So, what was the whole point of Easter?

I said in my post about Easter Sunday that Easter was the most important part of the Christian faith. I've just realised that I didn't really explain why.

I quoted previously from Romans: 'for the wages of sin is death'. The second part of that verse goes: 'but the gift of God is eternal life'. It was through the sacrifice of Jesus that our sin could be atoned for. It was through the resurrection that the whole deal was brought into place. This was like the new deal of faith, and the basis of it is grace, not works. No matter what I do, it makes no difference to the fact that I am loved by God and that I've been set free and redeemed and I'm going to heaven.

Paul preaches grace throughout his books. The gist of it goes like this. When Christ died, he paid the price for sin. When we accept that payment, we accept Christ into our hearts and lives. This means that when God looks at us, he doesn't see the bad stuff we do, he just sees Jesus. And since Jesus lived the perfect live, we're perfect too.

That's not to say I don't do bad stuff. I do. I get into arguments with my brother, I can be moody and grumpy, I'm not as nice to people as I should be. But it's not counted against me. Same for anybody who's accepted Jesus as saviour. 'For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him'. Jesus isn't going to condemn you. God isn't standing there with a big stick, glaring at you, saying 'oy, you messed up, you're a dirty rotten sinner and therefore deserve eternal punishment'. He's looking at you thinking 'I love you, but I can't accept you because you're messed up'. It's like this. If you're wearing a big white robe, absolutely perfect, sparkling clean, and someone you love comes up to you, covered in muck, you can't go and hug them, because you'll get mucky too. God can't hug us because of sin. So he had a great idea. He said 'right, I'll deal with the sin'. So now, when you accept Jesus, Jesus' blood cleanses you, makes you non-mucky, and then God can come and hug you. And no matter what you do, no matter how bad you think it is, it's not something that Jesus can't get rid of.

A lot of churches don't preach grace. They preach rules along with grace. You're saved if you believe in Jesus and... No. That's not true. It says in the Bible 'If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved'. That's pretty unambiguous. There's no buts, there's no added clauses, there's no small print involved. The trouble with grace is that it can be abused. People say 'oh, well if nothing I do matters, then I'll just go off and sleep with whoever I like, kill people, and generally live my life as though I'm the only person in the world who really matters'. No. That's not what Paul meant. The whole point of Christian freedom is that you're free from sin, free from death, and therefore what do you want with it any more? Jesus didn't say that you wouldn't have consequences on earth if you do wrong, only that the eternal consequence--death and separation from God, is no longer an issue if you accept his gift. If you go out and kill someone for example, that will have consequences. It doesn't make God love you any less, but it doesn't take away the fact that the police will hunt you down, that you'll have to live with the fact that you took a life.

I'm straying slightly off the point here, I'll come back to the idea of grace later.

When Jesus died, basically what happened was God decided to swap things over. When he looked at Jesus on the cross, he saw our sin and rottenness and disease. That's why Jesus said 'my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'. Because God cannot look upon sin. But when God looks at us now, he sees Jesus' perfection and glory. That's the whole point of Easter. Easter gives us hope for eternity.

And remember: God made you special, and he loves you very much.

Easter Sunday

It seems to me I kinda abandoned Easter with Jesus dead. Which was maybe not such a great idea. After all, Norma (I guess you'd call her our youth pastor) was most upset at the thought she might have to leave the teaching of Christianity with Jesus on the cross.

A brief summary of what happened then. Jesus was hastily buried on the Friday, as no work could be done on the Sabbath which traditionally started on Friday evening. This meant that his body was left in the tomb over the Saturday. A couple of chief priests went to the governer and said 'look, this guy said he was gonna rise from the dead, so put a gaurd on the body will you so that none of his disciples can steal his body and claim he's risen'. So the Romans did just that, and rolled a big heavy stone in front of the tomb. On Sunday morning, some of the women who were with Jesus (Mary Magdaline and a couple of others, including one called Joanna) went up to the tomb to deal with Jesus' body properly. They were concerned as to how they'd get the stone away. When they got there, they found the stone was rolled away, the guards were not there. This is where accounts in the different gospels differ slightly. They were met by an angel, and told that they shouldn't look for Jesus amongst the dead because he was living. Then according to (I think) Luke, they saw Jesus but mistook him for a gardner at first. They went back, told the other disciples that Jesus was risen, but they didn't quite believe them. Then Jesus appeared to them and they kinda had to believe cos he was right there in front of them.

The resurrection of Jesus is the most important part of Christianity. This part is where faith comes in. It's one thing to accept the virtually indisputable fact of Jesus' death on Good Friday, it's another to believe he's the son of God and rose from the grave on Easter Sunday. This occurrence is so central to the Christian faith that Paul wrote 'If Christ had not been raised from the dead, our preaching is useless and so is your faith'.

Historically, there is some evidence in favour of the idea that Christ did rise from the dead. The gospels were written down within thirty or so years of Jesus' time on earth. That's not really long enough for a myth to build up, and there were plenty around who could say 'nah, that never happened like that'. In Acts, Luke records that Jesus appeared to some 400 or so people, many of whom were still around to attest to the validity of that claim. To do so when nobody could in fact do that would invite trouble. However, ultimately it comes down to a question of faith, of whether you do or do not believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

That, then, is the events of Easter.

As an interesting foot note, when Jesus appeared first to the disciples, one of their number, Thomas, was missing. When they told him that Jesus had been present, he dismissed their claims as ridiculous, saying that unless he could touch Jesus, put his fingers in the nail holes and his hands in Jesus' side, he wouldn't believe it. Jesus showed up amongst the disciples again, and this time Thomas was amongst them. He invited Thomas to do what he had said would convince him. Then he said that those who believed but had not seen were very blessed indeed.

Easter Saturday

Sandwiched right in between the two major events of the Christian faith--Good Friday and Easter--is that unusaul little day called Easter Saturday. The only day when Jesus wasn't around. After all, he was present in creation (see the bit in John re: the word becoming flesh), and he's present again now, and he was present when he walked the earth. But on Easter Saturday, Jesus was elsewhere. What happened on the in between day?

There's not really a whole lot in the Bible to tell us what went on. I guess the disciples were pretty miserable. It was the Sabbath, so nobody did any work or any of that. They moped about, wondered what had happened to make it all go wrong, why Jesus, who they thought was supposed to save the world, had died in such a horrific manner.

However. What you have to surmise is that as when Jesus came back, he'd conquered sin and death, that's what must've happened. The conquering sin came on Good Friday. The conquering death came when he died. Death couldn't keep hold of him. If you've ever read or seen The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it's like how Aslan explains that the willing sacrifice is able to rise again, having taken the place of the other, and the Stone Table is split apart and can never be used again. Jesus died, yes. On Saturday, he was dealing with the power of death. It looked like everything had all gone wrong, looked like the disciples had got the wrong guy, looked like all their hopes had been dashed.

And I guess that's Easter Saturday. A pretty miserable day, all told. Probably why it's not really celebrated. But essential. After all, if Jesus hadn't been dead, he couldn't have said 'been there, done that, sorted it all out for you', could he?

Good Friday

Um, yes, it's a bit late. I know that. But I figure I can't let Easter/Good Friday get too far behind before I make a comment on it up here.

Good Friday. I always wondered when I was younger about why it was called good. What's so good about the saviour of the world, the son of God, getting flogged and beaten and mocked until he was half dead and then hung up on a cross to die of suffocation? Jesus was crucified on Good Friday. That's a historical fact. It's confirmed by sources outside the Bible, Pliny was one of them I seem to recall. But before he was crucified, he was beaten with a whip studded with bits of glass. The beating alone could kill you. The soldiers spat at him and mocked him, dressing him up and beating him around even more. Then he was forced to carry his own cross, up to a hill. People gathered round to watch, mocked him as he walked. He was nailed to it, and then hung up and left to die. It could take several days to die on a cross. It wasn't the bleeding or any of that which killed you, it was suffocation. In order to breath, you had to press against the nails in your feet, lift up your head, breathe in. Eventually the victim became too exhausted to lift their head, and they suffocated and died. If the guards wanted to speed up the process (which they did on this particular Friday, as they didn't want the bodies hanging their on the Sabbath which was doubly special because of the Passover), they broke the legs of the men they were crucifying. When they came to Jesus, he was already dead, so they stuck a spear in his side to make good and sure. Blood and water flowed out. Although that sort of knowledge probably wasn't hugely commonplace at the time, when you die, the blood and water starts to separate. So that showed he'd been dead for a while. Apparently some people think Jesus was still alive then. I highly doubt it, given all that. And if he had survived, he wouldn't have been in a fit state to push a stone away from his tomb and wander out into the village and say 'look everyone, I'm alive!'.

Anyway, given all that, I wondered for ages what was so good about Good Friday. I thought of it to myself as a bad Friday.

But the thing is this. Without the suffering then, we wouldn't have been freed from the curse of death. Jesus had to die like that. Not only did it fulfil the prophecies about him, that he would be hung from a tree, that he would suffer, that his stripes (the marks left by the whip) would heal us, but it also satisfied the needs of God's justice to have a punishment for all the wrong that has been done. You see, God loves us, but the sin separates us from him. He'd like to turn a blind eye, but God is just and you can't be just and turn a blind eye to people doing wrong. So 'God demonstrates his own love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us'(almost certain that's from Romans). Therefore, while Good Friday may not have been all that pleasant for Jesus, it was certainly good news for us. It meant that the perfect sacrifice had been found and offered up, and therefore we are free from the punishment that we deserved, 'for the wages of sin is death'(also from Romans, definitely this time).

It's like this. In the books of the law, a sacrifice had to be offered to atone for the people's sins. This was usually a lamb or a goat or a cow, something of that nature. The scapegoat used by the Isrealites is a particularly good example. What happened was, the High Priest would lay his hands on the head of this goat, and then all the sins of the Isrealite people would be laid on the goat, so that the goat could be taken away and the people of Isreal were free from their sins. The goat had taken the punishment for them. Now, a goat wasn't a great sacrifice--none of the animals were. So when the people sinned again, they had to sacrifice again.

Jesus put an end to the repeated sacrifices. He lived a perfect life, was a lamb without blemish (you couldn't offer an imperfect lamb that you didn't really want--in order for the sacrifice to mean anything, it had to be perfect), and therefore became the ultimate sacrifice for sin. When he was brutally killed by the Romans, he took on the sins of the world, and atoned for them, just like the scapegoat. But he did it permanently. His sacrifice lasts forever and ever, and it atoned for all sins that have ever been committed and will ever be committed.

I've heard it explained like this. As Jesus was being nailed from the cross, God, who is outside time, gathered up every sin that would ever be committed while the earth exists, and he hammered it to the cross along with Jesus.

That's why Good Friday is good. It was a good day for us, because now we can reap the benefits of that.