No More Empty Easter Eggs

My earliest memories of Easter include three constants. First was the searching for plastic Easter eggs my parents had “hidden” around the back yard for my brothers and me to find. The second was the wearing of our best clothes to church followed by our annual family photos near the bright red Spring blooms on the rose bush in the back yard. The third was a statement by the man making the opening announcements at church that this was not a special Sunday but just like every other other Sunday. He would say we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus each Sunday when we gather for worship. Oddly, I don’t remember the church actually talking about the meaning of the resurrection on any Sunday. (Maybe they did and I was just too young to grasp it.) It was as if we were given plastic theological Easter eggs with nothing in them.So today, Easter morning, I begin my attempt at blogging because no other theme has become as important to me as the significance and meaning of the resurrection of Jesus.

I grew up in a religious tradition that talked about the historical fact of the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead, but we fell short of attaching much theological meaning to that event. For us, the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead was important simply because it served as the ultimate miracle by which Jesus proved his deity. It was kind of a “See, I told you so!” moment by which we could know with certainty that Jesus was the Son of God. His now-beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt status as God’s Son and our Savior was important because it let us know that his death on the cross was effective in forgiving me of my sins thereby opening a means to heaven. And that was the bottom-line for our faith, getting to heaven when we die.

I started to sense something was amiss in my understanding of the resurrection through a number of events in my life, two which stand out. The first was during a short-term mission trip to Irkutsk, Russia in 1994. I was waiting to deliver one of the evening lectures which our group presented every night during the campaign. My translator was a delightful and brilliant Russian Christian lady named Irene. While waiting together backstage she said, “May I ask you a question?” Arrogantly I thought to myself, “I wonder what simply question this new Christian woman is going to ask me, a smart, well-educated American Christian preacher?” Then she asked, “Why does the Bible say that when we die we go to heaven, but then at the resurrection we return to get our new bodies only to return back to heaven? That doesn’t make any sense.” My arrogance was shattered. Not only did I not have a good answer; I had never even considered the question. All I could say was, “Ah, I don’t know. That doesn’t make any sense.”

The second event occurred a few years ago when my wife and I attended the Saturday evening Easter service at a Dallas area megachurch. It was a well-orchestrated, attention-grabbing production that focused on the death of Jesus on the cross. In spite of the great presentation, I left disappointed that it was advertised as an Easter service but said almost nothing about the resurrection. In reality it was a Good Friday service emphasizing the death of Jesus. Figuratively speaking, we were handed theological Easter eggs but inside was a cross, not an empty tomb.

When I asked my wife what she thought of the service she said, “I don’t mean this to sound bad, but all I ever hear is ‘Jesus died for your sins.’ Isn’t there more to it than that?” At the time I was a graduate student at Abilene Christian University and was learning how the church of the last several centuries had narrowed the gospel to the death of Jesus on the cross. Everything else–his life, his teachings, and even his resurrection–became secondary to that one event. I had just witnessed another example of what I was learning in school.

So what is the message of Easter? What is the big deal about Jesus rising from the dead other than to back up his claim to be the Son of God? What should be in our theological Easter eggs? One of the implications of Easter that has become of interest to me is what Paul writes in his letter to the Christians in Corinth. “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:20-26, NIV). Jesus’ resurrection was the “firstfruits” of many resurrections to come later, including yours and mine. In other words, what happened to Jesus on that first Easter morning is also going to happen to us one day in the future. And not just for us but for God’s entire creation according to a number of scriptures, including Romans 8:18-25. (I’ll save that for a future article.)

That’s not how we typically envision the future playing out. For most of us we think that when we die we go to heaven (or hell) and that’s the end of our journey so the big party can begin. The future resurrection of the dead has pretty much been erased from our Christian belief system. If it does remain, it is blended in as an ill-fitted side note, as demonstrated by Irene’s backstage question in Russia. Or it is woven in as something that happens immediately upon our death, as if our death and our resurrection from the dead are one event. In fact I hear many Christians talk of their departed loved ones as having already obtained their new bodies in heaven; there is no need for a future resurrection. But that’s not what the Bible actually says. Jesus has defeated death for himself but for us Jesus has not yet defeated death. Or as Paul puts it, “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

N.T. Wright has become one of my favorite Christian scholars and authors because he has provided answers to questions that have plagued me for decades. One of his lines that I love is “it’s not about life after death but about life after life after death.” Elsewhere he has said (paraphrasing from my memory), “Defeating death is not going to heaven when we die. That is death.” Dying and going to heaven is not the final stage of my journey. That is actually a pause in the action before the really big event occurs when Jesus returns and raises me from the dead. Even in John’s vivid imagery in Revelation 6 he sees those in heaven with Jesus still longing for something else to take place.

My theological Easter egg is now jammed full with multiple meanings for the resurrection of Jesus. One of those is Jesus’ resurrection serving as an example of what will happen to me one day. I will also rise from the dead. I will not merely reanimate my dead body in its current broken-down, overweight, receding-hairline condition. Neither will it be a return to my glory days, before age and too many trips to Taco Bueno took their toll. I, like Jesus, will have an actual physical, flesh-and-bone body that is not limited by the laws of physics. I don’t understand how that can be. And I don’t understand all the implications. But Easter has taught me that something amazing is going to happen one day in the future just as it did 2,000 years ago in the past.

This Easter, I am thankful for Jesus conquering not just sin, but also death. And I look forward to the day when he will return to earth and call me from the grave as well. In the meantime I look forward to examining more of the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection and the various levels and expressions of hope it provides.