Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Iowa with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light.
If Christ has not been raised from the dead, your faith is futile. - The Apostle Paul
It would seem that there are an infinity of ways that the Church can lose sight of what really matters. Today is Easter Sunday. The day when we celebrate the event that has defined the Christian faith from the beginning: the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This is the first Easter in a long while that I haven’t had a church to celebrate with, so I’ve spent some time considering the meaning of the Resurrection and trying to clear away some of the accretive barnacles of nonsense that have attached themselves to the event in my mind. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
First of all, let me make the point that Easter is the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus, not his death. That he died in our place is the topic of Good Friday, not today. This is not the day to wallow in guilt and shame. It is the day to rejoice in God’s goodness and grace. (How many Easter sermons have you heard get this wrong?) Look through the sermons and proclamations in the book of Acts. The central point of all of them is the Resurrection. It was such a shocking event that the apostles could hardly talk about anything else. Sometimes the death is barely even mentioned. Today is about the Resurrection. And the glory of the Resurrection is in how it proves that Life is greater than death. Good is more powerful than evil. And God is in the business of doing impossibly new things.
Secondly, the Resurrection isn’t primarily about Jesus. I know, that sounds crazy but look at the grammar of the New Testament. Jesus is the object of the Resurrection, but God is the subject (God raised Jesus). Or when Jesus is the subject of the event, the verb is in the passive voice (Jesus was raised). God is the main actor. The Resurrection is something that happened to Jesus. This is important because it indicates that the Resurrection is first and foremost about God, and about His faithfulness. Jesus didn’t raise himself from the dead; God raised him. Which means that when Jesus endured the trial, beating, and crucifixion he was divesting himself of the power to do anything. The taunt from the soldiers for Jesus to save himself was probably something that Jesus could have done, but he refused to. When he died, he truly died. And he placed himself in God’s hands, trusting in God’s faithfulness to do something new. Jesus didn’t raise himself.
Tertiarily, meeting the risen Jesus led to a crisis of faith for the disciples. It upended their religion. We see this in a number of ways.
The early Jesus-followers shifted their holy day from Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath) to Sunday (the day Jesus was raised). Honoring the Sabbath in specific ways was a key distinguisher of a faithful Jew.
Paul’s encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus caused him to completely reevaluate everything he thought he knew about God. It upended everything he had been taught about what it looks like to love and honor God.
And my personal favorite: (Doubting) Thomas looked a man in the face and called him his Lord and God. This was blasphemy for a Jew. It was heresy. But the Risen Christ was such a beautifully-baffling reality that somehow it transformed a blasphemous statement from the lips of a faithful Jew into a fundamental statement of faith.
Finally, the Resurrection is the source of the authority of the Bible. The most fundamental statement of faith in Christianity is that “Jesus is Lord.” The resurrected Christ who ascended to the right hand of God is the authority over the Church (even over the whole cosmos). The Bible is authoritative because it is our primary revelation of the resurrected Christ, but it is a dependent authority. (I make this point to demonstrate that the Bible’s authority doesn’t come from itself. That is circular reasoning, as when people quote 2 Timothy 3:16-17 to prove the Bible’s authority.) And of course we can only really know the meaning of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension from within the story that the Bible is telling, which must include the stories of the Old Testament. The Bible is the context in which we understand the meaning of Jesus. The Risen Lord as our primary authority gives greater value to the Great Tradition of Christianity that, for over 2,000 years, has sought to understand who this Jesus is and what it means to live well in light of that knowledge.
As far as I can tell, these are the central pieces to the Christian faith. There are some natural and logical implications that flow from these pieces that can tell us more about who Jesus is and how we should live. There is much more we could say. (If you’re interested in following that train of thought I would suggest you start here.)
But let me also be clear in saying that there is plenty of religious nonsense that has been added to the Christian faith that doesn’t naturally or logically flow from this center. So I would encourage you to spend some time contemplating the beautiful mystery that is the Risen Jesus and allow it to perhaps upend some of your own religious convictions. Just like what happened to Paul, Thomas, and all those who met the Resurrected Christ.
Happy Easter.