If you have ever had kids in a soccer program, you know there’s nothing worse than watching your kid’s team face a mismatched opponent. Your kid’s team just stands there while her opponents repeatedly kick the ball into the goal with ease. Sometimes it is so painful to watch, that both parents and kids alike can’t wait until the game is over. Just blow the whistle and put us out of our misery, we think. Our middle child, Tara, has played for several years on a travel soccer team. A couple of years ago, they had an undefeated season, so they were often on the other side of many mismatched games.
Interestingly, the travel league had something
called the “slaughter rule” which prohibited a team from getting more than a
seven point lead. Once a team was
ahead by seven points, they were not allowed to score any more. If they did, they would be hit with a
$50 fine. Tara’s team played
a few games that undefeated season during which this rule was put into
effect. In fact, during one of
them, a teammate of hers accidentally kicked the ball into her opponent’s goal
and triggered the $50 fine.
Now some might say such rules are inappropriate.
Although it’s a rule designed to keep the losing team from being humiliated,
many people feel that losing and even being humiliated are part and parcel of
playing a sport. Learning to deal
with losing is to be expected and in fact, one of the life lessons that
competitive sports teaches.
I’m not sure on which side Jesus would come down in
such an argument about kids’ sports, but I do know that when it comes to the
conflict between God and Evil, Jesus does not follow the slaughter rule. He mercilessly runs up the score
against the forces of evil, injustice and even death. On Easter morning, it is this decisive victory of Jesus that
we celebrate.
The meaning of Easter cannot be captured in just
one phrase or metaphor. There are images we use to convey the Easter message;
rebirth, renewal, a new beginning.
Nothing wrong with those images but we may be unfamiliar with some other
ones from the Bible. The apostle
Paul said, “Jesus must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet and
the last enemy is death.” The
comforting images of rebirth and renewal fail to capture that aggressive nature
of the resurrection of which Paul writes.
If there is one thing for certain in this universe, it is that very
living thing, including you and I, will eventually die. Hate to ruin your Easter, but hopefully
that’s not a news flash to you. To
suggest that such a process is reversible is to overthrow everything we know
about the natural world. To claim
that Jesus has risen from the dead is a radical challenge to reality and to the
powers of this world. Death has
always been the ultimate weapon, for governments both good and bad, for armies,
for terrorists, for criminals and for stalkers and pedophiles. If Jesus defeated death, it’s more than
just a good Sunday morning for Jesus.
It means all those sources of evil in our world have been disarmed.
For the past few weeks, we have been exploring the
Apostle’s Creed and using its words to bust some myths about Christianity. One of those myths is that Easter is
just a pleasant and happy holiday that celebrates the rebirth of Spring. That’s not what the Creed says. When the Creed claims that Jesus,
“descended to the dead, the third day he rose again from the dead” it is saying
something very radical. So
radical, that in some Christian traditions, the first part of that phrase, ”he
descended to the dead” or “he descended to Hell” is deleted. Yet I believe that if we leave out
Jesus descending to the dead, we can never fully appreciate the full magnitude
of the Resurrection.
In the Bible, the place of the dead or Sheol in Hebrew, or Hades in
Greek, was where it was believed everyone went when they died. It was a place of nothingness, often
compared to a trash heap on the outskirts of the city. It was not a place of eternal
punishment, but where both the righteous and the wicked went when they died.
Some Jews believed they went there to await the final resurrection. It was the fate every human being
shared. Most importantly it was
the fate Jesus shared with all of us.
Both the Bible and the early church were insistent on this fact, Jesus
really died in the same way every human being who ever lived or ever will live.
From this fact, sprang many ideas in the early
church. Some Christians believed
and still do that, while in the place of the dead, Jesus preached the gospel to
everyone who had ever lived before him.
We find a suggestion of that in 1 Peter where the author writes about
Jesus preaching to the “spirits in prison” after he was “put to death in the
flesh”. In the Orthodox tradition, there are images of Jesus storming the Gates
of Hell, rescuing Adam and Eve from captivity, and defeating Satan’s grip on
humanity. Now rather than
get caught up in how literally we take all that imagery, let’s look beyond it
to the message with which it presents us.
Overall, there is a rich Christian tradition that emphasizes the reality
of Jesus’ death and victory he won within it.
So when the Apostles Creed follows the words “He
descended to the dead” with “On the third day he rose again from the dead” the
repetition of the word “dead” is not due to bad writing. It is to emphasize that Jesus went to
and returned from a place. Not a
place like Topeka or even a parallel universe, but the place of death. Our biggest fear. Our biggest enemy.
Unlike our kid’s soccer leagues, Jesus has no
slaughter rule when it comes to evil and death. Throughout his life, he defeated the forces of
evil, both economic and social, when he reached out to the poor and the
rejected. He loved them, valued
them and healed them. He defeated
the powers of the self-righteous when he exposed their hypocrisy and dogmatic
religion. As he hung on the cross,
Jesus undermined the powers of revenge and hatred when he uttered, “Father
forgive them, they know not what they do.”
We might ask him to take it easy on his opponents,
but like the 2007 Patriots, he just keeps running up the score. He dies and seems defeated, his mission
killed off with him. But God
can’t leave well enough alone. On
Easter morning, God’s opponents are defeated mercilessly. God raises Jesus from
the dead. In that one event, God
overcomes evil. For every brutal
regime, or oppressive religious institution, including the ones that killed
Jesus, death was always the ultimate weapon. By overcoming death through Jesus, God disarmed evil. God vindicated Jesus by proving that
the path and ways of Jesus were right.
Right now, we are in the midst of an economic
crisis. The question on everyone’s
mind is, “When will things turn around?”
Each day politicians and the media look at every economic report and
indicator looking for some indication that things have hit bottom and are
turning up in a new direction. The
truth is, it will only be years from now and with hindsight that we will be
able to look back on this recession and say when the turning point occurred. We will look back and say, “A-ha! That’s
the moment when it all turned around.” Easter is like that. When we look at the history of the world, with all its dark
and evil epochs, it is the moment we point to and say, “A-ha! That’s the moment
when it all turned around.”
The Apostle Paul later wrote in 1 Corinthians 15,
that at the Resurrection an old saying came true. “Death swallowed by
triumphant Life! Who got the last word, oh, Death? Oh, Death, who's afraid
of you now? It was sin that made death so frightening and law-code guilt
that gave sin its leverage, its destructive power. But now in a single
victorious stroke of Life, all three - sin, guilt, death - are gone, the gift
of our Master, Jesus Christ. Thank God.”
As we look around at our world today, that may seem
hard to believe. Whether it’s
dictators, kidnappers, or serial killers death still seems to be with us as the
ultimate form of coercion. Critics
of Christianity claim that nothing is different; that Jesus didn’t change
anything.
But those critics are wrong. They are wrong because that same
Resurrection power that raised Jesus now resides in all of us. Easter was not just an event that
happened on a long ago Sunday morning.
It is still happening now and empowers this church and everyone in
it. As followers of this Risen
Christ, we can face the dark powers of injustice, oppression and violence with
confidence because we know that because of Jesus, those things hold no power
over us. What God began in an
empty tomb, God will bring to completion one day. In the meantime, you and I continue to work to make it
happen. God is creating a new
world and Easter was only the beginning.
The old world of sin, evil, violence and injustice is passing away. A new world of love, peace and justice
is being born. It hasn’t been
completed yet, but the one who rose on that Easter morning is with us and even
within us as we continue God’s renewal of Creation.
Pam and I have a friend who works in the
theater. Sometimes he likes to
bring his work home with him to entertain his daughters. One Easter, he decided to use his
special effects skills to add some excitement to Easter morning. Using a giant bunny head, a top hat,
and a vacuum cleaner, he constructed an Easter Bunny in his family’s hallway closet. That Sunday morning, his girls
awoke and, like they did every year, searched their house for hidden Easter
eggs. They noticed that the closet
door was slightly ajar and the two girls crept closer to investigate. They thought perhaps the Easter Bunny
had hidden some eggs in there. Slowly, they swung the door open and peeked
inside. A little shaft of light
fell on the Easter Bunny’s face.
Terrified, they turned and ran screaming, “He’s still here! He’s still here!”
When you think about it,
that’s what Easter is about. Like
those little girls, or like those women at the tomb, today we exclaim with both
terror and joy, “He’s still here!”
A message from 1 Corinthians 15:12-28 by Don Heatley, pastor of Vision Community Church, Warwick, NY
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