Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.
As we were approaching Spring Break my freshman year of college, my roommate and I were talking about what we were going to do during our week at home. I talked about what my family did for Easter, which piqued his curiosity. “What is Easter about, anyway?”, he asked. As a guy who literally grew up in church (my dad and both grandfathers were pastors), I couldn’t believe what he was asking. I soon discovered that even though he went to church with his mom on Easter and some occasional Christmas services, and even though he identified with Christianity as his religion, he didn’t know anything about Easter, really.
What does Easter mean to you?
Jesus’ week in Jerusalem did not end well. After being sold out by one of his disciples (Judas), he was arrested, tried by religious authorities who didn’t obey their own rules, then tried by the Roman authorities who had Jesus severely beaten and eventually executed by crucifixion. He died late Friday afternoon, and a wealthy benefactor had his body placed in a cave-tomb and sealed with a stone. Guards were even sent to make sure nobody tried to steal Jesus’ corpse. The disciples hid in fear of being arrested and facing a similar fate. After the Sabbath was over Saturday night, the next morning some women followers of Jesus went to properly prepare Jesus’ body for extended burial. When they arrived at the tomb, they could see that no guards were present, the several-hundred-pound stone had been rolled away, and Jesus’ body was no longer laying inside the cave-tomb. Naturally, they wondered what had happened. They were greeted by an angel of God who asked them a peculiar question: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? Don’t you see, he is not here. He is risen!” Soon thereafter, Jesus was experienced alive by his followers, albeit in a new form. Depending which of the four Gospels referenced, there are slight differences in what happened, but the gist is the same: Jesus was dead, then was experienced alive again. For many Christians to this day, Easter is simply about that: there is life after the grave and believing in Jesus guarantees it because he said if we believed, we would be welcomed into heaven. For many Christians, this is the primary – if not only – reason to have faith.
This message for many is a bit ho-hum. In my experience, the overwhelming number of people believe in an afterlife for themselves and everybody they care about. I’ve presided over hundreds of funerals and memorial services in my pastoral career. In nearly every case there was strong belief that the person being remembered was in heaven, playing golf, or fishing, or playing poker, or…. In a sense, this is evidence that the Church has done a good job with this aspect of the Easter message – most everybody seems comfortable with the idea of some form of life after the grave, and that God will welcome us home. This assumption has not been the case for most of humanity since Jesus walked the earth, however. This is a fairly recent development, historically.
The disciples lived at a time when there was not a lot of confidence in anything happening post-grave, except perhaps for a very elite few – the prophet Elijah and another obscure character named Enoch from the Jewish tradition. Good Roman citizens may have believed that some of the Caesars lived on since they were at times viewed as demigods. Let the historical context sink in a moment to appreciate this important fact. The disciples had little confidence in life being more than a few decades of hard living before being crushed by death. Jesus’ resurrection completely changed all of that. The hope was real, and it radically changed and empowered them. Their confidence is everything he said skyrocketed after Easter morning, and the hope it communicated was extremely compelling to others who, up to that point, had no hope for more than this life. A strong belief in heaven was a serious game changer. It still is. Ask anyone truly facing death or their loved ones – hope that there is more can bring great peace.
We live at a moment where we could use more peace. A microscopic virus has wreaked havoc over the entire globe, disrupting literally everyone’s lives in one way or another. Many have lost jobs that may or may not return. Some have lost their business. Many have lost sight of a hopeful future. Over a million have contracted the virus, and worldwide the death toll is already staggering and will continue to rise in the weeks to come before leveling off. All of a sudden all of humanity has been brought to its knees. While most people will not die or even get sick from COVID-19, it has forced us into a season where we are faced with loss and death on many levels. Literally in terms of physical health, and metaphorical on many fronts. Whereas before when we had no social distancing or sheltering in place restrictions put upon us, now we cannot turn to the same coping mechanisms that once worked to help us deny this perpetual reality of the human experience. Loss and death are very real physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, economically. We may find ourselves with many deaths and losses that we are facing, that have been laid in a tomb and sealed shut. We may find ourselves, like the disciples, locked away in despair, not knowing what to do next, trapped in hopelessness. Yet if Easter is anything, it is a proclamation that death and despair don’t get the last word. Easter means hope. And hope makes all the difference between simply surviving and prevailing.
Easter proclaims that there is a power at work that is greater than flesh and bones and market crashes and viruses combined. This hope brought Jesus’ disciples out of their doomy-and-gloomy sheltering-in-place into a new light and a new future. What they were sure was the end got flipped – it was a new unprecedented beginning. They launched from that day with a level of confidence and energy unimaginable prior to Easter Sunday morning. The power and hope of Easter lasted the length of their lives and was stronger than the pain and suffering they all would endure, even when facing martyrdom. Don’t miss this: they still faced hardship in life – that’s inevitable – yet it did not stand a chance against the power and presence of God which provided an everlasting stream of life and direction. That same reality is possible for all of us today. COVID-19 may rob us of life, health, finances, and freedoms, but it need not rob us of hope. There is a power that is deeper, that is experienced, that is real, that is lasting.
To tap into the deep power that is Easter we need to learn some things from those first disciples. They were the first to experience the resurrected Christ. They all believed what they experienced together – they did not doubt it. Yet this kind of believing in Easter ran way deeper than intellectual assent. Surely there are a lot of people that have confidence that Jesus’ resurrection experienced by the disciples was true, yet they remain in despair. The abiding power of the resurrection came because of something the disciples had been learning for the three years or more leading up to that first Easter. They had learned and adopted the way of Jesus and were living in his footsteps.
If you’re looking for the secret sauce the disciples had that helped them experience the power of Easter, given them hope and courage for the rest of their lives, it was that they adopted the way of Jesus as their own. So much so, in fact, that the early Jesus followers were called the people of The Way referring to Jesus’ teachings. Not to be confused with some form of legalistic adherence to a bunch of do’s and don’ts, the Way was an ethos, a way of being that transformed the way they viewed God, themselves, the world around them, the intersecting systems, and their engagement in the world. Like the Karate Kid who waxed on and waxed off, the disciples walked in Jesus’ footsteps, listened to his teachings which he repeated in every new town, watched how he did life, how he treated others – everything – because all of that together is what kept Jesus so tightly aligned with God. They rightly figured that if it was important to Jesus, it should be important to them, and if it worked for Jesus, it just might work for them. They were correct. They began to live like Jesus, and they saw the same kinds of things happen in and through them that they saw in Jesus. Profound insights, vision to see things clearly, courage to call out injustice and call for love, and even power to facilitate healing like Jesus did. The secret sauce for how they embraced and harnessed the power of resurrection was their devotion to the Way of Jesus, making it their own. This still works. In fact, I would submit to you that it still is as much The Way as it ever was!
In my experience, a lot of people believe in Easter intellectually and maybe even emotionally, but not with their whole being, which also includes their attitudes and behaviors. Their faith in God and Easter isn’t much more powerful than their faith in their laundry soap, and often not as powerful as their faith in the US flag. Keep your laundry soap and your flag, yet realize that there is something much bigger offered here that transcends Tide and is stronger than our democracy (and its military). The power of Easter is the game changer and life restorer, calling for a deeper and greater allegiance than even our patriotism, and providing much more. Beauty where there was ugliness and destruction, strength for fear, gladness for mourning, peace for despair, and life where there was once death.
Many years ago I officiated a funeral service for a guy that in many ways wasted his life. For whatever reason, he was pretty much all about himself, used people again and again (especially women), lost multiple jobs due to either his anger problem or drinking problem. His health was as good as you might guess for a guy who drank a 12-pack of beer every day along with smoking two packs to go with it. He got cancer and died. His brother showed up for the funeral, and he gave every indication that he was not happy to be there. Not because of grief, but disgust, anger, disappointment. The only other person who came was a woman in my church who introduced me to the guy. He wanted me there as he was taking his last breaths. I tried to convince him of the unconditional love of God which loved him then and forever, a love large enough to welcome him home. But I don’t think he really bought it, because he never really lived it. Easter isn’t something we just sign off on. It is something we live and discover that it lives in us and produces in us life we hadn’t thought possible. In the Christian tradition, the Easter life begins with a yes to follow in the footsteps and teaching of Jesus, which is followed with many more invitations to say yes to, all leading us to learn and grow and see and do in ways that tie us to the heart of God which is eternally good and loving. That’s why Easter is more than a one-off historical moment, and more of a movement – we become resurrected here and now, with a growing hope for what comes next.
What will Easter mean for you today? Especially during this global reset event of COVID-19, why not say yes to a new approach, the Way of Jesus that leads to life?