Luke 24:1-12
As everyone knows, Easter is the time when we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection stands at the core of the Christian faith. The Apostle’s Creed states that Jesus “was crucified, dead, and buried… on the third day he rose again.” The apostle Paul wrote in Colossians 2:12 that we are “buried with him in baptism” and “raised with him through faith in the power of God.”
The Disciples of Christ congregation I served in Louisiana for ten years as pastor enshrined a brief version of those words above its baptistry. I’m glad, because more and more, I find that these words are very close to the core of the gospel. We are buried with Christ, and God raises us up to new life. That’s the message of baptism, being buried under the water and raised again. It’s also the main message of Easter.
There’s more than a little bit of experiential truth of the heart there, as opposed to head truth. Easter is a good time to revisit that truth of the heart – what we mean by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Jesus did not leave behind a theological primer. He didn’t write anything himself, as far as we know, though Luke 4 tells us that he was literate – he read scripture in the synagogue. Jesus preferred to teach out loud to those who would listen. He didn’t set forth doctrines. He spent three years teaching, but he taught using beatitudes and parables to convey images: Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are the poor. The kingdom of heaven is like this…
Jesus’ teaching focused on hearts and souls. That’s often a problem for us modern people, in this age where public dialogue often centers around how much information we have, and mostly ignores our hearts and souls. Today the worst insult that people on different political sides can throw at each other is some version of the word “stupid.” Character, we’re told, doesn’t matter today. If you call someone greedy or self-centered, they may very well thank you for the compliment.
Our culture often dismisses hearts and souls as irrelevant. But any discussion about following Jesus has to start there. Our ability to love doesn’t depend on our IQs. It depends on what’s in our hearts.
We often assume that the early church had all the answers. Our denomination developed from a movement called “Restorationism” because it intended to restore the New Testament church. We have often assumed that the early church had somehow embodied the ideal, and there’s a great passage in Acts that says that all lived in harmony and shared all they had with each other. It sounds like the perfect picture of what a church should be.
Alas, it didn’t last very long. Both the book of Acts and later church history show that the early church struggled for centuries to understand Jesus. That was probably inevitable as the gospel spread around the Mediterranean world to many different cultures with different assumptions about the way the world worked. They wrestled with questions such as whether Jesus was human or divine. Some said he was one, while some said the other. It took a few centuries for the church to conclude that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine.
They wrestled with questions such as why Jesus was crucified, executed in such a shameful manner that was reserved for the lowest criminals, and what all that meant for his followers.
When I walked the aisle and professed my faith at age nine, I did so because I didn’t want to go to hell, so to the best of my nine-year-old ability, I confessed my sin and gave my life to Christ. This was the beginning of my spiritual journey, not the end, and I suspect something similar was the beginning for many of the rest of us here today.
However, if we see the resurrection simply as our way to heaven, then we may see the three years of Jesus’ teaching as something of an afterthought. We may see Jesus’ parables and beatitudes as nice stories if anyone could ever manage to live up to them.
But I believe that Jesus’ teachings are important to understand if we want to understand why he chose to undergo crucifixion and resurrection. He spoke of a God who loves us more than we can comprehend. He quoted Old Testament passages to his listeners. In Matthew 9:13, he told people, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call, not the righteous, but sinners.”
That’s just one example, but it doesn’t sound like an angry and distant God bent on sacrificing somebody just to appease his anger. Jesus emphasized a God of love and mercy. He reached out to sinners; he didn’t waste much time on people who were so perfect and self-sufficient that they didn’t need him.
I’ve come to see the death and resurrection of Jesus as a model, a paradigm for the way the spiritual life works. As the Franciscan writer Richard Rohr has said, We have to go down before we can go up. We have to die to our old selves before we can be raised up to a new life. The Bible is full of examples of this pattern. Jesus once said that the only “sign” he would give people was the story of Jonah, who was swallowed by a great fish. We would normally have thought that was the end of Jonah, but after three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, as the story goes, Jonah found himself back in the sunshine on the beach, where he proceeded to do what God had sent him for.
The Hebrew scriptures have other examples. Joseph is thrown into a deep pit by his jealous brothers, then sold into slavery in a foreign land. That’s about as low as you can go! He might have given up, but instead Joseph rose to great power and responsibility. He was able to save Egypt as well as his family from a seven-year famine.
However else we may interpret the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, I keep coming back to the fact that Jesus told his disciples, “Follow me.” He didn’t say, “Praise me.” He didn’t even say, “Worship me.” He told us to accept our own crosses and to follow the path he set out.
That path that involves dying and being raised again. This pattern of down and then up, loss and then renewal, lies at the heart of Easter. We haven’t always gotten it right. Too often in history, Christians have only wanted to go up, to see themselves only as victors and champions. The crusades were one example. The infighting among Christian denominations is another.
But Jesus taught that none of us comes to new life or victory without first dying to ourselves. To live the Christian life is to follow the pattern that Jesus set. In his death and resurrection, Jesus was telling us, “This is the way to transform evil into good!”
In dying, Jesus exposed what the evil of the world really is. Many of us were taught that evil consisted of things like saying bad words or going fishing on Sunday instead of going to church. That model of the spiritual life trivializes evil. It is deeply flawed because it depends on my willpower, and as Paul said, my own power is not enough. We can’t create a new way of living using our old way of thinking. Even if I obey all the rules, I’m still the same person I was. There’s no transformation there.
In doing and teaching the things that led Jesus to be crucified, Jesus showed the world that the nature of real evil is violence against others. Jesus refused to commit violence or to encourage it, even when it was practiced against him. He made this very clear in his teaching. In Luke 6:27ff, Jesus tells us,
“I say to you that listen, ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer him the other cheek also. If anyone takes away your coat, offer your shirt too. Give to everyone who begs from you, and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.’”
Those are hard words for our old selves. The question for us is whether we are going to be among those who listen, whether we are among those who are willing to let our old selves die so that God can raise us up again to a new life. Jesus died to show us the pattern that leads to new life, the way of living that seeks to put God and others first rather than ourselves. As Richard Rohr says, in allowing himself to be crucified, “Jesus is not changing his Father’s mind about us; he is changing our mind about God – about what is real and what is not.”
Paul tells us in Colossians 1:15 that Jesus is “the image of the invisible God… and (v. 20) through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”
Jesus made peace through the cross. That’s the template for our lives. Peace is central to Jesus’ message. It’s the opposite of the violence that was visited upon him. If he had responded in kind, he would just have perpetuated the violence that characterizes the whole world. By responding to violence with peace and love, Jesus showed us how to break the cycle. God’s power resurrected Jesus, and God’s power will be with us once we have followed Jesus down the path of dying to ourselves and being raised by God’s power to new lives of love.
This is how we change the world, not by conquering it or destroying our enemies. Those things just keep the violence going. Jesus died to show us the way of love. Early Christians were called “people of the Way” because their way of life was so different from everyone else’s. They acted out of love. They were humble, not proud. They didn’t have all the answers, and they didn’t need them. They died to their old selves so that God could transform them into loving hearts. Being correct was not the point; loving was.
Some people approach Easter as though all that matters in the Christian message is this one day. But Easter Day was a logical extension of the previous three years of Jesus’ teaching and wandering from town to town, demonstrating again and again that God is love. The cross teaches us how to stand against hate without becoming hateful. We are called to be emissaries for God’s kingdom of love, and the way of the cross is the path we take.
Cynthia Bourgeault put it this way:
Jesus’s real purpose in his sacrifice was to wager his own life against his core conviction that love is stronger than death, and that the laying down of self, which is the essence of this love, leads not to death, but to life… Thus, the real domain of the Paschal Mystery is not dying but dying-to-self… [it reminds] us that it is not only possible but imperative to fall through fear into love, because that is the only way we will ever truly know what it means to be alive.
Let’s pray.
Lord, we confess our conceit and our pride. We have been quick to take offense, quick to lash out at those who offend us. We have committed violence of thought, word, and deed out of fear that we might lose what we think we have. Help us to let go of our pride that you might create hope. Help us to face our fear of loss by giving what we have to you. Help us to follow the path of your kingdom – of dying to ourselves so that you might raise us up to your kingdom of love. Help us to follow, not merely to repeat empty words. In your name we pray, Amen.
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