If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory. ~ Colossians 3:1-4This is the day! Easter is here! It is the reason that undergirds all of Christendom, all which we believe, all which we practice, and all the seasons that follow. It changes everything. Thanks be to God for that. It’s time for Easter — Alleluia!
And until that glorious day, every Easter we will proclaim, Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!We know in our heads that Jesus’ resurrection is important, but do we know it in our hearts, too? Do our daily lives and our celebrations proclaim its importance to our loved ones and the world? As teacher Del Tackett asks often in his video series The Truth Project, “Do you really believe that what you believe is really real?” If we do, it changes everything. The death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ do — and should — change everything.
Those outside the Church ought to be looking at Christians, confusedly wondering what in the world the big deal is and why we are having the biggest party of the year. Palm Sunday through Holy Week, with its culmination on Easter morning, is truly the core, the center of our year as the Church and of our spiritual life as the body of Christ. God’s story and our story culminate in this week, and it’s simultaneously the beginning of everything we do the rest of the year.
What is it that happened early that Easter morning? After He descended to the grave, Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God, was physically resurrected and made alive that third morning.
Question 64 of our catechism asks, and then answers:
According to 1 Corinthians if Christ was not raised our faith is futile and we are lost in our sins. This event is the hinge of our faith, and it changes everything.“What does the [Apostles’] Creed mean when it affirms that Jesus rose again from the dead? It means that Jesus was not simply resuscitated; God restored him physically from death to life in his perfected and glorious body, never to die again. His tomb was empty; Jesus had risen bodily from the dead. The risen Jesus was seen by his apostles and hundreds of other witnesses.” (1 Corinthians 15:3-8)
The fact that this bodily resurrection really, actually happened matters. ... Multiple scholars have put together wonderfully detailed works demonstrating not only theological arguments but also historical and extra-biblical evidence that the resurrection really truly did happen.
It’s not uncommon today for us to focus on this evidence and proof of the Resurrection, which is very valuable! But author Robert E. Webber cautions us that “in our earnestness to defend the Easter fact, I wonder if we have so intellectualized the resurrection that it has become fact and not faith — or at least a weakened and misunderstood faith.”
We, of course, should ask, what happened, but we need to go a step further and ask why does it matter?
We have to not only know the Easter fact but also have an Easter faith. If Christ has indeed been raised, what does that mean for us now? N.T. Wright, in his book Surprised by Hope, proposes that, “What we say about death and resurrection gives shape and color to everything else.”
Jesus was the first of humanity to be resurrected, to receive a new, physical, glorified body. It’s significant that He wasn’t just alive in some sort of “spiritual” form. Remember, the tomb was empty. His new body in some way “used up” the physical matter of His earthly one. The Jews of the time believed in life after death, but were expecting a physical, bodily resurrection at a future point in time… phase 2 so to speak. What they didn’t expect was that this would happen to Jesus three days after He died.
Jesus is still human and always will be, and this secures not only our future but brings hope crashing into our present. Jesus’ resurrection means death has been defeated, and will someday be banished completely. Because of this, earthly powers have lost their power — their power depends on being able to wield the weapon of death. Death no longer has power over us, it has lost its sting!
We follow Jesus in dying to our sins and being resurrected into the life of the Spirit now, a metaphorical resurrection. At His resurrection Jesus inaugurated a new kingdom — one that wasn’t what people expected — and He continues to be and will be different than what we expect.
But not only do we experience a resurrecting of our current state, we await a future bodily resurrection after we die. A common view of life after death, even in Christianity, is to think of heaven as a disembodied ethereal spiritual realm where we directly go the moment we die, and which remains in that state forever. However this view doesn’t align with the teachings of the Bible and the history of Christian and Jewish belief. N.T. Wright writes that, “what we have at the moment isn’t, as the old liturgies used to say, ‘the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead’ but the vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.” Later in Surprised by Hope he writes that,
We can’t wrap our minds completely around that future hope — we can’t fathom all that it is yet to come, and to pretend we can creates a weak and boring picture. We imagine a fuzzy dream-like world that we are only sort of present to. Muffled sounds, cloudy, serene images. But that day and time will be more present and real than anything we now know, and we will experience and see it more fully than we ever could see reality today. As Amy Lee says, “the chief beauty of heaven isn’t its desirability over hell.” What is to come is more glorious than anything we could imagine.“Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life — God’s dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever. And when we come to the picture of the actual end in Revelation 21-22, we find not ransomed souls making their way to a disembodied heaven but rather the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, uniting the two in a lasting embrace.”
This future hope can and should interpret our present lives. We pray for God’s Kingdom to come, and for His will on earth now. And we become part of that work as His church, a visual representation of that Kingdom to the world.
Almighty God, who through thine only-begotten Son Jesus Christ hast overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life; We humbly beseech thee that, as by thy special grace preventing us thou dost put into our minds good desires, so by thy continual help we may bring the same to good effect; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost ever, one God, world without end. Amen.
Related links: John 20 | Mark 16
