Easter 2023, 4-10-23 message<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are many ways to think about Easter \u2013 including, I earnestly mean, ways for us to contemplate and meditate upon its significance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beyond its secular trappings and pagan associations, the eggs and candy and (once upon a time) Easter parades, and hunting for eggs. The bunnies. The \u201ctraditional\u201d Easter menus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even, at our churches, the end of Lent with, for some Christians, its ashes and sacrifices, palms on Sunday and Good Friday observances. Even sunrise services and special hymns. Beyond all that\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I once had a Christian friend who was a faithful, lifelong churchgoer. An orthodox (but not Orthodox) Protestant. But to the extent he had a personal theology, he had some gripes with God. For instance, he always wondered how God could be a \u201cGod of love\u201d who required that Abraham kill his boy Isaac as a sacrifice. Do you know the story? Neither did Abraham understand, but he obeyed. He took Isaac up on a mountainside and prepared to slay him. As we know, God intervened and told Abraham to let up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The whole act seemed to my friend to be unbelievably cruel \u2013 from the strange command to the \u201ctease\u201d of calling off the bizarre command at the last minute. \u201cGod of Vengeance I understand,\u201d my friend said about the \u201cOld Testament\u201d revelations of God; \u201cEven a God of Judgment. But to torture a father in such a way, and to even present a scenario of preparing the boy to be killed\u2026 what kind of a God is that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, He is a God who evidently was not introduced to congragations over a lifetime of Sunday sermons. For between the lines of the Abraham-and-Isaac story is a God of love<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We can, perhaps, forgive my friend. Because despite the ancient Israelites always looking to the \u201ccoming Messiah\u201d and receiving myriad signs and prophesies, very few of them understood the ways of the Lord. For that matter, even the Disciples who lived with Jesus for three and a half years, who witnessed miracles and listened to teachings, did not fully understand the message of the cross. Right down to the arrest and passion of Jesus; his crucifixion and death \u2013 even immediately upon His miraculous resurrection from the tomb \u2013 they did not fully understand what we are considering here: the meaning of Easter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jesus was God-Become-Man, the Incarnation. Not in order to live as much as to die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His mission was only peripherally, however important, to teach and heal and bear witness to the Father. His mission was to be killed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the Christ he touched people\u2019s lives as they happened to meet Him. But it was never meant to be that His life on earth would \u201cdraw all unto Me.\u201d That was the purpose of His death, not His life \u2013 \u201cIf I be lifted up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The message of the cross and the meaning of Easter were in the sacrificial death of the spotless lamb, Jesus Christ. Unlike the sinless Jesus, all of humanity has sinned. And no one can stand sinless before a Holy God, \u201cno, not one.\u201d Rules, commandments, religious laws had not brought salvation to humankind. How many times a year (or a week, or a day) do you commit any sort of sin?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jesus became that sin offering; His death is substitutionary. \u201cBelieve in Me,\u201d Jesus told us, \u201cand ye shall never die.\u201d That is \u2013 life eternal, forgiveness of those sins, acceptance by God. We only have to believe it in our hearts, and confess it with our mouths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Jesus died for the punishment we deserve, He rose from the dead to show that, indeed, sin and death have been defeated on our behalf. Then He, 40 days later, ascended bodily into Heaven, to finally confirm His divinity. Then the Holy Spirit came to believers \u2013 as it does today \u2013 on the day of Pentecost, to be God-within-us<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It sounds simple. Maybe even crazy, but no crazier than Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son. It was picture, a foretelling, a prophesy, of the Lord God\u2019s willingness to sacrifice His<\/em> own Son. Indeed, it stood as His promise to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLife\u201d was, perhaps, viewed a little differently in Old Testament days; infant mortality was common. And in today\u2019s world (ironically, especially in \u201cChristian\u201d countries) life seems cheaper all the time, as our culture of death normalizes abortion and euthanasia, trafficking and abuse. Yet the slaying of one\u2019s child, directly, or planning it, as God ordered the Passion of the Christ\u2026 is a different matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If God the Father ever wept, it was then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the meaning of Easter is not only Jesus\u2019s death, but all He endured \u2013 for us. The unjust arrest, the false accusations, the mocking, the whipping, the physical abuse, the crown of thorns, the carrying of the rough cross through streets, the spikes through wrists and feet, hanging, bleeding, suffocating. And, in my imagination, the most painful aspect might have been the Savior\u2019s realization of betrayal by His closest friends and followers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat kind of God,\u201d as my friend might have asked, \u201cwould write such a script?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The answer is<\/em> the Easter message: A God who loves us to such an extent<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That Easter message, ultimately, is a love story. Nothing more; and surely nothing less. The hymns we sing are love songs back to God. The unified story of the entire Bible, its centrality the hours between the cross and the empty tomb, was God\u2019s plan for His incarnate Son. And for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it\u2019s not over. Jesus does not \u201cmerely\u201d live today. There is a lesson of a little boy playing Jesus in a Sunday School Easter pageant, in his bedroom robe, jumping from the cardboard tomb and yelling \u201cHere I come, ready or not!!!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n