Pastor's Message for April 2006
Resurrection: God Does Something New
(This reflection on the meaning of Easter is taken from "The Whole People of God" curriculum from several years ago; I commend it to you as a perceptive understanding of the central event of our faith, that we celebrate this year on April 16th.
- Pastor Floyd Churn)
God raised Jesus from death to new life - this is the central belief that lies at the heart of Christianity. This is the turning point around which everything revolves. It is because of the Resurrection that the disciples found the courage to come back together after they had been scattered at the crucifixion. It is because of the Resurrection that the Good News spread throughout all the world, as people passed on the story to each other, finding hope and meaning in it. It is because of the Resurrection that we know God is among us today.
The authors of the Gospels did not need to defend the authenticity of the Resurrection. For them the evidence was overwhelming, written in the commitment and the passion of the Christians in their communities. Rather, the writers sought, through story, to help their hearers understand more clearly what God was doing through Jesus' resurrection, and why this event should be such a monu-mental act of good news.
Stories of the empty tomb tell us something crucial about resurrection. Jesus did not simply "live on in people's memories." The Resurrection was more profound than that. Similarly, several of the appearance stories show Jesus breaking bread and eating with the disciples. The resurrected Jesus may pass through locked doors, but he is no insubstantial ghost. Neither is he simply resuscitated, however. Unlike Lazarus who is brought back from the dead only to grow old and die again, Jesus is raised to a new life where death is no more. In this new life, he is not always recog-nized by his disciples. He has changed and it takes time for them to know him. Yet when they recognize him all doubts are banished.
Resurrected life is different from this life, and yet the two are connected. Paul compared the body before resurrection to a seed planted in the earth (1 Corinthians 15:39). He explained that the body after resurrection differs as radically from the one before it as does a seed from a plant. All of these stories are attempts to capture in narrative the deep truths of God's act that simply cannot be described in ordinary straightforward prose.
At the heart of these stories and images, however, is the conviction that God did something radically and wonderfully new after Jesus was crucified. God's response to the evil and suffering of the cross is not to come charging in to the rescue, but to bring new life even out of death. God did not prevent Good Friday, but God trans-formed it to Easter. We who live in a world full of Good Fridays can find enormous hope in this. We know the pain and suffering that so many live in. Sometimes it can seem unremitting. A God who can transform even death itself is powerful indeed!
Just as God wouldn't allow death to be the end for Jesus, so God will not allow it to be the end for us either. We know that nothing, not even death itself, has the power to put us beyond the reach of God's love (Romans 8:38-39).
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