And it is not just about experiencing him as one might experience a ghost, but experiencing him as “Lord,” as a divine reality who is one with God and who invites our allegiance and loyalty.

All of this is included in the early Christian post-Easter affirmation, “Jesus is Lord.” The lords of this world - a collusion of religious authorities with Roman imperial authority - said “No” to Jesus and executed him. Easter is the reversal of Good Friday: it means that God has vindicated Jesus, said “Yes” to Jesus and his vision over against the rulers of his world. God has made him “both Lord and Christ,” as Acts 2.36 puts it. “Jesus is Lord” is the most common post-Easter affirmation of his significance. He is Lord – and the would-be lords of this world are not.

Were the skeletal remains of Jesus to be indisputably identified, it would not matter to me. To think that the central meaning of Easter depends upon something spectacular happening to Jesus’ corpse misses the point of the Easter message and risks trivializing the story. To link Easter primarily to our hope for an afterlife, as if our post-death existence depends upon God having transformed the corpse of Jesus, is to reduce the story to a politically-domesticated yearning for our survival beyond death.

Rather, what mattered for his early followers was that they continued to know him as a living figure of the present after his death – not just during the forty days of appearances that the author of Acts mentions (Acts 1.3), but in the years and decades (and centuries) ever since. And to affirm, as Christians do, that the living presence of Jesus is Lord is to commit oneself to the story of Jesus as the central revelation of God’s dream for the world. It means to stand against the powers that killed him and to stand for the vision of God’s kingdom that he proclaimed.

Easter is both personal and political. The lordship of Jesus is the path of personal liberation from the lords of culture, and the affirmation of a very different kind of world. To lose this emphasis in a debate about what happened to the corpse of Jesus is to be distracted by the lords who killed him.