I Pity the Fool! - Easter, Mr. T, and Hope
Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia! It is Easter! Yes, I know that was on Sunday, but Easter is actually a season…it lasts for 7 weeks on the church calendar. In truth, we are always Easter people. We are always coming back to the source of our hope no matter what time of year. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death and has won for us eternal life. We need to hear that every day because every day has enough trouble of its own (Matthew 6:34). We always need to hear Jesus’ word of forgiveness and the promise of new life.
Christians are not the only ones in the world to hope for eternal life. It is a pretty common thing for all of humanity. It betrays the fact that most people if not all do not see death as just a natural part of life. Which is what so many say these days to try to cope with the reality of death. We may go along with Disney, which for a little while back in the 90s promoted a more Native American perspective on death. In movies like Pocahontas and the Lion King we heard songs about “the circle of life” and how death is natural and so on. We should be comforted by Mufasa’s words that when we die our bodies go into the ground and become the grass, which feeds other animals. The circle of life. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t really comfort me.
In many ways it promotes the idea that this is all there is. Your life right now is all that you have so live it up. To quote Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, “I know I was born and I know that I’ll die, the in between is mine. I am mine.” A sort of defiant individualism, a carpe diem point of view because all we have is the moment. It’s a romantic idea, but it doesn’t actually help when death comes a-knocking. No matter how we try to reconcile with the reality of death it still makes us uncomfortable. I’m more in the boat with James Bond in Die Another Day. When the villain says, “to die chasing a dream, isn’t that the way to go?” Bond replies, “I’d rather not go at all.”
When push comes to shove that’s where most of us are. Just think about the many different forms of the after life in other religions. Muslims believe in heaven and famously having a bunch of virgins with which to enjoy it. That doesn’t really seem like heaven for the virgins, though. The Buddhists believe in reincarnation for the average Jane or Joe, but it’s just because you screwed up in the previous life and need to work harder. Only those who attain complete enlightenment will get to enjoy Nirvana. It’s probably a pretty lonely place. Hindus also believe in reincarnation, which again is a long process of trying to become perfect. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again in the next life, and the next, and the next, and the next, etc. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Confucianism believes that the living are responsible for the continuous happiness of their ancestors and their well-being in the afterlife, which would be a problem if your relatives don’t like you very much, and especially if you didn’t get along with great grandma. The Mormons are kind of like the Muslims in that the men get to call up all of their wives into their own personal heaven, which they then populate. SO, being a woman in that religion means that you get to spend eternity pregnant and delivering babies. I’ve been told being pregnant can be wonderful, but I’ve never heard any woman say they want to stay that way forever. In fact none of these afterlives sound like an improvement on this life to me, but we’ll come back to that. The point is that we hope for some sort of eternal life. Death is not the way things should be. We’d rather not go at all.
There’s another point of view that has gained traction in the last century and a half or so. It plays off of our largely relativistic perspective. It’s one in which it doesn’t really matter if there is an actual afterlife as long as it gives you hope in the now. SO, it’s kind of a mix of Eddie Vedder where the now is all that matters and still needing hope in the face of death. If the idea of an afterlife helps you cope with today then believe in it because how you feel right now is all that really matters.
Remember the 2010 movie Inception? Well, I’m going to give some spoilers if you haven’t seen it, so be warned. That movie to me epitomizes this idea. Throughout the whole movie Leonardo Dicaprio’s character is trying to get back to his kids whom he had to leave after becoming a wanted man in the United States. In the movie he developed a way to enter the dream world in the subconscious. At one point in the story he and his wife lived in the dream world for decades, but when they woke up only a few hours had passed. It’s a trippy movie, but interesting. Leo had to develop a constant, something that would help him know if he was in reality or if he was dreaming. He had a spinning top. If he spun it and it did not fall that meant that he was still dreaming and needed to wake up. If it fell that meant he was in reality. The two worlds were so similar, that one could begin to believe the dream world was more real. Leo’s kids would occasionally pop up in the dream world, but he never wanted to see their faces because he knew that if he did he would never want to leave. We get to the end of the movie when he is allowed to return to the U.S. to finally get to see his children, but right before he does he spins his top on the table to see if he’s still dreaming. Before it has the chance to fall or not he sees the faces of his children and is reunited with them and the last shot of the film is of the spinning top. It wobbles a tiny bit and then the screen goes dark. We never know if it falls or not.
The movie is asking the question, does it really matter if he is dreaming or not because he is happy? He’s with his kids, and he is able to finally rest. There have been Christian theologians that have asked this question about the resurrection too. Does it really matter if Jesus rose from the dead or not? We know the crucifixion happened and that gives us hope that he sacrificed himself for us and our sin, which offers us relief in our here and now. SO, isn’t that enough? German theologian Rudolph Bultmann is famous for holding this position. He said it did not matter if Christ had risen from the dead or not, which was a very big point of debate in modern scholarship during the 19th and 20th centuries. Liberal theologians were attacking anything that had to do with the atonement for our sins, and they obviously went after the resurrection because that is really the heart of the matter. They would rather have Jesus as a great teacher and moral example because that Jesus doesn’t confront you with your brokenness, your need, your sin. Thomas Jefferson was a fan of this line of thought and even re-wrote the Bible to eliminate anything supernatural or miraculous in Jesus’ life.
Does what Jesus said or did matter at all if he was not raised from the dead? Bultmann, Jefferson, and others would say sure because he gave us good advice, was a good example and that can inspire us right now and that’s all that matters, my feelings right now. Whatever helps me get through my day today and makes me a better citizen. Never mind the fact that Jesus would be little more than a quack, a liar, and an abject failure. The disciples on the road to Emmaus articulated the disappointment perfectly when they thought Jesus was dead, “we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:13-35). They “had hoped,” but those hopes were dashed…until the resurrected Jesus opened their eyes over dinner. They clearly did not agree with Bultmann.
Other problems arise with this relativistic line of thought. Think of Inception. All that mattered in the end were Leo’s feelings and needs…Leo’s point of view. The movie didn’t seem to care that he had real children somewhere in the real world that would never see their father again if he stayed in the dream world. Their needs and feelings weren’t as important as his. They would suffer, but as long as he didn’t see it or feel it, everything was going to be okay. The truth does matter. Having hope right now certainly does matter, as I said in the opening, but hoping in a fiction, or a lie is no hope at all, and it can have dramatic consequences on us and the people around us.
It matters that Jesus rose from the dead. Paul dealt with this in 1 Corinthians 15. He says, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” If Easter never happened, if Jesus never rose from the dead on the third day, if the stone was not rolled away and the tomb was not found empty, then we would be the sorriest bunch of chumps in history. No better than fools. Hoping completely in vain. Hoping for something that would never happen. We would all be getting a visit from Mr. T.
I loved the A-Team when I was a kid!
Jesus’ bodily resurrection matters most of all when we are faced with the reality of death itself, as we have been profoundly in the past couple years. Easter is our evidence that Jesus has conquered death once and for all. He has proven that he is the Lord over life and death. That’s the incredible promise of the resurrected life in Christianity…we get to be reborn to new life and we will never experience death again. It’s not cyclical like the Hindus or Buddhists believe that you’ll just keep coming back again and again suffering death again and again with the ultimate goal of escaping this crude physical world. We do talk about experiencing death existentially in this life, that we continue to experience existential death as we come to grips with the reality of our justification and salvation in Christ, but those are simply foreshadows of what we will ultimately go through physically because we actually value the physical. Our God is a creator God. He made this world, this universe and everything in it, and cares deeply for it. He does not waste what he has made rather he promises to make it new, to recreate it. It is not something to escape, but something to redeem. There was an excellent article in the NY Times this week that gives even more importance to a physical resurrection.
We are given a description of it in Isaiah 65,
“For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth…I will rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in my people; no more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping and the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days. They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands” (v. 17-22).
Isaiah shows us that we will not just be spirits in the new life, but rather will come to experience life in the fullest. It’s not just a dream, but a physical reality. We are saved for life…to live.
If death is brought to its end, then conflict must end as well. This is particularly hopeful right now with the war in Ukraine. There will be peace. Isaiah says, “‘The wolf and the lamb shall graze together; the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and dust shall be the serpent's food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain,’ says the Lord” (65:25). There will be no more war. Animals who symbolize natural born enemies like the wolf and the lamb or the lion and the ox always against each other will now be at peace with one another. The desire to kill and destroy will be gone, and we will forget what it was even like to have such desires. “The former things shall not be remembered or come into mind” (v. 17). Peace will be our new reality. The conflict that originally began with our rebellion against God is overturned because Jesus has made peace with us through the cross. He has made us who were his enemies his friends through his sacrifice. He has made us sisters and brothers, who were once strangers at best because of our sin. He has made peace real and promises that it will impact all of the created order. He is indeed the Prince of peace.
Amazingly, we do get to experience some of this now. The real, recorded, historical resurrection gives us hope now. It is a promise for us that is not all in the future. We can experience healing from our brokenness by his grace. We can face the pain of sin in our lives because we know it has lost its ultimate power over us. It will not destroy us. He will sustain us. We can experience forgiveness in our relationships because he has forgiven us, he has made peace with us. We can even enjoy our work. It isn’t always the slog that it could be, and we don’t have to worry about it as much because our identities are located somewhere else now…in Him. Peter says it like this, “According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Peter 1:3-4).
Thank God Easter happened! Thank God the grave was empty on that day thousands of years ago. Thank God there were witnesses, and thank God they wrote it down for us. We have a historical record that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Not only was the tomb empty, but Jesus was seen walking around talking with people, eating with people (like those disciples on the road to Emmaus)…they touched his wounds, he breathed on them, and so on. We have accounts of the resurrected Jesus appearing 12 different times to people in the Bible ranging from one person, like Paul for example, to over 500 people at a time according to 1 Corinthians 15. The promise of new life after death is not just some empty idea. It’s not just a concept that makes us feel good when we’re blue. It is not just a dream. It has happened before in history and not just by anyone, but by the founder of our faith. Jesus is “the first fruits.” He is the firstborn of many. Jesus is alive! He is risen from the dead. We do not wait in vain. Instead of being pitiful fools, we actually have more reason to hope than anyone else on earth. Jesus is yours today. Anyone who believes in Him as Lord and Savior has been bought with a price and is united with him through his cross. And as Paul assures us, “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5). Alleluia! Amen.
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