EASTER 06 b

Easter is such a joyful time; a time of celebration, a time of new hope and new life. Very often the emphasis placed on various religious celebrations gets clouded by the emphasis placed on them by secular society. Even children become somewhat confused over the meaning and importance of holidays like Easter.

In the cartoon “The Family Circus” the two children have found their Easter baskets and are enjoying them. One asked, “Who colored all these eggs?” To which his sister replied, “The Easter bunny.” “Who gave us the jelly beans?” “The Easter bunny,” she said. He asked again, “And the chocolate rabbit?” “The Easter bunny.” Obviously there was nothing beyond the reach of the Easter bunny.

The family attended Easter services and heard the preacher say, “They came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been rolled back. Who could have done this?” To which the young boy jumped up in the pew and said, “The Easter bunny?” There is a lot of confusion and doubt when it comes to Easter.

Alan Perkins, speaking about the Christian faith said in one address: “I stand before you [this Easter Sunday], on this holiest day in the Christian year, to declare that the Christian religion is utter nonsense. A huge mass of inconsistencies; a conglomeration of all that is absurd, ridiculous, incomprehensible, contradictory, unbelievable, incredible, and patently false.”

I would like to highlight some of the ridiculous statements made by its founder, Jesus of Nazareth:

+”For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.” (Luke 9:24)

+”Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave.” (Matthew20:26-27)

+ “Blessed are you who are poor… Blessed are you who hunger…Blessed are you who weak…Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil because of the Son of Man.” (Luke 6:20-22)

+ “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.” (Luke 6:27-38)

Not only that, but the followers of Jesus behaved in ways that make no sense at all:

“[The religious authorities] called the apostles in and had them flogged. Then they ordered them not to speak in the name of Jesus, and let them go. The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name [of Jesus]. Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ.” (Acts 5:40-42)

This kind of behavior was not unusual. Over the centuries many Christians have been tortured and killed, some even torn to pieces by wild animals, simply for refusing to renounce their faith. Even today, in many parts of the world, Christians are routinely persecuted and killed. What sense does that make? What good does it do to maintain your religious beliefs if they are going to get you killed? Wouldn’t it be better to change religions and live? How can you do anyone any good if you’re dead?

Only the resurrection can make any sense out of these teachings and this kind of behavior. Without the resurrection nothing about Christianity makes sense.

Before the resurrection, Jesus’ own disciples didn’t understand Him. “But they did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it.” (Mark 9:32)

Luke 9:45 says “But they did not understand what this meant. It was hidden for them, so that they did not grasp it, and they were afraid to ask him about it.”

“Jesus used this figure of speech, but they did not understand what he was telling them.” (John 10:6)

This is a common thread throughout the gospels; the twelve disciples, who were with Jesus for three years, who listened to his teaching, who observed his miracles, who watched his life day in and day out – it is the consistent witness of the New Testament that prior to the resurrection these twelve men had only a very hazy idea of who Jesus was and what He was doing. They are continually misunderstanding His actions, misinterpreting His teaching, asking questions which appear to us to be incredibly dense and dim-witted. Why is this?

There are two possibilities. Either that Jesus had, by a stroke of incredibly bad luck, chosen as His disciples the twelve most clueless men in Galilee; or, that something was missing: a key that would unlock the meaning and significance of Jesus’ life and teachings. That thing is the resurrection.

The resurrection makes Christianity make sense.

John 2: 22 says, “After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.”

In the twelfth chapter of John we read these words, “At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him…” (John 12:16).

But it wasn’t just the disciples’ understanding that changed. There was also a dramatic change in their behavior. The resurrection changed everything. Before the resurrection, they were spineless cowards who scattered when Jesus was arrested, choosing to save their own skin rather than remain loyal to their Master. Peter emphatically denied that he even knew Jesus. None of the Twelve even asked for his body to bury it (it was Joseph of Arimethea). But after the resurrection, they became bold and courageous; they willingly suffered arrest, harassment, torture and execution.

You may have heard someone give an opinion that it doesn’t really matter whether Jesus Christ rose from the dead in a physical, bodily sense; that the important thing is what he taught and how he lived. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Listen to what St. Paul said about that, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men” (1 Cor. 15:19).

Without the resurrection, it isn’t just Christianity that makes no sense; life itself makes no sense.

+Criminals who don’t get caught will avoid paying for their crimes; those unjustly accused will never be vindicated.

+Those who achieved success and power by lying and cheating will rest in peace, they will have the same fate as those who suffered for doing the right thing.

+Sin and virture, good and evil, honor and treason, faithfulness and treachery, all will have the same result – the stillness of death.

What difference does the resurrection make?

+The resurrection of Jesus Christ gives us the promise of new life. “By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also,” St. Paul said in 1 Cor. 6:14.

+The resurrection of Jesus Christ gives us the promise of forgiveness. “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification” (Rom. 4:25).

+The resurrection of Jesus Christ gives life meaning and purpose. All does not end at death.

Dr. Seamands tells of a Muslim who became a Christian in Africa. “Some of his friends asked him, ‘Why have you become a Christian?’

He answered, ‘Well, it’s like this. Suppose you were going down the road and suddenly the road forked in two directions, and you didn’t know which way to go, and there at the fork in the road were two men, one dead and one alive—which one would you ask which way to go?’”