Easter--When It All Comes Together

Easter Sunday—everything I wrote about Maundy Thursday and Good Friday would be meaningless twaddle if it weren’t for today. This is the day when it all began to make sense. This is the day when the Twelve Apostles, finally, began to get what Christ was talking about.
Up until Easter Sunday (Paskha, or Passover, they call it in most European countries, after the original Jewish celebration), Christ looks like a somewhat suicidally dumb schmuck. He was told not to go near Jerusalem. He had so thoroughly annoyed (and FRIGHTENED) the political and religious leaders of his time that it was dangerous for him to go.
One of his own followers, after they could not dissuade him from going, turned to the others and shrugged, “Let’s go with him—and die with him”. They were under no illusions. He insisted on going and what everyone expected happened. They killed him.
Not just suicidal, but he sounds like a deluded schmuck who thought he was on some kind of mission for God. He said, “I must go to Jerusalem because that’s where all prophets get killed”. He wanted to put himself in the same category as Isaiah, who got sawed in half by an ancient Jewish king who was under as much pressure as the current Jewish leaders.
He had appalled these same leaders by claiming to be one with God—“Before Abraham was, I am”, he had proclaimed. No one missed the reference to the day God identified himself to Moses by telling him—“I am who I am.” “I am”—the unspeakable name of the non-contingent God—and, in a day when blasphemy was taken seriously, to claim to BE “I am” was the ultimate blasphemy, for which the only punishment must be death.
Besides this Christ was stirring up large crowds, dangerous to do under the nose of a Roman garrison on the edge of an Empire that faced a dangerous foreign enemy (Parthia). Jewish leaders lived in fear that some local firebrand would stir things up enough that a Roman army would move in on them and wipe out their nation and their temple. (It happened forty years later.)
So they maneuvered to get Christ killed—by the same Roman authorities they feared. They warned the Roman governor that Christ had said he would rise again; unlike the Apostles, they had at least listened to what he was saying. The Romans posted a guard so no overzealous follower could sneak into the tomb, spirit the body away, and claim he came back to life.
The Roman guard was found unconscious. They babbled about some space men in shiny suits who rolled away the huge stone at the entrance and knocked them all out. (Matthew’s account) They were bribed to shut up and the horrified leaders claimed the body was stolen.
The Apostles refused to believe anybody’s story about a resurrection until Christ walked through a locked door and identified himself. (They were so intent in hiding, it is most unlikely that they took on any Roman guards!)
Good Friday suddenly has meaning. Not only did God sacrifice his son for men—he raised him back up from the dead—the Christian Bible suggests that, unlike merely creating the cosmos, the defeat of death itself took serious exertion of divine power.
Not only does the Christian God raise Christ from death and Hell itself, but now the promise can be made to all men—“Oh death, where is thy sting; Oh grave, where is thy victory?” The Christian message becomes—“We live because He lives”. The keys to Death and Hell are now in the hands of the Son of God who sacrificed himself to save men from them.
It is an astonishing proclamation. Death does not win. What we bury will live again. Body, soul and Spirit—all because of Good Friday AND Easter morning. The last great horror of men, dying, has now had its fangs pulled.
Believe it or disbelieve it—it is an astonishing claim. Take it as truth, and it is the best news you will ever hear. Deny it—and run the risk (Pascal’s Wager) of facing an offended deity who takes a dim view of ingratitude—of whom it is written “Fear Him who, when he has killed, can kill again”.