Why the Good News is the True News

     I am a fan-come-lately of the television series, Lost.  I received the DVD set for the first season last Christmas and became totally hooked.  I need my Lost.  We can’t watch it this season live because we’d be ahead of ourselves so we’ll always be a year behind.  We’ll have to wait until next winter when the DVDs of the second season come out – unless someone here just happens to have the current season on tape – hint, hint.

     I really don’t want to wait until next Christmas to see what happens to Jack. 

     Jack is the medical doctor on the island and the popularly recognized leader of the castaways.  At least he was the first season.  He could be dead by now.  I don’t know.  If you know, don’t tell me.

     Jack is everyone’s savior.  Whenever the bad stuff starts to come down the cry goes up, “Get Jack!”  Jack knows that to do.

      Arnold Toynbee devotes one entire chapter to the subject of saviors in his A Study in History.  Toynbee places saviors into four categories.  One is the savior with the scepter – the political savior.  Two is the savior with the book – the philosopher, the teacher, and the theologian.  Three, there is the savior with the sword – the military hero.  Four is the man-god or god-man savior – those of Greek or Norse mythology.

     Toynbee points out that each of these savior types ultimately capitulates to the great enemy, death.  Politicians, kings, military leaders, and philosophers, all die.  Then he concludes this significant chapter by declaring that at the ordeal of death, few, even of the would be savior gods, have dared to put their title to the test by plunging into death’s icy river.

     “And now,” Toynbee writes, “As we stand and gaze with our eyes fixed upon the farther shore, a single figure rises from the flood and straightaway fills the whole horizon.  There is the Savior; and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand; He shall see the anguish of His soul and shall be satisfied.”  Toynbee incorporates into that concluding statement from Isaiah 53 the quotation of John 3:16.  “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

       Hope that is founded on the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not an unrealistic refusal to accept the negatives of life. It is not blind to pain.  It is a realization that even those negatives -- even the mass carnage of a war of something and individually vicious as Alzheimer’s -- cannot ultimately prevail against the power and love of God in our lives and the lives of those we love.  The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had a wealth of experience in the negatives of life.  But he aptly expressed the Christian hope when he said, “We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.”

     Infinite hope comes from the resurrection of Jesus and the meaning He attached to that resurrection for us when He promised, “Because I live, you shall also live.”   The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s answer to our deepest needs.  For in the resurrection of Jesus Christ we discover that while there are forces in this world that have the power to do us to death, God reserves to Himself what death does to us. 

     Paul tells us in Romans 4:24 that Jesus died – not just as a martyr or as a demonstration of God’s love – but as a savior.  He died for our sins.  Romans 4:25 says that “Jesus went to the cross because of our transgression.”  In some way Jesus took our guilt upon himself.

     Now over in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul fleshes out this brief statement in Romans.  Here Paul outlines the core of the good news that we preach:  “For I delivered unto you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to scripture.  The death of Jesus was “according to the scriptures.”  It wasn’t an after-thought or an attempt to patch up a bad situation.  It was part of a long-promised plan of salvation.

     Paul also tells us that Jesus was dead and buried – that He was stone cold dead as a doornail complete with brain death and irreversible deterioration of the cell structure.  He wasn’t in suspended animation.

     The third thing that Paul writes is that Jesus was raised from the dead “on the third day” (according to the Jewish way of figuring “the third day.”)

    We need to recognize that the resurrection of Jesus was a unique event.  As C.S. Lewis points out in an essay What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ?, some people say that the “importance of the resurrection is that it gives evidence of survival – evidence that the human personality survives death.  “On that view,” Lewis continues, “what happened to Christ would be what happens to all people, the difference being that in Christ’s case we were privileged to see it happening.

     “That is certainly not what the disciples believed.  Something perfectly new in the history of the universe had happened.  Christ had defeated death.  The door that had always been locked had for the very first time been forced open. This is something quite distinct from mere ghost survival.  I don’t mean”, Lewis writes, “that the disciples disbelieved in ghost survival.  On the contrary, they believed init so firmly that, on more than one occasion, Christ had to assure them that He was not a ghost.  The point is that while believing in ghost survival, they yet regarded to resurrection as something totally different and new.  This new person, after death, does not get divided into “ghost” and “corpse”.  A new way of being has arisen.”

       Now, many people think that resurrection has something to do with spring.  That makes a certain satisfying metaphorical sense where Easter always falls in springtime. They think Easter represents the "rebirth" of life after the cold dark times.  They talk about a spiritual renewal that is like the greening up of the world. But Easter has little to do with Spring. This is not only because the bottom half of the world celebrates it during their Autumn. It is because what we celebrate at Easter is not natural, like the green blade rising is natural. Easter is not a force of nature. It is in fact altogether unnatural; and, as such, it is terrifying.

       Spring amazes us with its beauty, but it does not terrify us.  In all four gospels, the reaction to the announcement of resurrection is disbelief, trembling, alarm.  These are big, powerful, paralyzing emotions. Writer Fleming Rutledge asks whether the disciples (who lived in a world far more attuned to nature's rhythms than ours) would really have "trembled with amazement" because flowers had bloomed again?   No, they were amazed and terrified because a good man who had been unjustly killed, and who was really dead, even decaying, was now alive. They were terrified because His being alive was something completely new, something completely different. 

       Easter is about Jesus and His real death.  It is about His completely different, completely new life beyond the reach of death.  And if it isn't just about Jesus and what God did for Him by raising Him from the dead.  It is also about what God will also do for us -- not only in death, but also in this life.  It is about God already letting us experience the power and indestructibility of resurrection life. 

       If we think of Easter as merely greening us up until the next harsh winter comes around when we will shrivel again, Easter does nothing to lead us out of futility.  If Christ's resurrection is merely a symbol of some vague human hope in the midst of despair -- if we never really meet Him in his utter newness – if He is never able to release us concretely from our seemingly irreversible patterns of sadness and loss, betrayal and indifference, shame and guilt --  if the grace of Easter is only a matter of coping better with what is and cannot change, instead of receiving power to be forgiven and forgive ourselves, to break the grip of our destructive pasts, and to live a different way – if Jesus was not really raised from the dead, and raised from the dead for us; if He is only a vivid memory, an ethical standard or a generic spiritual ideal, then, as  Paul wrote to the Corinthians, my "preaching is useless and so is your faith"   Let’s all get out of here right now and do something worthwhile. 

        But in fact, Paul writes, Christ has been raised from the dead.  The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the hard proof of your whole and healthy relationship with God if you believe.  Romans 4:25 states that Jesus “went to the cross because of our transgression and was raised because of our justification.”  We, as Romans 5:9 declares, are set right with God because of Jesus’ blood and therefore God raised Him from the dead as a demonstration of that fact.

     Now let me get technical for just a moment, in Greek, which is the language in which the New Testament was written.  There are three little prepositions which become very important at this point.  The three words are “eis” which means “with a view to, “pros” which means “for”, and “dia” which menas “on account of.”  Some commentators and Bibles translate the “dia” in Romans 4:25 as if it were “eis” or “pros” – to give the idea that Jesus was raised from the dead so that we would be set right in our relationship with God.  But the word there is “dia” – on account  of.

     In other words the Bible says that Jesus was raised from the dead because we had already been set free at the cross.  Jesus went to the cross to pay the penalty of our sin – He “became sin for our sakes,” Paul writes.  The resurrection is the demonstration of the fact that Christ’s sacrifice was accepted.  If it were not accepted – if we were not forgiven -- Jesus would still be in the grave.  The resurrection is our peace with God made flesh.

     If the resurrection is not fact – not spiritual hope but hard historic fact -- then the hope Christianity holds out to the world for a new creation free from evil, decay, and death is only a nice dream.

     So is eternal life.  Paul observes in Corinthians, “If Christ is not risen, then those who have died in Christ have perished.”  If the one who claimed, “I am the resurrection and the life” still lays in the grave, then death does have the last word, and we may as well learn to copy with that dark reality.

     If Jesus is not alive, Paul says, the cross would stand as a great symbol of futile sacrifice.  But it would not be the ground of our forgiveness and wholeness.  As Paul soberly notes in 1 Corinthians 15:17, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless and you are still in your sins – and that we are of all persons most to be pitied because we have relied on something having been accomplished which has not been accomplished – our forgiveness and peace with God.

     In other words, Christianity believed only because it helps people live better is pointless.  If we all end up only as little piles of dust, then why does it really matter how we live?  We and the people around us don’t have any ultimate meaning anyway.  The resurrection changes everything.  It gives us hope and eternal meaning.  We do not believe in Christianity because it is good.  We believe in Christianity because it is true - the resurrection proves it – and that makes it good!

     For as Paul declares: “In fact Christ has been raised from the dead – not as a spiritual event but as a physical and historical reality.  An empty tomb is a pretty poor foundation on which to establish a world religion.  The Christian faith, however, is based not on an empty tomb, which is incidental, but on a risen Lord – the Lord who appeared first to the women, then to Peter, then to the eleven including incredulous Thomas in the upper room.  And then as Paul says to the Corinthians, “To more than five hundred faithful brothers and sisters at one time most of whom, he wrote then, are still alive – go ask them yourself.”  Check it out.  “Last of all,” Paul concludes, “I saw Him myself on the Damascus road.”

       Jesus put the meaning of His resurrection for His church very simply: “Because I live, you shall also live.”  Paul puts it this way in Romans 6:4 “Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so that we too might walk in newness of life.”

     A Roman catholic theologian from Switzerland named Hans Kung writes: “To believe in eternal life (in the Biblical senses) means – in reasonable trust, in enlightened faith, in tried and tested hope – to rely on the fact that I shall one day be fully understood, freed from all guilt and definitely accepted, and can be myself without fear; that my impenetrable and ambivalent existence like the profoundly discordant history of humanity as a whole, will one day become finally transparent, and the question of the meaning of history will one day be finally answered.”

     What’s the answer?  “Behold, I tell you a mystery,” Paul writes.  “We shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.  For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality.  But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.  O death, where is your victory?  Of death, where is your sting?”  The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ therefore, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not pointless.”

     We can keep going.  We can walk in faith.  Because Jesus “went to the cross because of our transgression and was raised from the dead because of our forgiveness.”