I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what the resurrection of Jesus Christ actually does for humanity. It seems that each time I start letting this event permeate my thoughts something starts to just buzz with in me. Last evening, I was trying to wind down from a pretty busy and stretching day, so I picked up a book I’ve started reading called “Deep Church”. Now, I’ll save my thoughts on the book for another post, but I found that as I read this book about the Church and her engagement with the culture and world around us, I started getting that buzzing feeling. It made me go back, once again, to this amazing thing that happened at Easter about 2000 years ago.
When I was in College, I remember reading this historian who questioned whether the resurrection of Jesus had happened. He said that what had happened to Jesus was called the “Swoon Effect” and that while on the cross, Jesus didn’t actually die, but he swooned or feinted and everyone just thought He was dead (because after all 2000 years ago people were stupid and didn’t know what a dead person actually looked like!). I have some pretty amazing problems with the theory, and I could talk about all kinds of reasons for, ultimately, my dismissal of it. However, I think the reaction of the followers of Jesus is the biggest reason that I have to believe the resurrection.
If you think about it, there were only a couple of those 12 (or 120 if you want to add the number of followers that the book of Acts mentions in chapter 2) that could have actually been true leaders. They were a bunch of misfits, a bunch of “not-quite-good-enoughs” and to top it off, they had all deserted their master and friend at the greatest point of his need. This is not a crew that you would want to start a church or an organization with, yet not only did Jesus choose them, but as he was resurrected something began changing in each of them. They became more fully alive then they had ever been – they became deeper, fuller, more real, more a part of some amazing work that had lived dormant in them for decades.
I think the only follower of Jesus who had a pedigree worth noting was Paul and he started off pretty violent and hostile to the church! Paul became a follower after the resurrection, after pentecost and after the first round of believers of Jesus were spreading the Gospel. But Paul was transformed from this militant persecutor of the faith of a group who believed that a dead man was now alive, into a person radicalized and charged with spreading that gospel with all he met. There had to be a reason that he changed and that he, and countless other followers of Jesus, were willing to suffer for their faith! What they went through was not just inhumane, it was barbaric – it was torture – and all because they believed that JESUS was alive and because of that fact alone, LIFE was different.
Paul says in Romans 8, that not only is there no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus but that we are no longer “dead in our sins, but alive in Christ.” That’s the difference! That’s the part of the Church’s early foundations and structure that made the difference. They believed, they knew, they counted on the fact that Jesus’ resurrection was also their resurrection. My friend, Rebecca Heid, reminded me this week that the word in the Greek for “I” is the word ego and it’s where we get the idea of the the Self, or as Freud called it, the Ego.
She went on to share that when Paul says the ego has been crucified with Jesus, it’s the part of us that demands that is now dead too. That also means that it is the true self that is raised with him. That means that the selfishness, the self-centeredness, that I so quickly blame as the reason for my inability to change, is dead. It also means that the LIFE God created me for, the one that is my best possibility, is not only a possibility but it’s an actuality, if only I choose to walk in it.
This destroys a very common phrase that I both use and hear a lot. If my selfishness dies with Jesus and the true Me is brought to life in Him (as the early church seemed to believe and indicate as normal for all believers) then I can’t say “It’s just the way I am” any longer. I can’t say it because it not true, it may be better to say “it’s just the way that I continue to choose”. I believe that it is this difference that caused a bunch of nobodies to become leaders of a movement that would change the course of the world. It was their understanding that their Self was no longer and that HIS restored Life was for them that made it possible.
It’s just another reason that Easter is so cool and it’s an opportunity for us to Live fully Alive and actually believe it’s more than a possibility, but a reality, if we’ll only choose it.
