For
months now we’ve been reading through Jesus’ parables: stories about
resurrection out of death and stories about God seeking out the least and
entering into the most hopeless, most deathly places. We’ve dwelled on the
mystery of God-incarnate and come through Holy Week from a procession with
people waving palms, to a Last Supper, to death on a cross, and we’ve found
ourselves here on Easter Sunday (just as we do every year) as if this is the
most natural thing in the world. But it’s not. It’s bizarre. God came down to
earth to save it by doing the least weakest-looking thing in the world: By
dying.
This backwards God we have in Jesus
makes being a Christian challenging, because we live in a world that works one
way almost all the time while holding to a faith that promises that, in the
end, everything will be flipped upside-down. As we go about our daily business,
we like to hang out with people who are trustworthy and charming and
attractive; Jesus liked to hang out with sinners, and people who did unsavory
work, and the deranged. We value our freedom and liberty, we like being
non-conformists; Jesus preached submission and conformity to the way of the
cross, which is about as unattractive as conformity gets. We like family and
friends; Jesus said to leave them behind without a second thought. We like
being alive; Jesus said that to take up our crosses and die.
All of what Jesus said is crazy if
not for Easter morning. Without resurrection, all the parables are meaningless
and all the healings are temporary; without Easter morning Jesus is, as so many
claim, just another prophet—and a pretty poor one at that. Today is the day
most important to our faith, because it is on the resurrection that everything
else hinges. All our beliefs about salvation, our understandings of brokenness
and sinfulness, and our hope for new life after death—all of it is predicated
on an empty tomb.
And the crazy part of it is this:
You can’t prove it. That’s maybe not the thing you’d expect to hear on Easter
morning, I know. You might expect me to say that it’s true because the Bible tells
me so, but the truth is that you’re either going to believe that or you won’t.
You’re going to take it on faith or you’re not. There is an ever-growing portion
of the population who wants me to produce a proof, to argue for the invisible
with the visible, to use miracles and after-death narratives of people who were
mostly dead but not quite as evidence of the divine, or to wait on the History
Channel to explain what really happened.
If these folks want to believe in Jesus at all it is because they want to hear
that Jesus blesses his followers by healing the sick, sparing the endangered,
feeding the hungry, and finding the lost remote control that disappeared into
thin air somewhere between the couch cushions. We don’t have a God who does
those things as “proof.” Yes, God might heal the sick, God might work through
an addict to bring about new life, and God may even do that for you, but that is
no proof of anything other than cosmic chance. The only event that stands
alone as a testimony to this God we understand to have entered into human form
is the resurrection. All else is commentary.
Trust. It comes down to trust. We
believe in a God who granted us the one wish we wanted above all else: freedom.
And so we find ourselves in a world where freedom has run amuck with a God who could smooth out history but doesn’t,
because we human beings so love the freedom to choose, even if we are always
choosing wrongly. So we live in a world filled with good things but also hunger
and disease and genocide and mental illness and a decimated earth that is in
many places barely suitable for habitation. We have taken the gift of freedom
that we so value and then complained when God has not ironed out the
imperfections we-ourselves have sowed. Then, we-very-same-human-beings who have
caused this degradation have decided that because our freedom has made what
appears to be a godless world there must not be a God at all. “We don’t need
him,” we say. “He’s a fairy tale. A myth. A legend from people long ago who are
not nearly as smart, or as clever, as we are.”
And so we live our lives and we hope
those lives are good and long, and then we die and we hope somebody remembers
us and that we have made some positive contribution to the world. And we hope
that our children have it better than we did. Without resurrection, that’s it;
that’s the meaning of life.
But if Christ was raised from the
dead on the third day, then our little desires don’t really matter. We know
that the world is not ever going to return to Eden on its own. Neither history nor
revelation encourages any expectation that God is in the business of turning
back the clock. God doesn’t make the world a little better, and a little
better. That’s how we work, and sometimes we do a decent job, but, in spite of
all our progress, it’s never enough. It’s not enough for the children stolen
from their families by warlords hellbent on asserting their control and fueled
by xenophobic rage. It’s not enough for the victims of car accidents and wars,
and those who get cancer before our subjective understanding of what is an
acceptable age to die. It’s not enough for those with a genetic tendency toward
addiction. It’s not enough that the world is getting a little better for most
when there are still those for whom it is getting worse—when there will always
be those who are suffering.
More than that, we all suffer. Even
those of us with a tremendous “quality” of life find ourselves lacking meaning;
we find ourselves fanaticizing about a different, riskier life, we find
ourselves committing adultery out of sheer boredom, or we turn to the bar, or
we hate our job. In a million ways we lose our excitement for life. Looking
back on so many who have lived comfortable lives we might wonder if our only
purpose is to pass on our genetic material and then sink into a slow decline
toward death. And the only difference between our life today and what would
have happened a millennium ago is that today we can describe that slow descent
as “comfortable.”
It’s not enough—it’s really not
enough. Today, the good news of the Gospel is difficult to communicate because
the illusion that comfort and security are the best of all things is strong.
It’s a tough nut to crack. It’s why there are so many people who claim the
Christian faith on a census but don’t care even a little about practicing it,
who are “members” of a church but never attend. It’s just another thing to make
them comfortable at the end of the day, assured that even when they slip away
into death something more comfortable awaits. The life-or-death nature of the
resurrection is lost to Netflix, yoga pants, hockey games, and cheap beer. This is not the resurrection. This is
not the anticipation that Mary Magdalene and the other women bring to the tomb.
For too many of us, Jesus could rise from the dead in front of our eyes, and
we’d turn around and ask our spouse when the service is going to be over so we
can get home and eat.
We need to wake up. We need to care.
Not because the church is dying, and not because Christianity is slipping away.
It’s not (in spite of the narrative spun by too many preachers and secularists alike).
There are over two billion Christians in the world—more than at any other time
in history. The major change in the last forty years has been that those Christians
now come from places where life-or-death questions are still at the front of
peoples’ minds. Christianity is leaving the western world of comfort for the
marginalized world of Africa and Asia, which
should give us pause.
Resurrection matters profoundly to people who
live with life-and-death every day. We insulate ourselves. We sit in
comfortable chairs, we sit in front of screens, and we engage in theoretical
arguments with people who sit just as comfortably as us. This is no way to be a
Christian. We are called to enter into the muck, because we have a God who has
gone there first. We have a God who walks a road of suffering and death, not
only so that we can live and have life abundantly—yes, that is true—but also to
show us where meaning and purpose are accomplished. It’s through pain and
suffering; not through comfort and security.
Jesus did not die to make you
comfortable; nor did he die to satisfy an angry God; and neither did he die so
that you can get on with your life as if none of it happened. That’s armchair
Christianity with its boots kicked off. Boots-on-the-ground Christianity
understands that the way of the cross is more mysterious and much more personal
than that. It is a call to new life in an old world. It is a call to wake up,
because, as Jesus has been saying throughout Matthew’s Gospel, the time is
near. Forget about the time being near for the second coming and all that; you have
yet to allow the first coming to change you, so what will the second
accomplish? The end is near because God has broken into your world. Wake up.
Because an empty tomb means we cannot pretend that comfort is the goal of life;
that security is the goal of life; that we are supposed to pass on that good
life to our children. No. The way for our children to find meaning is the way
we have so quietly rejected; it is the way of the cross and the way of the
tomb—death and resurrection.
Wake up. It’s Easter morning, and
the candy doesn’t matter; the dinner doesn’t matter. Those little comforts of
the day do not matter, because
without an understanding that we are resurrection people, that we live in a
world that is irretrievably broken, that we will try to make it all add up and
it won’t work; without understanding that the only hope we have is an empty
tomb, nothing else matters. If Christ is not risen, then nothing else matters.
Your life will be forgotten; your children will die, perhaps even before you.
But if Christ is risen, then nothing else
matters either. So trust him and trust him now. Then, we can live. Then we can
have hope. Then the messed up course of history is just a prelude to something
different.
You can’t fix the world, and neither
can I. You can’t protect your children from everything the world will throw at
them, and neither can I. And, crazier still, God might not fix or protect you
either—not from the terrors of this life. God is not a good luck charm or a
guardian angel. But, at the end of the day, when life fades to gray and we have
nowhere else to turn, when disaster strikes or when our lives appear
meaningless, when we pick up the umpteenth bottle or feel attracted to that
person we know we shouldn’t, when we sit on a bed crying or when we look at a
gun and wonder why life is even worth living, when we pick up a cheeseburger
because we’re bored or steal from our neighbors because we can, when we turn on
a computer and our eyes glaze over or lie in bed at night unable to sleep, in
all our imperfection we crave a promise not that it’ll be OK but that it all
matters; that we matter. And the only place where we will find that promise is
with a stone rolled away, with a God who chose to die so that there is no place
we can go where he has not been—not in life, not in death, not even in hell.
And then, craziest of all, this God who has been there—who is there when we are at our most broken—was raised from the dead, so
that we might be too. That is a promise for long, lonely nights,
and the specter of death. I know that my Redeemer lives—and more than that he
once was dead, but no longer.
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