Happy Easter! You know, I’ve really come to love Easter more
and more in recent years. It may not match
up well to the emotional buildup and quiet holiness of Christmas, but I’m
learning that its meaning is far more revolutionary than I’d ever realized.
For years I
thought that the Resurrection was mainly a symbol that life goes on, that God
gives us a second chance. If something comes to life that once was dead, it must
be sharing that “Jesus-spark” that keeps hope alive when everything looks dead.
(Never a big fan of peeps and chicks,
but certainly dormant flowers that bloom in the spring made a fine symbol of
Easter.) And Resurrection must be the proof of an afterlife, that there’s more
to existence than this earthly plane.
And although
I am one of those people that believes in the bodily resurrection, I didn’t
quite know how to respond to the assertion that “Life just doesn’t work that
way; resurrection is scientifically impossible.” So Easter mostly had a “Don’t give up hope” encouragement
to it, and I mined that as deeply as I could.
Well, that’s
not deep enough, not by a long shot. It
may be all of the above (except maybe the afterlife proof), but it’s so much
more.
Now I see,
for example, that science is the study of repeatable events. History, on the
other hand, is the study of non-repeatable events. History is the accumulation of
events that happen that we don’t insist
on being subject to scientific examination.
We use different means of verifying their having happened. Scripture,
tradition, reason and experience can all bear witness to the likelihood of a
bodily Resurrection. So I believe that resurrection may or may not qualify as a
scientific event, but it definitely qualifies as a historical one.
Now I’ve
come to see the resurrection of Jesus as the in-breaking of God’s New Creation. It’s the inaugural weekend of a new and
unprecedented reality. We have been in a
fundamentally different order of creation since that Sunday ages ago. “Our old history ends with the cross; our new
history begins with the resurrection.” (Watchman Nee)
Our world is
qualitatively different now.
Now I see that we live
in “a new world order, [one which] has opened up in the midst of the present
one. God’s future has arrived in the present in the person of the risen Jesus,
summoning everybody to become people of the future.” (N. T. Wright) God’s
future is one in which the dead are raised. It is the future in which sin and death
lose their power. In God’s future our battered planet is renewed, justice
becomes the norm, all reconciliations are accomplished, our human bodies are
remade, and the knowledge of God is rewritten on every human heart.
God’s future
is the one consistently proclaimed throughout the Bible. And it’s a future that happens here – not in
heaven, but on earth as it is in heaven.
The reality
of the resurrection removes this ideal from “Wouldn’t it be nice…?” and places
it squarely in the realm of “This will be.” That’s why it summons every one of us to
become “people of the future.” This is
what’s before us, so why not start living it now? Why play by the rules of a losing
contest?
If you want
to live a life that endures and counts for something, remember: “The entire plan for the future,”
said Billy Graham, “has its key in the resurrection.” That key will open more
doors than we ever realized before.
Pastor Larry
