Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ is coming again. This triple affirmation, made by the Church for the past 2,000 years, is no longer understood by our society at large. Our culture has become so secularized that we no longer know what this strange but beautiful phraseology means. Volumes can be and have been written to explore the depths of this affirmation, but let’s attempt a nutshell explanation. Let’s start with the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus. Jesus avoided band-aid solutions to deep wounds and quick-fix solutions to deep problems. He always went to the root of the issue. We see this in his Sermon on the Mount. Not content to merely condemn murder, Jesus addressed the anger behind the murder. Not content to merely condemn adultery, Jesus addressed the lust behind the adultery. Jesus insisted on unmasking and addressing the real issues behind the presenting issues. He went beyond the behavior to address the motivations of the heart. This helps us to understand what was accomplished on Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. When Christians say “Christ has died” we are affirming that, by his death, Jesus severed the root of all that is evil. He died to conquer sin and death and all of their demonic tentacles, which are the cause of all the evils within the human soul, which are the cause of all the evils within our world. When Christians say “Christ is risen” we are affirming that by his resurrection, Jesus demonstrated that the job has been completed. The mission has been accomplished. Sin and death and all the evils within our souls and all the evils within our world have been severed at the root. The fire that destroys all that is good and right and beautiful in our lives and on our planet has been extinguished at the source, as attested by the resurrection of Jesus from the grave. When Christians say “Christ is coming again” we are affirming that what has been accomplished by the death and resurrection of Christ will become the living experience of all the redeemed, and will be the future of the planet, when Jesus returns. When we say “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ is coming again” we are affirming that the problem of sin and death, the problem of evil and pain within our souls, and the problem of evil and pain within our world have been extinguished at the root and are on the cusp of being eradicated, completely and forever. That is why today Christians around the world make the joyful proclamation “He is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!”.
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On Friday we lament the death of Jesus, and on Sunday we celebrate his resurrection. What do we do on Saturday? What to we do when our goals have been thwarted, our expectations have left us disappointed, our hopes have been dashed, and we wake up and realize that there’s nothing left to do? Saturday is the day of silence; the day of pause; the day of waiting for we know not what. It’s the day of suspended animation. It’s the day when the world waits. It’s the day when the world holds its breath. It’s the day of the drumroll that we think we may hear rumbling faintly, many miles off in the distance— but no, that must be our imagination. Nothing good is going to happen here any time soon.
What can we do on Saturday? We can learn to be silent. We can learn to pour out our souls to God in utter honesty, as King David did in the Psalms and as Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane. We can learn to listen to what is really going on in our own hearts and minds and souls. We can be honest. We can face our deepest fears and doubts. After all, God already knows how we feel, and there’s no reason to hide ourselves from ourselves when there’s nothing left to lose. You can’t get much lower than rock bottom. What can we do on Saturday? We can listen for the still, soft voice of God, as did the Prophet Elijah. We can strain our ears to hear what God might be telling us. It’s easier to hear when the world around us is silent and there is nothing left to distract us. Dreams die on Friday, but if we are listening for the voice of God, new dreams and new hopes can begin to be stirred on Saturday. While there may be nothing very solid going on in our lives or in our souls, no “aha” moments, no amazing revelations from the heavens, no lightning or thunderbolts or visions in the skies, it’s the day to be looking for the smallest stirrings of the faintest hope of new beginnings. That may be all we get on Saturday, but that is enough. A little flicker of hope is all that we need. Even if we can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, at least we can begin to suspect that the light is out there somewhere. Maybe we’ll see it tomorrow. Didn’t the psalmist of old remind us “You have allowed me to suffer much hardship, but you will restore me to life again” and “Sorrow may last for a season, but joy comes in the morning”? Is it possible that we can have joy again— maybe not today, but eventually? If we listen with our souls, Saturday is the day when we may begin to hear faintly that something is stirring. A still, small voice is speaking. The smallest flicker of hope is being born. Dare we believe it? Dare we trust it? It’s not over. When we cannot see the hand of God, that’s when we learn to trust the heart of God— and the heart of God toward us is good. God is good, and his heart toward us is good. Yes, it is very good. Sometimes the voice of God speaks the loudest when everything else is silent. Sometimes we hear the voice of God most clearly when we are lamenting in silence, too sad and too stunned and too weak and too numb to be able speak or to fix or to repair or to distract or to blame or to argue or to defend or to protest or to criticize or to rationalize or to analyze or to strategize or to give an opinion or to even have an opinion. It’s the day when we stop trying to define ourselves by our positions and by our opinions. It’s the day when we stop trying to prove that “we” are right and “they” are wrong, and we realize that we don’t always need to take a side. It’s a day of learning that we have nothing to defend and nothing to hide and nothing to protect and nothing to lose, as long as we are in God’s hand— and we are in God’s hand. It’s a day of realizing that there may never be a “new normal”, but that’s OK, because God is in the abnormal as much as he is in the normal. It’s the day of being still, and knowing that God is God— and that is enough. It’s the day of learning that the day that feels most hopeless is not the end of hope. It’s the day of waiting. It’s the day before the day of new beginnings. It’s Saturday. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ is coming again. If it’s true, then all that we have and all that we are and all that we do must be shaken to the core by this reality. If it’s not true, then there is nothing worth living for, and nothing worth dying for. Either the universe has a purpose, or it does not. Either God reconciled sinful humanity to Himself through the death of Christ, or there is no reconciliation between Creator and creation, God is indeed very far away, and the world is without hope. Each one of us needs to wrestle with this “Christ has died” odyssey until we land on one side or the other. Indifference is not an option. Easter bunnies, eggs and chocolate are a convenient smokescreen. Religious tradition, whether in its more formal expressions or in its sentimental, trivialized, sappy, bumper sticker and slogan version, is a more deceptive smokescreen because it can begin to look and feel like reality, giving us cultural trappings without the substance that the trappings were designed to represent, so that those who embrace the trappings assume that they have also embraced the reality. Politicized religion is even more deceptive, for it releases itself as a tool into the hands of those whose agenda is not God’s agenda, corrupting itself into a grotesque caricature of what it was intended to be. Christianity wrapped in an American flag is no longer Christianity. Christ didn’t die so that we could make America great again. The reality is that we, who are sinners, were reconciled to a God, who is Holy, through the death of Christ, who died in our place, so that we who are the redeemed will bring eternal praise to God, for His eternal glory and for our eternal joy. If it’s true, then we must embrace it with the totality our being. If it’s false, then we need to run away as fast as we can and as far as we can and never look back. The one thing we can’t do is to remain indifferent.
All my life I have lived with a basic distrust of the crowd mentality. I am biased against large groups of people who are all thinking the same way. I tend to assume that if it’s a large group and they are all saying the same thing, there’s a pretty high likelihood that they are wrong. I probably got that from my dad. During my growing-up years my dad always used to tell his children “Don’t follow the crowd”. He wanted us to learn how to do the right thing, even when it was unpopular, even if it might bring scorn and ridicule upon us. It’s better to do the right thing and be ridiculed than to do the wrong thing and be popular and accepted. The crowds of popularity are not to be trusted. Go with your conscience, not with the crowd. My father was a wise man, and he knew what his children needed to hear. He lived what he taught, and I hope that my siblings and I have consistently followed in his footsteps.
When I read the Palm Sunday narrative in Scripture, it tends to reinforce my distrust of the crowd mentality. It was the crowd that celebrated the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem, and it was the crowd that demanded his crucifixion five short days later. How could the crowd be so fickle? Did they love Jesus, or did they hate him? What caused them to change their mind? I think it had to do with the quest for power. The citizens of Jerusalem wanted power because they had been pushed around for too long. They and their ancestors had suffered under oppressive regimes for centuries—the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Medes and the Persians, the Greeks, the Ottomans, and now the Romans—and their frustration had reached the boiling point; there was no turning back. An oppressed people can be kicked around for only so long before they start to fight back. Into that turbulent atmosphere rides a man on a donkey, and there are rumors spreading throughout the city that this young man might be the promised Messiah. They wanted power. They wanted control. They wanted a good fight, a battle, a war, an insurrection. They wanted to get rid of the bad guys and bring in the good guys. They wanted to regain control of their country, and they were hoping that this young peripatetic rabbi from Nazareth might be just the man for the job. And many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches which they had cut from the fields. And those who went in front and those who followed were shouting: “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord; Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David; Hosanna in the highest!” (Mark 11:8-10) While they are cheering and waving their palm branches, they might be asking themselves some questions that they dare not verbalize. “Why the donkey? Shouldn’t a warrior-king be striding into the city on a white horse? Could this have something to do with Zechariah 9:9? Where are the armies? That embarrassingly ordinary-looking bunch of unarmed “disciples” who insist on following him everywhere he goes doesn’t exactly look like the kind of militia that could march in and take over a city, let alone push back an empire. Something is not quite right about this turn of events. Something is not going as planned. This young rabbi seems to be departing from the conventional script. Why this talk about ‘love your enemies’? What kind of king is this? What kind of man is this? He talks of God as though he really knows Him. Could anyone know God that intimately? He speaks of God as being his Father in a way that seems almost scandalous. His way of dealing with people is not that of a warrior-king. He relates to people as though he really loves them. Can a warrior-king love his people? How can a conqueror allow his heart to be touched by the needs and concerns of his people, and even of his enemies, and treat them as his friends? He seems too gentle to be a warrior and too loving to be a king. His authority is won not by his harshness, but it’s somehow tied to his gentleness. He acts more like a servant than a king. He gathers his followers neither by threat nor by coercion but simply by being who he is. His people are his willing followers because at a place deep within themselves they know that there is something about him that’s worth following—or so they say. He teaches, but not as the other rabbis. He’s different. He’s a son of David, perhaps, but a different kind of son. Who is the man?”. The people are perplexed but they dare not give up their hope, so they continue to cheer, waving their palm branches as the entourage enters the city. Perhaps something good will come of this; perhaps not. If he is the long-awaited Deliverer, the strong man who will set right all that is wrong with the world, then they are in the right place at the right time, following the right man. Rome is about to fall, and they are getting a front-row seat. Some day they will tell their children and their grandchildren that they were there on that historic day when the king came into Jerusalem, turned the tables on Rome and restored the Kingdom of David. If he is not the Deliverer then they have nothing left to lose, and so they continue to cheer. It took five days for the crowd to realize that this man had no intention of starting an insurrection and getting rid of Roman rule. The “What’s in it for me?” mentality kicked in. This man was not what they were expecting, and as far as they were concerned, there was nothing in it for them. They must have decided that they had made a huge mistake. They no longer wanted this man to be their ruler. With this man in charge, the Romans would have even more power than they already had. That’s not what they had signed on for by cheering him into Jerusalem. He was now a threat to them, and they had to get rid of him, so the crowd did the unthinkable. Changing sides, they crossed over to the side of their enemies. They colluded with the despised Romans to get rid of the offender, and the offender was not a pompous uniform- and weapon- bearing Roman official but the robed and sandaled rabbi from Nazareth whom they had cheered and celebrated five days earlier. We need to understand this narrative from two perspectives: the eschatological perspective and the motivational perspective. From the eschatological perspective, what the crowd failed to understand is that Messiah comes twice. He comes the first time to die as a substitutionary atonement to pay for the sins of the world as the Lamb of God, as prophesied in Isaiah 53. He will come a second time to establish God’s reign upon the earth. The crowd didn’t get it. He wasn’t what they thought they needed. In their defining moment, the crowd got it wrong. From the motivational perspective, the crowd wanted power, but Jesus was all about abdication of power. Jesus surrendered his power. He gave all that he had and all that he was by dying for those who killed him. The way of Jesus is the way of self-sacrificial love. Jesus conquers evil not with guns and bombs and wars and violence in a quest for political and military power, but by loving his enemies enough to die for them. The crowd didn’t understand the concept of a suffering Messiah. The crowd got it wrong. They were motivated by a religious nationalism that confuses the pursuit of national strength with devotion to God, as though God could be used as the means to an end. They had no use for a Messiah who would continue to let Rome rule them seemingly unopposed while he advocated a quieter and slower method of conquering his enemies by loving them. There was nothing in it for them, or so they thought, so the citizens of Jerusalem threw away their only hope for an enduring peace and instead continued to dig into their misguided pursuit of religious nationalism. Today here in the US, we have our own brand of religious nationalism, Christian Nationalism, that closely mirrors the religious nationalism that surfaced on that first Palm Sunday in Jerusalem over 2,000 years ago. If Jesus were a Christian Nationalist, the story would have ended very differently. Jesus would have said “So you want a king who will make your nation great again? Fine, I’m here, let’s do it”. They would have put together an army, or at least a very strong coalition of religious and political leaders who were willing to work with each other toward the accomplishment of some mutual goals, with an army to back them up. They would have gotten rid of the Romans and set up their own government. They might have accomplished the task of making Israel great again, but by side-stepping Isaiah 53 they would have accomplished nothing of eternal value. Israel would have become a superpower, and the tables would have been turned against the Romans. Through a powerful alliance between what we would now call Church and State, with the religious leaders legitimizing the power plays of the political establishment and the political establishment providing special status and protection to the religious realm, Israel would be a force to be reckoned with. That’s not the way the story ended, because Jesus was opposed to what we today would call Christian Nationalism, and he refused to become a king under the terms set up by a coalition between the security-seeking religious establishment and the power-mongering political leadership. Jesus would have nothing to do with that kind of an agreement. He wouldn’t dance the dance of “I support you, you support me, and together we’ll make Israel great again”. His goal was not to build a powerful world-dominating empire. His goal was to die on a cross, and to invite his followers to be willing to do the same. He allowed himself to be killed by the very sort of political and religious coalition that the religious nationalists of his day would have wanted him to spearhead. Jesus didn’t say “pick up your flags and guns and follow me”; he said “pick up your cross and follow me”. The way of Jesus is not the way of flags and guns and political might. The way of Jesus is the way of compassion, self-surrender, and self-sacrificial love. Christian Nationalism leads to the building of an empire that is characterized by flags and guns and the pursuit of political and military power. The way of Jesus leads to a cross. On that original Palm Sunday there were two groups of people in Jerusalem. First, there were the cheering palm-waving crowds who were surrounding Jesus. These were the religious nationalists, who wanted to use Jesus as a tool to make Israel great again. Second, there were the disciples who were following Jesus, though it would lead him (and eventually many of them) to a cross. Today we need to declare ourselves. Either we are standing with the crowd, waving our palm branches in hope of building a Christian America, or we are surrendering our quest for power, and we are following Jesus all the way to the cross. We can’t have one foot in each camp. After showing us the way to the Father and teaching us how to live, Jesus died on the cross to provide atonement for our sins, he arose victorious over sin and death, he ascended into heaven, and one day soon he will return to set up his kingdom on the earth. It will be a peaceable kingdom that will be characterized by love, compassion, justice, and freedom from oppression. Let’s not make the same mistake that was made on that first Palm Sunday on the streets of Jerusalem. When Jesus returns, let’s not be found cheering for and working toward the wrong kind of kingdom. My dad was right. The crowd is often misguided. Don’t follow the crowd. Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. (Matthew 16:24-25) |
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