Each and every year, Christians around the world celebrate Easter. Along with Christmas, Easter is one of the two ‘biggies’ in the church, as it should be. My concern, however, is this: does familiarity breed contempt, even with the ‘biggies’? Have we come to the point where these celebrations have become “white noise,” something that is so familiar that we actually don’t hear it anymore?
My observation is that Easter has become ‘flattened out.’ In other words, it has been demoted to just one of the dozens of messages that defines Christianity. It has become simply equal to the call for social justice, caring for the poor, protecting innocent life, making margins for rest, improving marriages, raising healthy kids, giving an appropriate tithe, developing leadership, doing evangelism, being in a bible study, being friendly to neighbors, keeping a good job, etc., etc., etc…
Don’t get me wrong… all the things I just listed (and more) are important things for us to do. However, the fact that we do them is subsequent to something that is foundational, inexcusable, unavoidable and profoundly critical… the resurrection.
Resurrection is the defeating of death. Though we don’t like to think about death, it looms over us like a fog. Oscar Wilde, the English playwright and avowed atheist, called death the ultimate statistic. Everyone who lives will die. Benjamin Franklin listed death as one of the two absolutes in life along with taxes.
Death comes in all sorts of forms. Yes, obviously, there is physical death. We all face the fact that we will die, physically. But there are other deaths: the death of our dreams, the death of our hearts, the death of our souls, the death of our morality, the death of hope, the death of faith, the death of love, the death conscience. These are all living deaths we experience day in and day out.
For all of these deaths, Christ died for us… and amazingly, He was resurrected to restore life, to restore the death that we experience in every dimension of our experience on earth. Not only did Christ resurrect so that we can to be resurrected in eternity, but His resurrection is the power for every dimension of death in our life to be restored. It is not just eternity that needs resurrection, but it is our today that needs it just as much.
It is the resurrection that stands above every other part and piece of the Christian faith. It is the resurrection of Christ that informs and transforms who we are and what we do. Without the resurrection, everything else falls apart and finds no place to anchor our motivations for living a life of distinction. It is His resurrection that makes sense out of the rest of life.
So this Easter, let’s raise up the Resurrection above all else in our faith so that we can display the beautiful grace of God that transforms us from death to life, every day.
Yours,
Kevin