This Sunday is Easter, the most important day of the Christian calendar. However, it seems that many Christians don’t fully understand the importance of Easter. If you ask churchgoers to summarize the basic Christian message, you will often get the following response: “Our sin separates us from a holy God. Jesus died on the cross so that we might receive forgiveness of our sins. Those who trust in Jesus’ sacrifice will someday go to heaven to spend eternity with the Lord.” Sound familiar?
It should take no more than a moment of reflection to realize that this formulation is woefully inadequate. We might call this “Good Friday” Christianity. There’s a strong emphasis on the death of Jesus and the forgiveness we receive on account of his suffering. But there is no mention of the resurrection.
All the early Christians regarded Jesus’ resurrection as the foundational reality upon which our faith is built. “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”
How can we give ourselves a more Biblical grasp on what transpired two millennia ago?
Let’s begin by examining the dramatic confrontation which transpired after Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Lord was brought to trial before Caiaphas the high priest and the Sanhedrin, the governing body of the Jewish nation. Caiaphas directly challenged Jesus with the crucial question, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?” (Mark 14:61)
The Greek term “Christ” means “anointed one” and refers to the king of Israel. The Hebrew equivalent is the word “Messiah.” In days of old, the king would be anointed by pouring a flask of oil upon his head as a sign of God’s choice & blessing.
The scriptures foretold that the Messiah would establish his kingdom, not just over Israel, but over the whole earth. As written in Psalm 2, “I have installed my King on Zion [Jerusalem], my holy hill…I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will rule them with an iron scepter; you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”
The Messiah would inaugurate the kingdom of God, bringing eternal justice, joy, peace, abundance to the whole creation. He would also execute divine judgment against the dark powers which threatened to ruin God’s lovely world. The king would destroy those who embraced evil, injustice and immorality; they would be smashed like a piece of brittle pottery.
Here is point: the accounts of Jesus trial, suffering and crucifixion all focus on Jesus’ identity as the Messiah. Consider the account in Mark 15. When Jesus comes before the Roman governor, Pilate refers to him as “the king of the Jews” no less than three times! Pilate then turns Jesus over to the Roman soldiers, who taunt their prisoner by giving him a purple robe & a crown of thorns (more obvious royal imagery). The soldiers mock Jesus by calling out, “Hail, the king of the Jews!” (v18) When Jesus is crucified, the written notice affixed above his head reads, “The king of the Jews.” Finally, as Jesus’ life slips away, the Jewish leadership heaps abuse upon him: “Let this Messiah, this king of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.”
Mark has taken the dominant theme of Jesus’ Messiahship and practically beaten us over the head with it! It’s clearly the most vital thing that Mark wishes his readers to comprehend. Yet strangely, most Christians today simply don’t know what to do with this fact. To their minds, the most important thing is that Jesus is the spotless lamb of God, the one whose sacrifice secures our forgiveness and ensures our entrance into “heaven.” Within this incomplete scheme, Jesus’ identity as king is of no relevance. In fact, it doesn’t even matter that he was Jewish!
How can Christians recover the full meaning of Easter? What did the followers of Jesus think that the resurrection meant?
Above all, the first Christians believed that the resurrection confirmed Jesus’ central claim to be the king of Israel and therefore the true Lord of the world. Far too many churches have either ignored this reality altogether or “spiritualized” King Jesus. Many churchgoers have sadly relegated Jesus to being king merely in their hearts; they’ve demoted him to “heavenly” king whose kingdom has little relationship to the actual world around us. Nothing could be further from the truth.
When the gospel writers announced Jesus as king, they intended this to be taken in the rather straightforward & political sense that Jesus had been granted sovereignty to govern the whole creation. True, the resurrection meant that each & every human being had been summoned to submit their full allegiance to the king. But the resurrection was about more than just solitary individuals made right with God.
By raising him from the dead, God had granted Jesus full authority to re-order the world into the place God had always intended – a place of eternal joy where humanity could dwell in the presence of God forever. To achieve this end, Jesus’ rule & reign must be extended to every aspect of existence: families & homes, work & wealth, the environment, schools & hospitals, and especially government. To proclaim the resurrection is to announce that Jesus is king over all things. Period.
What conclusions can we draw from this central insight?
(1) The resurrection is the foundation of our hope. Many Christians are surprised to learn that the story of the Bible does not end with God’s people being evacuated from earth to some otherworldly sphere called “heaven” where we shall sit on clouds and strum harps all day. Nor does our postmortem destiny entail leaving our body behind while our soul departs to be with the Lord. Rather, Christians hope that just as God raised Jesus from the dead, so also, we shall be raised to new life.
Resurrection is not simply a vague way of speaking about life after death. Rather, the resurrection refers to the specific fact that the physical, dead body of Jesus came to life again. Jesus had suffered a brutal death. He’d been severely flogged and beaten; nails were driven through his hands and feet; his side was pierced by the spear of a Roman soldier. Jesus slowly suffocated on the cross as the strength ebbed from his body. But three days later, the very same body which was placed in the tomb emerged in glory.
This was not simply a matter of Jesus returning to the existence he enjoyed prior to his suffering. The one who emerged from the tomb possessed the same body, but it was a body that had been amazingly transformed. He was no longer subject to weakness, decay, sickness or death. “Since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him.”
Our destiny does not involve being evacuated from this world to dwell in heaven. Rather, the followers of King Jesus look forward to our own resurrection. As Paul declared, “[God] who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.”
We eagerly anticipate a future existence whereby the very same body which we now inhabit will raised to new, glorious life which can no longer be sullied by suffering or death. “So it will be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in in weakness; it is raised in power.”
(2) The resurrection not only affirmed God’s intention to redeem the created order, but it also revealed that this redemption had begun. Easter is the most fitting time of year to remind ourselves that Christian hope entails the rescue of God’s creation – the very same material world which we now inhabit.
But it should also be a reminder that God’s future, glorious world has already begun. This new world was brought to birth the moment Jesus walked out of the tomb. In fact, the physical body of Jesus is the first & most important part of God’s new creation. He is, after all, the king.
And each time that someone submits themselves to King Jesus, the new creation grows. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation: the old has gone, the new has come!” True, this new world will not be complete until Jesus appears once more to raise his people from the dead & fully establish his reign.
But make no mistake, the world has turned a corner. The old creation of sin & death is passing away; it has no place in the kingdom of Jesus, where only righteousness, joy, peace and life are allowed.
