THE EASTER PROMISE

I would be remiss for not mentioning Easter on a blog dealing in part with faith.  When people today think of Easter, they might think of rabbits, baby chicks, new clothing, jelly beans, colored eggs and a family meal together.  But this is not the true meaning of Easter. The true meaning of Easter deals with a promise of hope, of life after death, and of God’s intention to keep His promise. The Easter promise.

When you look at the Holy days in the Christian calendar (Epiphany, Palm Sunday, Christmas and so on), we discover that as important as each of these days are in their own right, Easter, even more than Christmas, is the most important of all. The Apostle Paul says as much in his first letter to the church in Corinth, Chapter 15:13,14:

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”

The date we celebrate to commemorate Christ’s birth would be just another day if Jesus were just a country preacher, someone who taught moral lessons, did good deeds and was then assassinated or died in his sleep.  But the Christian message (the kerygma) is that after being put to death, Jesus rose again.  He was seen by him mother, his disciples and many others as well before He ascended forty days later.  He was the only figure in history to have this distinction.

I want to organize this brief message roughly following the logic presented by St Anselm (1033 A.D.–1109 A.D.), Archbishop of Canterbury in his work “Why God Became Man.”

• God created humans because He wanted to freely love others who would also freely return His love.
• When Adam and Eve transgressed, they created a barrier or gulf between God and man.  Man could not truly return God’s love even if he or she tried.  Yet, God still loved us.  However, like the poles of a magnet that repel one another, we could not approach God and His nature, as the essence of His being made it impossible for Him to approach us in our fallen state. As a result, Adam and Eve had to be banished from their habitat in the Garden of Eden.
• The presence of sin in a previously perfect world upset the harmony in nature, space and time. There were universal consequences, including disease, death and destruction.  The spiritual consequences of sin are laid down in a set of spiritual laws even as our physical word has laws (gravity, inertia, centrifugal force, etc.)
• There was only one way to repair this rupture.  A person who was truly God would have to choose to also become truly man as well.  This was Jesus, the word or logos of God who with the Holy Spirit, was God Himself.
• Jesus’ ministry was to share God’s love, mercy and justice with the people he met.  His destiny, if he accepted it, was to die a painful death on behalf of the living people in the world, those who had died previously and those yet unborn.  After His death, He would spend a brief time in Hell as Scripture asserts and the creeds affirm.  By going to Hell on our behalf, he saved us from that terror which was never made or intended for humans in the first place.
• Jesus rose again by the power of God the Father as God, Himself, promised.  Jesus had faith in that promise, and that same promise to be released from the grave applies to us as well if we trust God ourselves.  As Paul once again assures us (Ephesians 1:18ff):

“I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.”

•  Paul sums it up in Romans 10:9: 

If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

That power which Paul refers to was available to Jesus on the very first Easter, and it is available to you almost two thousand years later as well.  And this is the Easter message.

I realize that for someone starting off and looking for something in which to believe, this takes a good deal of faith.  People who travel the world often find a land where they intuitively feel at home.  It might be a special, little known, tropical beach, or the natural splendor of New Zealand.  It might be the ruins of Angkor Wat or the hospitality of the Japanese.  Maybe it is Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca? It might just be an awesome flyfishing hole near Missoula, Montana.  I chose Christianity as my “home” not because I was brought up in the faith, but because I shopped around when I was younger and Christianity seemed like the best hope.  Other religions have bizarre gods (thousands of them) while still other belief systems require that you earn your own salvation.  Even more deny any afterlife at all.  But do you want to risk it all on hoping space aliens will rescue us or trust some other cult like Heaven’s Gate or Jonestown that claimed to have a secret no one else knew about?  Mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623 AD -1662 AD) faced this same dilemma and he chose to believe in Jesus.  It wasn’t an emotional choice for him, it was a logical one.

It is my hope that the true meaning of Easter resonates in your heart this Easter.  May God keep you and bless you.