Ressurection
It's Easter Sunday. The day when we tell the rest of the Good Friday story: the resurrection.
To be honest, the Easter story often sounds a little anti-climactic to me.
I mean the story to this point is pretty gripping: the life of healing and teaching; the triumphant march into Jerusalem; the long week where everything goes so very wrong; betrayal; denial. It all ends where it always ends: the powerless broken by the powerful in a manner meant to be an example to all those who stand when they should kneel.
The story then takes a bizarre, and, on the face of it unbelievable turn. Jesus is just suddenly alive again. No one even gets to see the special effects. They just find the tomb empty.
It's as if Superman gets shot full of kryptonite and killed by some alien foe, and then, in the last page of the comic, he's alive again. (Wait. That kind of happened, didn't it?)
The thing is, I think, all the people who originally told the gospel story, the writers who eventually wrote it down, the others who copied the story, the others who told the story after reading it, those who found in this story hope and comfort and challenge and conviction and salvation and condemnation, all those people don't end the story with Easter and the resurrection.
They start the story with it.
This is the point where it all starts, not where it ends. The story is not only or primarily about an innocent man who was killed by a ruthless empire, but about a world that is not what it seems, a world where what seems to be defeat is really victory.
The fact that it seems so unbelievable is the very point. The story of Easter is a lesson to the self-righteous, the oppressor, the bully, the snob. It says that, no matter how much it seems like all the power stands with you, God is really with those under your feet. No matter how much this world looks like a descent into madness and decadence and death, it is really being
born
again.
Resurrected.
To be honest, the Easter story often sounds a little anti-climactic to me.
I mean the story to this point is pretty gripping: the life of healing and teaching; the triumphant march into Jerusalem; the long week where everything goes so very wrong; betrayal; denial. It all ends where it always ends: the powerless broken by the powerful in a manner meant to be an example to all those who stand when they should kneel.
The story then takes a bizarre, and, on the face of it unbelievable turn. Jesus is just suddenly alive again. No one even gets to see the special effects. They just find the tomb empty.
It's as if Superman gets shot full of kryptonite and killed by some alien foe, and then, in the last page of the comic, he's alive again. (Wait. That kind of happened, didn't it?)
The thing is, I think, all the people who originally told the gospel story, the writers who eventually wrote it down, the others who copied the story, the others who told the story after reading it, those who found in this story hope and comfort and challenge and conviction and salvation and condemnation, all those people don't end the story with Easter and the resurrection.
They start the story with it.
This is the point where it all starts, not where it ends. The story is not only or primarily about an innocent man who was killed by a ruthless empire, but about a world that is not what it seems, a world where what seems to be defeat is really victory.
The fact that it seems so unbelievable is the very point. The story of Easter is a lesson to the self-righteous, the oppressor, the bully, the snob. It says that, no matter how much it seems like all the power stands with you, God is really with those under your feet. No matter how much this world looks like a descent into madness and decadence and death, it is really being
born
again.
Resurrected.
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