Easter? What’s all the fuss about?

At the heart of Easter is a commemoration and celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To make any real sense of this we need to put the resurrection into context.

Three days before, Jesus had been crucified. This was the preferred method of execution by the Roman Empire and so was nothing unusual – many thousands of other people had been and would be executed in the same manner. So what made this any different?

For a start, this was a political stitch up. The Jewish authorities were alarmed by the popularity of Jesus and his claim to be the long expected Messiah, the ‘Saviour of Israel’ because he didn’t fit the mould of what they were expecting, a warrior king who would defeat the Romans. They made trumped up charges, incited the population of Jerusalem to a demonstration of social unrest and then persuaded the Roman Governor that this would turn into a riot if he didn’t execute the ‘troublemaker’ Jesus. The Governor, named Pontus Pilate gave in to their demands. So one may conclude that this was just another sorry story of the ‘little guy’ being stomped on by the great and the powerful?

That most certainly wasn’t the case. However it may have seemed, Jesus was in control of the situation.

When a mob had gone out at ded of night to arrest him Jesus gave no resistance. In fact he pointed out that he could call on an army of angels to defend him if he so wished.

When a mob had gone out at dead of night to arrest him Jesus gave no resistance. In fact he pointed out that he could call on an army of angels to defend him if he so wished.

In actual fact it was the destiny of Jesus to be crucified!

Confused? You’re in good company – so were his disciples, who ran off in confusion and fear.

To understand this we have to delve way back into the Old Testament, to the time of Moses. Via Moses, God had given a set of laws by which his ‘chosen people’ (the Jews) were instructed to live. Embedded in these laws was the requirement to make sacrifices for forgiveness. The people could only approach God through sacrifice. This entailed the slaughter of an animal, usually a lamb. This might seem a bit distasteful to us today but the slaughter of animals for food and clothing was part of the normal way of life.  (It is today but the difference is that it happens out of sight). This ritual was also a sacrifice in the sense of loss. The person making the sacrifice was sacrificing a valuable asset.  The problem was that these sacrifices by their very nature were imperfect and so had to be repeated over and over again.  

Enter Jesus. Over millennia, humanity had strayed so far away from the path that God had mapped out for them that they had created such a gulf that He was simply out of reach. To close this gap there needed to be a one-off perfect sacrifice. That sacrifice was Jesus. Jesus lived a perfect life –i.e. he never strayed from what God the Father had called him to do; that is he never sinned. His sacrifice on the cross was a one-off, sufficient to atone for all past, present and future sins of the entire human race.

At the moment of his death the gulf that humanity had created between themselves and God was bridged.   That was the game changer of game changers!!

Quite rightly Christian celebrate Easter, the day when the crucified Jesus rose from the dead. This was not a resuscitation – no one ever in the long and bloody history a crucifixions had ever survived. The dead Jesus was resurrected, he was recognisable as the Jesus that his disciples had known but he was also changed. He was no longer constrained by human limitations, he could appear in multiple places at once, doors couldn’t keep him out, he could appear and disappear at will.  

Isn’t his all a myth though? A story with perhaps a grain of truth but enhanced and exaggerated with the passage of time?

Most certainly not – Look at the evidence; around 500+ people were witnesses to the risen Jesus (see 1 Cor 15:6). The same disciples who ran away at the time of his arrest and cowered in in a locked room were, a few weeks later, out on the streets  fearlessly attesting to the risen Christ to crowds of thousands ( Acts 2), within a few decades Christianity had spread throughout the known world.

Easter? What’s all the fuss about?  – The moment when the world changed for ever, where the gulf between God and humanity was bridged.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Note: the reference in ( ) can all be found in the Bible