“The Lord Is Risen.”
“He Is Risen Indeed.”
It’s a remarkable claim. A man who died – like, really died – brought himself to life again. People were not stupid 2,000 years ago. They knew what it meant to be dead; they knew what it meant that blood and water flowed from Jesus. They knew dead people did not bring themselves back to life.
There is a reason his followers basically embalmed him as part of the ritual Jewish women performed on the dead. For the second time, he is wrapped in swaddling clothes, though this time they were soaked with pounds of pungent perfume because it was assumed that, like his friend Lazarus, he would stink soon. If Jesus was merely a man, he would lie in state for four days before they would move what they called the now ‘corrupted’ body into a deeper tomb.
He was dead. You would think that the Gospel writers would want to cover over the fact that the followers of Jesus were so convinced he was dead they did this to him. That would have been a nice detail to leave out, that lack of faith of those closest to him. It would have left a glorious record of disciples who had no doubt, no wavering, no despair. They had understood all of Jesus’ hints. But, no. They recorded it. They thought he was dead.
When He revealed His risen self on the third day (so that he “did not see corruption” – Psalm 16 and Acts 2 – on the 4th day), people weren’t just automatically buying it.
The disciples did not believe the report of the women, the first to see and then report the resurrected Jesus.
Peter left his observance of the empty tomb bewildered.
The disciples didn’t believe the report of the two dudes on the Emmaus Road to whom Jesus revealed himself.
They thought he was a ghost when he appeared to them in a room.
Some of them still doubted after a later meeting .
They were not fools. They had seen false messiahs, and they knew that crucified people did not come back to life. Yet their eventual response to this is telling. They became convinced that is indeed what happened.
The early Christians claimed Jesus must be God in the flesh because of this resurrection at a time when no one in the Jewish community expected that kind of physical resurrection was a thing.
They didn’t eventually appoint a successor to Jesus to carry on His messianic mission, which was a normal thing to do when a supposed messiah died.
The early Christians said they actually had more hope than ever before, which would be an odd thing to claim if Jesus were still dead.
They claimed that not only was Jesus alive, but the community of the church was now the temple in which a living God’s Spirit would dwell.
This belief that Jesus was God solidified on the other side of this. They changed their view of God into a Triune one (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). They went from, “The Lord our God is one” to, “The Lord our God is Three-in-One.”
They continued to worship Jesus at a time when worship of a human was blasphemous to the Jews and traitorous to the Romans. The death of Jesus would have been a good excuse to back out and avoid all the hardship that came with believing in His deity. This had precedence in Jewish history, as their false messiahs kept failing them and the followers denounced him. But they doubled down.
They accepted and even embraced martyrdom when they could have remained in a tense but rarely fatal co-existence with the Romans (as long as they didn’t start a political rebellion).
They changed their worship to the first day of the week (Sunday) instead of insisting on the last day of the week (Saturday) because Jesus rose on the first day of the week, which meant that a new day was now the holy day. They didn’t rest from their labors on the 7thday; they rested in Jesus’ completed work on the Cross before the week even got started.
This belief that Jesus had risen from the dead upended their lives. It changed everything. But there is something else that stands out to me. John wrote an account in which he and Peter run to the empty tomb:
"Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved,and said, 'They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!'
So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head.
The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first,also went inside. He saw and believed."
John is recording the RESURRECTION OF JESUS, and he makes sure to note that a) Jesus loved him in particular, b) he won that foot race, and c) he didn’t just see (study and hypothesize) like Peter; he actually was and then believed. Props to John.
John was the last gospel written, and it seemed important to John to add some very important details that the others left out. “He’s alive! And, I’m faster than Peter” – not once, but twice.
Maybe John and Peter had a running, good-natured argument about this; I don’t know. Maybe this is what first century humor looks like. Based on the disciples’ track record, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that John was just setting the record straight that one of them was more committed to getting to Jesus and more ready to believe.
I am amazed that Jesus died so that even the most appalling acts of evil can be forgiven, that even the criminals we think of as monsters are not beyond the reach of the love and grace of Jesus.
I also love that Jesus died for people like the disciples: the petty, the shallow, the proud. In other words, ordinary people carrying around darker hearts than they want to admit and minds more broken than they know. Look at the “ordinary” people Jesus died for as they are recorded in Scripture (and by this I mean those closest to him).
The disciples are a mess. They are likely rejects from rabbinical schools. They are not the cream of the Jewish crop. They are petty, jealous, angry, unfocused, and cowardly.
His cousin John the Baptist and his brother James struggled with doubt even though they saw what he did.
Jesus called Peter “Satan” one time.
The Jews in Jerusalem were terribly disappointed that he was not the Warrior Messiah they were looking for. #palmbranches
The sincerely religious people were busy creating disciples of hell instead of heaven.
Paul, whom God eventually sends with the Good news to the Gentiles, killed followers of Jesus before he became one.
Tax collectors, prostitutes, and idol-worshipping Samaritans had a better handle on who Jesus was than the shiny religious people did.
His best friends can’t seem to stay awake and support him on the worst night of his life in the Garden of Gethsemane.
They all run away and hide when he gets arrested.
I love that God’s love pours down from a Cross and seeps into that kind of soil. I love that a gloriously resurrected Jesus appears to that kind of people. Because that means I have hope. That means you have hope.
We have to get over ourselves. Jesus didn’t come to earth because we were so cool to hang out with. He didn’t come because we had finally measured up to God’s expectations and it was time to level up! He came because His good world and His image bearers are dying, “groaning” in longing for the kind of redemption and restoration from sin that only Jesus can bring.
The glory of Resurrection hope is seen in comparison to the hell that Jesus stepped into to redeem. That’s not just the hell of headline-grabbing sins; that’s the hell of our chipping away at God’s good world with our anger, bitterness, envy, greed, lust, and callous cruelty. Some people dig pits of evil with backhoes of sin; those are the ones at which we stand up and point before we bend back to our shovels and slowly dig our way down to join them.
The bad news: Our hearts are darkened; our minds poisoned; our loves and desires distracted and broken. On our own, we tend toward the rot and ruin that follows sin. It’s like a spiritual law of thermodynamics: on our own, entropy and decay increases. Things fall apart. On our own, we continually contribute to the brokenness of the world.
The good news: God has not left us on our own. Jesus can fix the brokenness of his image bearers, and turn that decay into life. In the end, Jesus will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”[1]Now, when we accept the salvation Jesus offers, “he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”[2]
The bad news: We have spilled the ‘life’s blood” of others: physically, emotionally, relationally. We deserve to get what we give; in this case, the wages of sin is death. God, the LawSetter and Judge, demands justice.
The good news: It doesn’t have to be my life – or yours. Jesus, the Lawfulfiller and Savior, will bear the weight of His own justice by spilling His blood in our place. He took a punishment He did not deserve so that we can have the righteousness we did not earn.
The bad news: I don’t deserve this gift of grace, and neither do you.
The good news: We don’t need to deserve or earn it. It’s a gift to even the most undeserving. Jesus came to save the world and bring life, both now and in the world to come.
When the Jewish people celebrated the Passover, the one leading the meal would hold up bread and say, “This is the bread of our affliction, which our fathers ate in the wilderness” (a reference to Exodus 6). At the Last Supper, the presenter is Jesus, and here is what he does:
“Jesus took the bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take it; this is my body. Do this in remembrance of me.”
Not, “this is the bread of our affliction which our fathers ate in the wilderness.” Now it’s different. “This is the bread of my affliction as I lead you on the true exodus and free you from the bondage of sin and death.”
The Passover has changed its focus. Now we remember Jesus, who became our substitutionary sacrifice so that the spiritual judgment we deserve will pass over us, and whose mercy will lead us from bondage to life.
“Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, and they all drank from it. He said to them, “This is the blood of my covenant, which is poured out for many.”
Here is the one to whom the blood of the lamb of the Passover in Egypt had pointed. He will do more than free people from the bondage of earthly oppression; he will, as John the Baptist proclaimed, “take away the sins of the world.”
With “this is my body” and “this is my blood,” Jesus showed himself to be the fulfillment of their longings for a Messiah, a Deliverer. Passover had reminded them that God delivered them from death in Egypt through the blood of the Lamb. Now, we celebrate how God delivered the world from the power of sin and death through the blood of Jesus. His resurrection shows us that He has the power to do what He claimed He can do.
I was reading some reflections on Goodreads this past week about Jesus and Easter, and I ran across this quote by so Francis Spufford. It feels like a fitting way to end.
“The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much. The pain fills him up, displaces thought, as much for him as it has for everyone else who has ever been stuck to one of these horrible contrivances, or for anyone else who dies in pain from any of the world’s grim arsenal of possibilities.
And yet he goes on taking in… He is all open door: to sorrow, suffering, guilt, despair, horror, everything that cannot be escaped, and he does not even try to escape it, he turns to meet it, and claims it all as his own. This is mine now, he is saying; and he embraces it with all that is left in him, each dark act, each dripping memory…
But there is so much of it. So many injured children; so many locked rooms; so much lonely anger; so many bombs in public places; so much vicious zeal; so many bored teenagers at roadblocks; so many drunk girls at parties someone thought they could have a little fun with; so many jokes that go too far; so much ruining greed; so much sick ingenuity; so much burned skin...
It burns and stings, it splinters and gouges, it locks him round and drags him down…All day long, the next day, the city is quiet. The air above the city lacks the usual thousand little trails of smoke from cookfires. Hymns rise from the temple.
Families are indoors. The soldiers are back in barracks. The Chief Priest grows hoarse with singing. The governor plays chess with his secretary and dictates letters. The free bread the temple distributed to the poor has gone stale by midday, but tastes all right dipped in water or broth.
Death has interrupted life only as much as it ever does. We die one at a time and disappear, but the life of the living continues. The earth turns. The sun makes its way towards the western horizon no slower or faster than it usually does.
Early Sunday morning, one of the friends comes back with rags and a jug of water and a box of the grave spices that are supposed to cut down on the smell. She’s braced for the task. But when she comes to the grave she finds that the linen’s been thrown into the corner and the body is gone.
Evidently anonymous burial isn’t quite anonymous enough, after all. She sits outside in the sun. The insects have woken up, here at the edge of the desert, and a bee is nosing about in a lily like silk thinly tucked over itself, but much more perishable. It won’t last long. She takes no notice of the feet that appear at the edge of her vision….
“Don’t be afraid,” says Yeshua. “Far more can be mended than you know.”
Far more can be mended than you know. “See,” said Jesus in John’s vision in Revelation, “I make all things new.” This is the hope of Jesus’ Resurrection. He came to mend all things. And it is this Risen Savior who calls us to follow Him, so surrender our lives to the plan He has to make us new - heart, mind, and soul.
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[1] Revelation 21:
[2] Philippians 1:6