of hypnotic hallucination.

We may not have to literally give up our lives to death for the sake of Jesus; but He does demand of us that we yield our lives as a living sacrifice of praise to Him as the Saviour.

A dead Jesus is nothing to worry about. A living Jesus is, because He’s out there in the world asking each of us to make the decision whether we’re going to give our lives to Him or not.

And that’s THE most important and far reaching decision any of us is ever going to make.

This is how Paul in Scripture sees the choice: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”  (1 Cor. 15: 17-19)  

It’s literally a life or death decision. I wonder what will your decision is?