Maybe the message of Easter is simple after all; maybe it can be summed up in this word ‘resurrection.’ Again, it’s tempting to reduce Easter to what it accomplishes. It’s easy to think of the empty tomb and jump straight to elaborate atonement theories and speculation about how the resurrection completes the transaction that had God had begun at the cross.
But maybe resurrection morning is also God’s eternal ’stamp of approval’ on the kind of life Jesus lived. Good Friday reveals the degree to which we as a race will go when confronted with a living reminder of what we was supposed to look like. Jesus was hated (and loved) because he himself was the kind of person that we were all intended to be. That reminder was so powerful that it compelled some to worship and many more to kill.
Easter morning is God vindicating Jesus. Easter morning is God saying to us, “You should have listened to this man, you should have followed him. He actually was the resurrection. He actually was the way, the truth, the life. He was what each of you were intended to be, what each of you can be if you follow from this point on.”
The hope of Easter is that the resurrection of Jesus was merely the first in a long line of resurrections, culminating in the final and permanent triumph over good over evil, life over death. Resurrection is more than a happy ending to a tragic story (I’m summarizing N.T. Wright here), it’s an invitation to participate in all of life with the resurrection in view. Resurrection is about beginning to live all of life, here and now, ‘in Christ,’ in imitation of the one whom God has raised from the dead.
good words gil, sometimes it is very easy to forget all of those things. we should have listened to him and now for the rest of humanities existence we are making that mistake up.