And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun. And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great. And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. (Mark 16:1-6) Right now our culture is preoccupied with death. I am a chaplain. I see it every day. People are dying. I’m the one who makes the phone call to say a prayer with grieving family members when their loved one has just died, and during this coronavirus there have been a lot of sad phone calls. During this time I have observed three things:
During this time of COVID-19, those of us who believe in the reality of the resurrection are needed. In a culture of darkness and death, someone needs to be an ambassador of light and life. That’s our calling as Christians. If we don’t let our light shine now, the dying patients and their grieving family members and the nurses and the aides and the doctors who need our encouragement and our prayers will run out of hope. We need to be the ambassadors of life and of light that our society needs for us to be. Resurrection Sunday is a celebration of the fact that, by rising from death, Jesus Christ conquered sin and death. It’s not a quaint tradition that has outlived it’s usefulness. It’s a message of cosmic proportions. It’s the most important message that could ever be preached, because it’s a proclamation of the cosmic reality that lies at the center of the universe. It’s the only hope that the world has. (This promise of resurrection is not only a Christian teaching but finds its roots in Judaism. See Daniel 12:2). If we could get beyond our traditions and see things from a higher perspective, we would understand that Resurrection Sunday is a declarative celebration that is the kind of celebration we would have if war and violence and injustice and poverty and discrimination and cancer and COVID-19 and all other diseases that inflict and affect humankind were eliminated on the same day, times infinity, because it marks the defeat of all the enemies of God and of humankind, forever. It marks the defeat of humankind’s two greatest enemies, sin and death, out of which all the other of humanity’s problems flow. It marks the breaking of the curse of sin and death. The head of the serpent has been crushed by the wounded heel of the woman’s seed. God had created an unspeakably beautiful and glorious universe, humankind had rebelled, sin and death had reigned for a season, but in the resurrection of Jesus, God has the last word. God will accomplish his purposes. Sin and death and their consequences have been abolished. God is at work restoring his children, his earth and his universe to their original wholeness and beauty, and all obstacles have been forever defeated by the One who died and arose from the dead. God can never be defeated, and his purposes are good. Herein lies our hope and our joy: He is risen! "Jesus said unto her, 'I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live'". (John 11:25) This is the hope that I can hold out to dying patients and grieving family members and struggling medical workers. For two thousand years, the message of the resurrection of Christ, and the corollary promise of our own future resurrection, have empowered Christians in their attempt to follow Jesus into a culture that is filled with darkness and death, bringing with them a message of light and life, because it is tied to a reality, not a tradition. Our message now is more relevant than ever before. We dare not extinguish our flame or compromise our credibility by politicizing our message, or by reducing our faith to just one more helpful narrative among many helpful narratives, or by trivializing the message into an “ask Jesus into your heart” formula that ignores the demands of Christian discipleship. There are many pretty stories and there are many political opinions, but we carry the message of light and life. We dare not lay down our torch now. We must pass it on to the next generation. As Christians have attested for over 2,000 years, it’s a message that is worth living for and worth dying for, and it’s the message that the world absolutely needs to understand and embrace, or at least seriously consider. We can’t convince anyone that the message is true, but by the way we live we can show the world that it is credible. It’s not that it’s true because it works. It works because it’s true.
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