Then, He Lived
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One of the powerful things about this moment in the church year is you get to take in the big story of the Bible. You get the Peter Jackson treatment beginning in the ancient almost mythic events of the Old Testament and we get to see them in a fresh light that points us to the events of holy week, this event in holy week, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And now that we are here, we celebrate. Jesus, humanity’s hope, has not been defeated after all. We celebrate with the apostles who got the friend, their master, their teacher back. We watch their post-traumatic stress of watching him betrayed, beaten, ridiculed, tortured, reverse and drop off. The bleakness of that winter melts away to reveal a new spring of abundance, hope, and life. Humanity’s story has reached a new point, a new identity. After the genealogies of Genesis 5 and elsewhere that begin with a sentence about a person’s life and end with the words, “and he died” over and over and over again. We get a new kind of moment. Instead of “and he died,” being the final word, for the first time, we get a “then, he lived.” Nothing like that has ever happened up to that point. But the fact that it did happen to a human, means it could happen again. And the person who told us not only that it can, but that it will, had all of his authority to make such a declaration unquestioningly established when he was the first one to be resurrected from the dead. So we rejoice because after all of the millions and billions of “and he dieds” we finally get a “then he lived.” There is hope. Death, the oppressor, is defeatable. And in fact, Jesus turned death into a tool that can transform our lives and our destiny.
We see this in Paul’s treatment in Romans 6:3-11 . Jesus’ death conquered death, but he wasn’t only trying to best an adversary. His death wasn’t merely a way to conquer death through resurrection. Jesus took us with him when he died. When he died, we died with him. Paul tells that we died to our sin, our guilt, our shame. We died to the great burden of those things we can carry around with us. Jesus’ sacrificial death took those things away from us. And because dead people can’t sin, we died to sin when we died with Christ. To follow Christ is to die with Christ. And that means we are free from sin and our relationship to sin is changed forever. It’s no longer the air we breathe. A dead man can’t breathe. We see it for the toxic thing it is, like an addict clean for the first time. But we never would have known that we had died to sin, if we hadn’t reached this Easter moment. Easter proves that Christ’s death did something. Easter shows Christ’s words “It is finished,” to be accurate and not a hallucination brought on by extreme pain or a sad delusion or the most despicable lie ever uttered. The resurrection validates that peace really has been made with God. That sin really is forgiven. Without Easter, the cross is foolishness, misleading and just another human tragedy. But because of the resurrection, we can believe that the Cross accomplished God’s plan of salvation. The resurrection proves that we can trust Jesus’ words. We can cherish them. And in so doing we find that we went with him into death. We became those whose sins have dropped off. And then when he rose, we rose. He got a new life. And we got a new life. Our sins which infected us like cancer are eliminated. Not only did our relationship to sin change, our relationship with God is now changed. Our resentment toward him died with Christ and when we opened our spiritual eyes for the first time, we were able to see him as the source of all good, loving us, protecting us, defending us, nourishing us. And so we died with Christ to our sin, and we rose with Christ to our new life with God, one that will go on into eternity.
Becasue, you see, resurrection is more than powerful imagery for a positive life change, though it is that as well. Paul isn’t trying to game us into behaving better, though the truth can and should have that effect. The Good News of the resurrection of Jesus Christ affects more than our manner of living or even a changed heart. It affects our destiny forever. Paul tells us “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” Jesus’ resurrection didn’t merely establish a new relationship with God. It was a transition from being dead to being alive. Literally. It’s not from spiritually dead to spiritually alive. Not symbolically dead to symbolically alive. Not dead in the power of his influence to alive in the power of his influence. Because of Jesus’ resurrection, our destiny is eternal life, beginning the moment we believed and lasting forever, and somewhere along the line, we pass through physical death to physical resurrection. Death will be undone for those who follow Jesus Christ in his death, just as death was undone for Jesus himself.
You might be tempted to say, no that’s not possible for me. Jesus was the Son of God. I’m just me. I can’t be raised from the dead. No one else has.... But that’s the whole point: the reason we celebrate Easter is because someone has been raised. And his death was different. His was the death of the Son of God on your behalf. If he can be raised from the dead, he can pave the way for you to be raised from the dead. And he has. Because Jesus has been raised from the dead, you will be raised from the dead, if you’ll acknowledge him for who he is and follow him.
So it’s an important moment, this moment. We stand in the victory of humanity against death. We see the one who loved us unto death alive, well, and victorious. We see that his death did something, not just against evil, but for us. We see that we are united with Christ in his death. Our sin and shame has dropped off of us and our relationship to sin is different. Everything that takes place on the Cross stands validated in Jesus’ resurrection. There we also find ourselves united with Christ in his resurrection. We take on new and everlasting life with a changed and rightly ordered relationship with God.
And these are just a few pieces of how the resurrection of Jesus Christ changed and is changing humanity, ourselves, and our world. As we begin to walk in the new season of Easter, we’ll see even more. But for now, we celebrate the moment of Christ’s resurrection. We turn our fasting to feasting, our sorrow to joy, our mourning to dancing, because for the first time, the story doesn’t end with “and he died.” Those words are followed with “then, he lived.” And we live with him, alive to God in a new way forever. Alleluia, He is risen!