Why is Christ's resurrection such a big deal?

I love this quote from p. 67 of N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church - it captures the significance of Christ's resurrection, articulating it as THE hinge that ushers in God's new creation (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:17):

...the resurrection of Jesus offers itself, to the student of history or science no less than the Christian or the theologian, not as an odd event within the world as it is but as the utterly characteristic, prototypical, and foundational event within the world as it has begun to be.  It is not an absurd event within the old world but the symbol and starting point of the new world.  The claim advanced in Christianity is that of magnitude: Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation.