When
we celebrate Easter, we celebrate the reason for our hope. Despite the yearly reminder of Jesus
resurrection, we are often tempted to look for hope elsewhere. Easter forces us to ask the question anew,
with each passing year, where is our hope found?
Sometimes
upon asking the question, we realize that our hope is placed in things other
than God. We are tempted sometimes to
look for hope in our rulers; kings, prime ministers, presidents, rulers of
nations and shapers of our world. It
makes sense, at least according to how the world thinks. After all, rulers have power. They can conquer other lands, defend us from
our enemies, build the roads, schools, and hospitals we need, and create laws
to govern our society. If we have a
problem, surely they can find the solution.
This is sound logic until we realize that even good rulers are mere
human beings. To put it plainly, they
die before they finish their work.
Alexander the Great conquered much of the known world, only to die
before he could reign over his consolidated empire. Our own history provides its own
examples. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated
before he could bring the Civil War to an end, and guide us through
Reconstruction. FDR died before the war
in the Pacific was concluded, leaving Truman with the decision whether or not
to use “the bomb”. We can even find
examples in our Bible. Think about how
much the early church leaned on the apostles for a direct line to Jesus
teaching. The Gideons’ were not on the
street-corners passing out Bibles in those days, so the first Christians relied
on the apostles, those who walked with Jesus, to pass on his teaching. It must have been terrifying for them to
think of life without these leaders, as the church witnessed one after the
other suffer martyrdom. Even in the
church we tend to put too much stock in our leaders. We would be wise to consider the words of the
psalmist, “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his
breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish.” (Psalm
146:3-4)
Maybe
we have witnessed enough politics, both in Washington and in the church, that
we no longer put a lot of trust in our leaders.
That does not mean that we don’t have other idols in which we seek hope. How many of us place our wealth above all
else? If we simply see wealth as the
ultimate source of security, that is enough for it to supplant God as the
center of our universe. On one level it
makes sense. After all, money buys us
food, clothing, shelter, and helps provide the medicines many of us rely on for
good health. But Jesus warns us in that
most famous of sermons, the Sermon on the Mount, that when we trust in riches,
we trust on something that is temporal.
He reminds us, “Do not lay
up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven,
where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and
steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart
will be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21) And it is not just that money is temporary,
but that it also seeks to control us if we allow it, by making it too much of a
focus in our lives. Paul would write to
his young disciple Timothy, “But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the
world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing,
with these we will be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into
temptation, into a snare,
into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge
people into ruin and destruction. For the love of
money is a root of all
kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from
the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.” (I Timothy 6:6-10) If our hope is in our wealth, then sooner or
later we will be worshiping our wealth as the god of our life.
Maybe
we don’t trust in our leaders, or in our wealth. Maybe we trust in our own power, whether it is
ours individually or collectively. Power
does have a way of making us seem less vulnerable. In Jesus’ day, there was something referred
to as the Pax Romana, or “Roman Peace”. In essence, it was a way of referring to the
internal stability, and security from external threats that was a result of
Roman military might. In a post-Cold
War, pre-9/11 world, American citizens had much the same feeling of peace and
security. However, a group of determined
terrorists showed that no matter a nation’s military might, no country is
invincible. There are other issues with
seeking hope in our own strength. For
instance, what happens when power is in the hands of the unrighteous? Right does not make might, and often it is the
righteous who lack the power. Even if
power is in the hands of the righteous, if such a group exists is highly
debatable, power is never permanent.
There was a time when no one envisioned a world without the Roman Empire. There was a time when the “sun never set on
the British Empire.” History tells us
that if the Lord tarries, there will almost certainly come a day when America
is no longer the world’s super-power. If
we live to see that day, will all hope be lost?
David
writes that “Some trust in chariots
and some in horses, but we trust
in the name of the Lord our God.” (Psalm 20:7) Chariots and horses were the tanks and
fighter jets of ancient times. It would
be easy to try to amass as many as possible as a source of strength. And yet, David reminds us that the Lord our
God is the only one capable to giving us hope.
He is the only one in whom we should trust.
So
what does all of this have to do with Easter?
We have looked at a lot of things that claim to provide hope. Leaders, wealth, and even power are seductive
options when considering where to put our trust. The Resurrection however, reminds us that real
hope is in seeing the unseen. Our hope
is found in what the women don’t see in the tomb. The word find is used twice in the story;
once it refers to a stone that has been rolled away, and once it refers to what
they did not find- a body. It was simply
referred to as the body of Jesus when Joseph of Arimathea asked for it from
Pilate, but when it cannot be found in the tomb, it is suddenly referred to as
the body of the Lord Jesus. Jesus has conquered death, and his lordship
is now beyond dispute. It’s a scene that
transforms the women into angels. The
root word for “told” is the same as that of angel, which is from the Greek word
for messenger. While they don’t have
wings, harps, or halos, these women return to the disciples to speak a word
worthy of announcement by an angelic chorus.
It’s a word that sends Peter running to the tomb to see, or not see, for
himself the truth of what he has heard. Our
encounter with the risen Lord must be a personal one. Our faith cannot be sustained on the
testimony of others, so like Peter we run to the tomb each year, to discover
all over again that it is indeed empty.
It is true that unlike Peter, we cannot see the scene for ourselves, but
then again, that has never been the definition of faith. We have read our Bible from an early age, and
whether it has sunk in or not, we have been told that faith is different from
knowledge. The author of Hebrews would
say that “faith is the assurance of things hoped
for, the conviction of things not seen.”
(Hebrews 11:1) In some sense this makes
it difficult for us, even more difficult than it was for the apostles. Jesus acknowledges as much when he tells “doubting”
Thomas, “You believed because you have
seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
(John 20:29)
The
Resurrection invites us to enter the story of God’s goodness and work in our
world. It invites us to find our place
in God’s story. It challenges us to read
the Bible, the story of Jesus Christ not as a history book, but as our
story. John Steinbeck provides some
insight into how that might be done in a passage from his book The Winter of Our Discontent. He writes:
“That
Saturday morning seemed to have a pattern.
I wonder whether all days have.
It was a withdrawn day. The
little gray whisper of my Aunt Deborah came to me, ‘Of course, Jesus is dead. This is the only day in the world's days that
he is dead. And all men and women are
dead too…But tomorrow. Just wait until
tomorrow. Then you’ll see something.’
I
don’t remember her very clearly, the way you don’t remember someone too close
to look at. But she read the Scripture
to me like a daily newspaper and I suppose that’s the way she thought of it, as
something going on happening eternally but always exciting and new. Every Easter, Jesus really rose from the
dead, an explosion, expected but nonetheless new. It wasn’t two thousand years ago to her; it
was now. And she planted something of
that in me.”
Easter
reminds us that God’s work is something happening eternally, always exciting
and new.
The
challenge of Easter is to see Jesus’ resurrection not just as an event that
happened 2,000 years ago, but as something that is happening now, and to take
that way of viewing the world, and to plant it in as many other people as we
can through the way we speak, through the way we act, and through the way we
love.
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