The Gospel accounts detail the cruel death Jesus Christ suffered, how his tomb was found empty and how he appeared after his death and burial to hundreds of people.
You can’t prove the resurrection. You can’t prove God. Neither, for that matter, can you prove any historical event actually happened.
Christianity is founded on the acceptance of credible evidence. This is found in well tested historical writings and in the ongoing impact of the risen Jesus upon lives right up to today.
If I could prove God he’d be less than me, and the same’s true of the resurrection.
I believe in God and I believe in the resurrection. Both beliefs are reasonable whilst going wonderfully beyond reason.
How wonderfully beyond reason is the love that saw you and I as precious enough to merit the gift of Himself!
This love counters hopelessness, guilt, fear and apathy.
First hopelessness. The Easter victory of Jesus engages with that most demoralising state of the human mind - the belief that life is lived for nothing.
The novelist Thornton Wilder paints the dilemma of two vantage points, one without and one with the perspective of the resurrection: Some say that…to the gods we are like the flies that boys kill on a summer day. And some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
Could it be that much of the workaholism around in a materialistic society is a running away from standing still and thinking that hideous thought ‘life is all for nothing’?
Either this life is the prologue of eternal life or it’s no more meaningful than that of the flies that boys kill on a summer day.
The raising up of Jesus at Easter irradiates this dark hopelessness.
God, who made us, so sympathises with our weaknesses and insecurities he’s come among us and walked the valley of the shadow of death himself.
Easter speaks of a Love expecting nothing of us it’s not prepared to go through itself.
That Love, stronger than death, turned the tables on death so it can no longer demoralise those who know the risen Lord Jesus beside them.
If Christ’s victory counters hopelessness it secondly provides a remedy for guilt.
St John Chapter 20 recounts how the risen Lord Jesus told his disciples If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.
The truth of Easter brings forgiveness to counter guilt as surely as it brings life to the dead.
Guilt is the deep down feeling that you’ve done wrong. This is natural for human beings who’re both made in God’s image, with a sense of right and wrong, and yet so often fail to do right and fall short of God.
Jesus Christ comes into lives precisely because there’s sin there that needs dealing with! He died and rose to bring us the forgiveness that’s the very antidote to guilt.
Christianity is guilt-ridding not guilt-ridden.
Easter shows us Jesus came to save the world and not to judge it, but people have to let him free them from guilt by opening up their hearts for his cleansing.
Hope for the hopeless, forgiveness for the guilty. Thirdly the perfect love revealed on Easter Day casts out fear.
Do not be afraid the angel said to the women at Christ’s tomb, you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised (Matthew 28.5-6).
Sometimes we get deceived into thinking of Christianity as a place to gain moral improvement. It’s far more than that. Living as Christians is primarily about losing our enslavements, especially the fears that stop us living to full potential.
Nelson Mandela once said our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God...We are all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us’.
Easter’s about Christ’s raising and our own raising to become more fully and fearlessly what we’re meant to be.
If Easter addresses hopelessness, guilt and fear lastly it addresses apathy about the state of the world.
It teaches us that, though the world is far from what it should be, God is truly ‘on the case’. The raising of Jesus from the dead speaks of this world being taken up by God into his new creation and how we can work with God for that new world where righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3.13).
Christ’s resurrection speaks with relevance to a world where a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, where nations live in perpetual conflict and where human consumption punishes the environment.
Why sacrifice for the needs of others if in the end nothing we do will make any difference? Asks Bishop Tom Wright, who goes on to affirm: If the resurrection of Jesus happened, however, that means there’s infinite hope and reason to pour ourselves out for the needs of the world.
Apathy means lack of passion and it names a real spiritual problem in our society. Why bother? Once you catch on that the Maker of all bothers you gain heart, and not just for yourself but for the world around you.
The Martin Luther King’s of the world gain passion from the resurrection because they catch on that God’s God of the future coming into being. In King’s case his active faith brought a future to be that radically improved civil rights in the United States.
Christ is risen – he’s changing the world – and he wants us in his team!
He wants Nelson Mandela’s and Martin Luther King’s to rise up in Horsted Keynes with resurrection faith in the God of the future!
Tomorrow also is God’s – this is our faith! With the risen Christ at our side we’ll be seeing the kingdom of this world becoming the kingdom of our God and we’ll be part of the heavenly celebration of this the eucharist anticipates.
As often as we celebrate this sacrifice we further the Easter work of redemption not least by throwing ourselves into the fray of the working team that’s holy Church.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, O Lord, on earth as in heaven, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
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