My wife and I had dinner with a young woman and her boyfriend this past week. I think I heard her say that she is almost 21. He is 24. We’ve gotten to know them over the past year, and we like them. They are friendly and smart, and both of them are committed Christians.
At some point in the dinner, the subject of aging came up. I cannot remember the immediate context for her comment, but the young woman, speaking of when she is older, said: “I want to be the cool grandma, the one with a nose ring.” (She wears a ring on the left side of her nose.)
The idea struck me funny. Perhaps a grandmother today who had a ring in her nose and, say, purple hair, is cool. Just possibly, her teenage grandchildren say to their friends. “You should meet my grandma. She is really cool!” But by the time our young friend is a grandmother, I suspect that only old ladies who are forty years behind the times will be wearing nose rings. Everyone else will have abandoned the practice decades ago. Nose rings will be painfully uncool. (Saying “cool” will probably also be “uncool.”)
I thought all this in a flash. I spoke it more cautiously. “You know, by the time you’re a grandma, it’s possible that people won’t be wearing nose rings anymore. They might not be cool by then.”
I don’t think she had ever considered the possibility that nose rings might go out of fashion. She seemed surprised by the idea and, for a second at least, nonplussed. Could it be that what is cool now will be totally lame in ten years?
It may be that in ten years no one will be wearing skinny jeans. Pants that don’t cover the tops of a person’s shoes may be thought an embarrassment (as they were when I was young, and people mockingly referred to them as “highwaters”). When scrolling through old photos on their phones, adult children might be saying, “I can’t believe my mother made me wear jeans that had holes in the knees. That has got to be the stupidest fashion trend in history.” It may be that no self-respecting male will be caught dead with a man-tote, and shoppers might have to search shoe stores in all fifty states (or will there be fifty-one by then—or perhaps 49?) to find one that still sells torpedo shoes.
Time seems to roll across the continuum of existence in waves, and we all ride on a particular wave. The ideas, images, terminology, values, fashions, and amusements of the wave my generation rides will be somewhat different from the waves ridden by the generations that precede and follow my own. To know this enables me to be generous with people from other generations and to be humble about my own.
I spent most of a day last week in a conference with other pastors and denominational officials. One of our leaders (from a younger generation than my own) addressed the conference. He was wearing “skinny pants” and a shirt that came right out of a trendy clothing catalog. Later, another leader also spoke. He was wearing pants that were inches shorter than I would ever wear mine.
At the time, I thought these two were trying to be hip to win acceptance by the cool kids. But upon reflection, I think these men are simply riding a different wave than me. They wanted to dress appropriately, and this is what they, and people of their generation, deem appropriate. I was wrong to attribute to them any other motive.
The temporal seascape has seen an unbroken succession of waves. In the past, those waves were well spaced and moved more slowly, but the winds of change have picked up considerably, and the waves are passing quickly. It is silly to expect other people, younger people, to want to ride my wave or to concede that it is somehow better or more permanent than their own.
The waves advance and recede, though from my perspective one remains forever at the center: my own. (Of course, this is a delusion. If any wave occupies the center at all, it is the one Jesus rode during his earthly ministry.) But whatever wave we ride on, all the waves belong to the same sea.
St. Paul tells us to “keep the unity of the Spirit.” This cannot be done atop the crest of the latest wave of ecclesial practice or theological emphasis. Nor could it be done atop the ecclesial practices and favorite theological emphases that carried my generation along. To keep the unity of the Spirit with God’s people from other generations – older or younger – we need to be aware of our own strong preference for our generational distinctives.
We must go beneath the waves into the generation-spanning love of God, expressed preeminently when Christ emptied himself and died for people who cared nothing for him. The deeper we go into God’s love, the less difficulty we will have in keeping unity. If we go so deep that the pressure of Christ’s love reshapes us into conformity to his selfless sacrifice, unity will be natural. But if we stay shallow, stay where the waves of theological and ecclesial fashion toss us hither and thither, we will not find unity, only contempt and distrust.
This great passage, properly understood, is one of the most encouraging texts in all the Bible. Enjoy the video (and share it, if you can think of someone who would benefit from watching it) or read the text of the sermon (always a little different from what I actually say) below.
(1 Corinthians 15:19-28) If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he “has put everything under his feet.” Now when it says that “everything” has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all. (NIV)
I think it was Dr. Johnson who said, “Men live in hope, die in despair.”
I was in college when I first heard that quote—not in an English lit class but in the Student Union, while I was playing ping-pong. (I changed my major from billiard science to ping-pong my junior year.) The professor of ping-pong was my roommate and great friend George Ashok Kumar Taupu Das – I called him “the doctor.” Looking back, I’m amazed at his patience. In our first games, he beat me 21-3 or 21-4 and, even then, I only scored points when he was goofing around or not paying attention.
But after months of playing almost daily, I had become competitive. He was still beating me every game, but it was 21-10, then 21-14, then 21-18—and he had started paying attention.
It was during one of these contests – sometimes tied, sometimes the lead changing by a point or two – that the finish line came in sight for me. Just a couple of more points, and I would finally win. But the doctor got serious, shut me down, and handed me yet another defeat.
I must have said something about how I would get him next time. And that’s when our resident genius John Erdel, who was sitting there, idly watching the game, gave me a deadpan look and said: “Men live in hope, die in despair.”
What a dismal view of life! What a demoralizing view of death! “Men live in hope, die in despair.” Anyone who actually believed that would die in despair but could certainly not live in hope. But the resurrection of Jesus means that we can live and die in hope. The death and resurrection of Jesus has transformed the landscape. It is the biggest thing that has ever happened in the world, and whether you know it or not, it is the biggest thing that has ever happened to you.
Last week, we talked about what the resurrection means. This week and next, we will look at why it matters. (And if you missed last week’s sermon, you should go to www.californiaroad.org and watch it online. It provides the foundation for what I’m going to say today.)
The resurrection of Jesus Christ makes a difference in my life—in the way I think, and act, and in the way I will die. We need to drill down into this passage to see why that is true.
In verse 22, Paul writes: “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” In verse 53, he announces the defeat of death: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” Then, in verse 54, he borrows the words of the prophet Hosea to taunt death: “Death, what happened to your victory? Where is your sting now, Death?” Paul wants us to know that the resurrection of Jesus has brought death’s reign of terror to an end. Death has tyrannized humanity since the time of Adam. The fear of death lies behind, and feeds, all other fears. We cannot even imagine life without the fear of death.
Susan Sontag, the brilliant atheist writer and filmmaker, was 71 when she died from cancer. The doctors and nurses tried to talk to her about death and help her prepare, but Sontag refused to listen. Death was too awful even to think about. It terrified her.
For Sontag, this world had become a foul tomb, filled with the stench of decay—but she didn’t dare leave it. “She thought herself unhappy,” her son said, yet she “wanted to live, unhappy, for as long as she possibly could.” Even though life was a nightmare, she was afraid of waking up. How different her life would have been if she’d had the hope of the resurrection.
We who have that hope expect to wake up to joy unspeakable that is full of glory. Because the death-defeating life of Jesus is, by the Holy Spirit, already in us, we can face death with courage and even joy. The author of Hebrews writes: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15).
Our friend Amy Snapp was the Kids’ Min Director at our previous church. She was diagnosed with cancer in her forties. Like Sontag, she improved with treatment, and the cancer went into remission for a while. Then it came back.
Unlike Sontag, Amy wasn’t hiding from the future. Toward the end, when I stopped to see her, she told me: “I’m good. Ready to go. I’m not afraid.” She said she expected dying to be an adventure, like Lucy going into – and through – the wardrobe in the Chronicles of Narnia.
When Amy mentioned Narnia, it brought to mind a favorite passage, which comes at the very end of book 7. The Lion Aslan, the Christ figure of Narnia, says to the children: “You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.”
(I am quoting.) “Lucy said, ‘We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.’
‘No fear of that,’ said Aslan. ‘Have you not guessed?’
Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.
‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream has ended; this is morning.’
And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus, gives his people hope in the face of death. In 1973, during the reign of Idi Amin, the Butcher of Uganda, the people of Kabale were ordered to come to the stadium to witness the execution of three men. Bishop Kivengere asked for, and was granted, permission to speak to the men before they died. He approached them from behind and was surprised by what he saw when they turned around. Their faces were radiant. They smiled. One of them said, “Bishop, thank you for coming … I wanted to tell you: Heaven is now open, and there is nothing between me and my God. Please tell my wife and children that I am going to be with Jesus.”
The bishop thought the firing squad needed to hear that, so he translated their remarks into the soldiers’ own language. It left the firing squad so flummoxed that they forgot to pull the masks down over the Christians’ faces before executing them. The condemned men were looking toward the people in the stands and waving, handcuffs and all, and the people waved back. Then shots were fired, and the three were with Jesus.
The next Sunday, the bishop preached in the hometown of one of the three men. As he spoke, the huge crowd that had gathered erupted into a song of praise to Jesus![1] The hope of the resurrection can free us from the fear of death, but it does so in exact proportion to our nearness to Christ. Even Christians remain fearful when they are far from him.
By his resurrection, Jesus Christ cut death down to size. The English poet George Herbert said, “Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel” – he’s referring to the death and resurrection of Jesus – “has made him just a gardener.” But what a gardener! When he plants those who belong to Jesus, they rise with a splendor that is indescribable, unspeakable, and full of glory.
But our hope is greater than the hope that we will somehow survive death. The resurrection gives us reason to believe that we will be – that nothing can stop us from being – fulfilled, completed, perfected. Paul puts it this way: “The body that is sown” – gardener imagery again! – “is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power…” (vv. 42-43). And verses 52-53: “we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.”
Susan Sontag got it wrong. Earth is not a grave but a garden. This – weakness, sickness, inability, depression, aging, loss – is no more the whole story than the kernel is a whole stalk of corn or the acorn is a towering oak. God’s plan for humanity is not pain and suffering but joy and glory. It is not weakness but power. It is not sadness but joy. It is not the shame we know but a glory that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor human mind imagined. (1 Cor. 2:9).
You, if you have received resurrection life from Jesus through faith, will be happier than you can now conceive, stronger than you can now imagine, and overflowing with the vitality of love. The promise would seem too good to believe if we hadn’t already tasted this life, experienced its power, felt its love.
Listen: Jesus’s resurrection is evidence that the long, tortuous project known familiarly as Shayne Looper – substitute your own name if you have Jesus and he has you – will one day be finished and it will be good. Very good. Even Shayne Looper will be crowned with glory and full of joy, bringing glory and joy to God himself and to all the rest of us. This – nothing less, and certainly far more – is what awaits the people of God.
But the hope of the resurrection is more than the hope – as great as it is – that we as individuals will be fulfilled. It is the hope that all things in heaven and on earth will be made right, good, and glorious. The resurrection means that God’s plan is unstoppable, and that heaven will make right every earthly wrong. What has happened to Christ will happen to us, and something like it will happen to the world.
There are times when that has been hard to believe. I have stood in the ER with a family as the doctor performed CPR on their son and brother, whose body lay before them, torn by a hideous gunshot wound. The doctor eventually gave up. Too many times, I’ve sat with families – sometimes a young dad and mom, the mom holding her three-year-old or her baby in her arms – while the nurse removed life support.
I’ve cried with too many people whose image of themselves was shattered like glass by the terrible abuse they suffered as children. You’ve known them too. We’ve not only known them; we are them: the sufferers, the abused, the wronged, the fearful, the damaged. So, what if the future holds inconceivable glory? The past holds unutterable pain. Even if we someday attain joy, will we not always be haunted by the suffering?
No, we will not. C. S. Lewis was right: We “say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”[2]
Listen to these words of hope from the throne of God. “‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new!’”
The singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson put it into words this way.
“After the last tear falls, after the last secret’s told After the last bullet tears through flesh and bone After the last child starves and the last girl walks the boulevard After the last year that’s just too hard
There is love…
Cause after the last plan fails, after the last siren wails After the last young husband sails off to join the war After the last, ‘This marriage is over’ After the last young girl’s innocence is stolen After the last years of silence that won’t let a heart open
There is love Love, love, love. There is love.
And in the end, the end is oceans and oceans of love and love again We’ll see how the tears that have fallen Were caught in the palms of the Giver of love and the Lover of all And we’ll look back on these tears as old tales
‘Cause after the last tear, falls there is love.
There is love because, after the last tear falls into nail-scarred hands, there is God.
Our hopes are audacious and unparalleled. The Marxist hoped for a better world. The Christian hopes for a perfect one: a new heaven and new earth, where righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:13). Karl Marx’s most enthusiastic hopes fade from sight in the shining hope of the resurrection, the way the light of a candle fades before the noonday sun.
Our hope is not just that our sins – worse than we remember and more than we can count – will not be held against us, though because of Jesus, they will not! Our hope is not just that our pains will be forgotten, swallowed up in bliss. Our hope is not just that our shame will be buried with us when we die and left in the grave when we rise. Our hope is not just that evil and injustice will be destroyed, never to return. Our hope is that God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).
This hope is not like the Buddhist hope of Nirvana, in which the delusion of selfhood is at last extinguished and there is only the Unity. No, when God is all in all, we will be more than we have ever been. We will have becomeus, more ourselves than ever before, made to be with God and to be filled by God.
What lies at the foundation of all existence is not some subatomic particle or the so-called four fundamental forces. What lies at the foundation of all existence is a relationship: the overflowing, joyous relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And what rests at the pinnacle of all existence is relationship: the overflowing, joyous relationship of Father, Son, Holy Spirit and, by the triumph of grace, us.
This long story of bullets and wars, of marriages ended and innocence stolen, is different than we thought and better than we’ve dreamed. It is the story of the perfectly joyful, perfectly beautiful Trinity making perfectly joyful, perfectly beautiful beings of us and inviting us to join their party. Emptiness is not our future, but fullness, “for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9).
Because of the joyful love of the Triune God, this is what awaits us. And it has been made possible, made real, by the loving sacrifice and glorious resurrection of our man in heaven, who is also “our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.”
This is why the resurrection matters. This is why we hope. Amen.
Watch the sermon, First Stone in an Avalanche, or read the sermon below.
(1 Corinthians 15:20-26) But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
You’re on your way home from Chicago’s north side, and it looks to be a long drive. I-90 isn’t stop-and-go; it’s just stop. You turn on the radio and scan the channels, and you land on the Cubs’ game. Your dad was a Cubs’ fan, as was his dad, and you’ve been a Cubs’ fan for as long as you can remember. Pat Hughes is calling the play by play, and the Cubs and the Dodgers are scoreless.
You’ve been listening for about half-hour – and you’re not even to I-55 yet – when it occurs to you that Pat has not used the words “pitch,” “swing,” or “out.” How can you call a game without using those words? Maybe you just missed it. So, you start listening intently but there’s not a single, “Swing and a miss.” No, “And here’s the pitch…” And after two full innings, no mention of an out. You wonder what is going on. This has got to be intentional.
I had an analogous experience in reading the Gospel accounts of the life and death of Jesus. (This really surprised me when I first realized it, and it surprises me still.) No one ever uses the word “resurrection” to describe what happened to Jesus, neither the Gospel writers nor the people whose conversations they reported. They report that Jesus was alive after being dead but never use the one word you would expect them to use: “resurrection.” It’s as if they were trying to avoid it.
That ought to raise a question in our minds: Why didn’t they use the word resurrection? The answer comes in two parts, the first of which is very straightforward: The Gospel writers did not use the word “resurrection” because the people whose story they were telling didn’t use the word. The fact that the writers refrained from using what is arguably the most important word in the vocabulary of the early church speaks volumes about their intention to faithfully recount what had happened.
Some biblical scholars think that everything theological in the Gospels – especially everything that points to the deity of Jesus and his status as the Messiah – was invented by the Church and written into the Gospels in an act of historical revisionism. Those scholars believe that the healing miracles, the transfiguration and especially the resurrection never happened. They think the Church fabricated it all as a way of elevating Jesus’s status and validating their faith.
Yet here we have the most important thing ever, the climax of all four Gospels and the core tenet of the Christian faith, and not one of the writers gives in to the temptation to describe it as resurrection. This is an overlooked and remarkably important evidence for biblical authenticity.
But that brings us to the second part of the question. Why didn’t the people in the story – Peter, John, the apostles, Mary Magdalene – refer to Jesus’s return from the dead as “resurrection”? The doctrine of the resurrection was profoundly important to most first century Jews. So, why didn’t any of the disciples, or after the fact, the fearful chief priests, ever mention the word?
I think the answer is once again straightforward, though it might surprise us. In the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s return from the dead, the disciples didn’t realize he had been resurrected. Now don’t misunderstand: they knew Jesus had risen from the dead. The evidence overwhelmingly supports that conclusion. They did not, as some have suggested, think that Jesus lived on in spirit or as a “life force” or as a powerful memory. They didn’t point to their hearts and say, “He’ll always be with me!”
No, the disciples believed that Jesus died—that he was stone-cold, dead as a doornail dead, and buried. And they believed that after three days he came back to life; he was alive—walking-talking-eating-drinking-alive! But it did not occur to them that he had been resurrected.
That may sound like a contradiction, or even heresy, but it is not. The disciples had seen three people (that we know of) raised back to life after they had died: the daughter of Jairus, the young man who lived and died in Nain and, most spectacularly, their friend Lazarus. These people had been dead – stone-cold, dead as a doornail dead – and Jesus had somehow brought them back to life. But the disciples did not think that they had been resurrected. The idea never occurred to them – and it wouldn’t.
When they heard that Jesus was alive and then saw him for themselves – after having seen him horribly killed – they believed their Master had come back from the dead, and they were overjoyed. But that did not signify to them that he had been resurrected. In their minds, and in the minds of their contemporaries, resurrection was a different thing altogether. It didn’t happen here or there, to this or that individual. When it happened, it would happen to everyone, and that would be on the last day. Resurrection would close this age and inaugurate the age to come.
So even though Jesus rose from the dead and his friends knew it, they didn’t make the connection between his rising and the resurrection. In their minds, when the resurrection happened, everyone who had ever died would be raised from the dead – the righteous to eternal life and the unrighteous to eternal death. It took time and instruction – most importantly from Jesus himself – for the enormity of what had happened in that garden tomb to sink in. Jesus had not only come back to life, as remarkable as that was; the resurrection – the coming to life of everyone who had ever died – had begun. That is stunning news!
By the time we come to the early chapters of Acts, Jesus’s followers are using the word “resurrection” right and left. What changed? After he rose, Jesus had met with them repeatedly over a forty-day period and explained to them from the Scriptures what had happened and what it meant. In Luke’s words, “[B]eginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). So, less than a month-and-a-half after Jesus rose, we find the disciples “proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 4:2).
They now understood that the resurrection – the coming back to life of everyone who had ever died – had commenced. That brought them to the remarkable conclusion that the “last days” had begun and “the renewal of all things” (those were Jesus’s words) was at hand.
On Easter, churches often focus on the fact that we will continue to live after we die. As true as that is, it’s important to realize that most people believed that before Jesus rose from the dead. They believed that humans continue to live in some form (as ghosts, or spirits, or as some kind of life force) after they die. The resurrection of Jesus signaled something more radical and far-reaching than that.
No one has explained the implications of Jesus’s rising more thoroughly than the apostle Paul. When he first heard people say Jesus was alive, he didn’t believe it. (We assume that people in the first century were gullible and would believe anything, but that’s rubbish. They were no more likely to believe that a man three days dead would return to life than we are.) Paul never doubted it was a hoax … until he saw the resurrected Jesus for himself. That changed everything.
From then on, Paul could not stop talking and writing about the resurrection. In his biblical letters, he used the noun “resurrection” approximately four times as often as the noun “forgiveness”. The verbs related to resurrection and forgiveness are even more out of balance. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the resurrection to Paul. As far as he was concerned, there is no “faith in Jesus” apart from belief in the resurrection.
Paul’s most comprehensive explanation of resurrection comes in 1st Corinthians 15. The entire letter was written around the idea that God is restoring all things, and the resurrection is at the center of his plan. And when I say “resurrection,” I am referring to the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all the rest of us. In Paul’s mind – and in the minds of the early Christians – the two cannot be separated. His resurrection initiates and is the guarantee of ours. Ours is the outcome and achievement of his. The bond between them is unbreakable.
Yet some people in Corinth were trying to break it. They couldn’t see how sophisticated, first century intellectuals could possibly believe in resurrection. Yes, they believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead, but they denied that the rest of us would be raised. They believed, as Plato taught them, that death unchains people from their weak and corrupt bodies and releases their spirits into the eternal world. The idea that the spirit would then be reunited to the body was repulsive to them.
Now look at 1 Corinthians 15. The central question in this passage comes in verse 12: “But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” These educated Corinthians were affirming that Jesus had been raised but denying the resurrection of the rest of us.
In this chapter, Paul begins with the question of whether the dead are raised, then moves to the question of when the dead are raised, and finally to the question of how the dead are raised. It is a brilliantly organized piece of writing. We don’t have time to look at all of it, so we’ll focus on the relationship between the miracle of Christ’s rising and our own resurrection.
Now remember than some of the Corinthians denied there is a relationship between the two. Paul insists that there is. He carefully avoids speaking about Christ’s resurrection and our resurrection, as if they were two different things. Jesus’s resurrection is a part of the resurrection. Or it might be more accurate to say that the resurrectionflows out of Jesus’s resurrection. The two cannot be disconnected. There is one resurrection, but it happens in two phases. Christ’s resurrection is the first stone in an avalanche.
Why make such a fuss about this? Because Paul understood that the resurrection is about more than a spirit being united to a body following death. That is far too individualistic a way of looking at it. Resurrection is the pivotal event in God’s plan to “make all things new.” Resurrection inaugurates the last days, initiates the Great Renewal, and promises the glories of the kingdom of God. Resurrection is the threshold into the age to come. Most Jews believed that. What they didn’t know was that resurrection had already begun in Jesus. That was the astonishing good news the Christians had to tell. It was not just that people go on living after they die – everyone already knew that! It was that the new age had arrived when Jesus rose from the dead.
That is why, in verse 20, Paul calls Jesus “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (or died). In the first century, people understood the image of the firstfruits, but we might not. Each year, at the very beginning of the wheat harvest, the Israelites took their first ripe wheat as an offering to the Lord’s temple. It was called the Feast of Firstfruits. Seven weeks later, when all the wheat had been harvested, they went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Weeks. Just as Firstfruits announced the harvest had begun and promised more to follow, Jesus’s rising announced the resurrection had begun and promised more to follow. The two thousand years between Christ’s resurrection and today are but the interval between Firstfruits and the Feast of Weeks.
Behind this passage stands the idea that God is restoring creation. There are allusions to creation – as recounted in Genesis one and two – everywhere in this chapter. That is intentional. There are seeds and plants, like Genesis 1; men and animals; birds and fish; there is the sun, the moon, and the stars. And in case we still haven’t caught on, Adam himself shows up. Paul is thinking about creation … and recreation. The first creation floundered upon Adam’s rebellion and is dying. The new creation was established on Jesus’s obedience and is ready to rise. Look at verses 21-22: “For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.”
“But,” verse 23, “each in his own turn.” Here is where the Jesus-follower’s understanding of resurrection goes beyond the ancient Jewish understanding. It didn’t change it (Paul’s view is still thoroughly Jewish), but it added to it. The additional insight was this: There is an order to the resurrection. It happens in phases. That’s the thing Paul and his colleagues had not previously understood. When he did, it changed everything.
Christ’s resurrection was not simply proof that people continue to live after they die, though they do. It was not just proof that death had been defeated, though it was. It was proof that the new age had dawned, that the ancient promises – of a kingdom, a restoration, and a renewal – were being fulfilled. It was proof to the disciples, as Chesterton once put it, that the world had died in the night and that “what they were looking at was the first day of a new creation…”[1]
Judaism divided time into two ages: The present age and the age to come. The present age is a time of injustice and conflict. Paul refers to it elsewhere as “the present evil age” (Galatians 1:4).
The age to come, on the other hand, will be the time of God’s undisputed rule, characterized by peace and justice – a time of prosperity, reconciliation, and joy. And, as everyone knew, the line between this present age and the age to come was the resurrection.
And here is Paul, telling us that the resurrection has already begun. The claim is staggering. The resurrection began in a Jerusalem garden on a spring morning somewhere around 30 A.D. when Jesus came out of the tomb, and it will conclude when Jesus comes back from heaven. But if that is true, what has happened to the age to come? Is this … it? Is this all there is?
That is an important question, and no one contemplated it more deeply than Paul. He believed that the new age had already dawned and that everyone who confesses Jesus as Lord is already part of the new creation (“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” – 2 Corinthians 5:17). The new age had dawned but the old age would not conclude until the completion of the second phase of the resurrection, when King Jesus returns. The sun has already risen, but the moon still hangs in the sky. We live in the overlap between the arrival of the new age and the termination of the old one.
We think of the resurrection as proof that we will go to heaven when we die. Paul thought of it as proof that God’s kingdom has come to earth while we live. The new age had dawned or, to be more precise, is dawning. In the overlap time, we still have the sorrows, sins, and corruption of the present age. But we can already tap into the joy and peace and freedom of the age to come. The winds of that age are blowing across the borders of our time, and we can lean into them. We can experience “the power of the resurrection” even now, during the overlap period.
There are battles to be fought and won during the overlap. There is a way of life to be learned. There is work to be done. So, Paul says in the last verse of this chapter: “Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”
Easter – the resurrection – means more than life after death. It means that we can live a different kind of life before we die, as we draw on the resources of the age to come. Most people live out of the past. For good or ill, they are molded (and often shackled) by it. But through faith in Jesus Christ, people can break the mold and learn from him how to live out of their future. They can know, as Paul put it, “the power of the resurrection.”
If that’s what you want – a future-oriented, God-empowered, old-habit-breaking, hope-inspiring life – there is one place to find it: in a connection to the Resurrected One, Jesus—a connection established by faith. I invite you to believe on the Lord Jesus today. If you already have a connection to him, I invite you to learn how to draw your life from that connection.
[1]The Everlasting Man. The entire quotes runs: “On the third day the friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways, they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.”
We know the story. The religious authorities joined forces with the political superpower of the day to end what they saw as an offense against piety and an assault on the established order – in other words, to terminate a threat to the status quo. They acted decisively to stamp out the menace. And when they were done, they had stamped him into the ground, into a hole in the ground; and they buried him there. As far as they were concerned, the fire of extremism had been snuffed out.
But the combined forces of religion and politics buried more than a man in that tomb. They buried his followers’ joy, their hope, and their future. When we see those followers again, they are filled with despair: Peter weeping in the night, the Eleven, trembling with fear, hidden behind locked doors. You can hear the despair in the voices of the two on the road to Emmaus when they said: “We thought” – but alas, we were mistaken – “that he was the one who would redeem Israel.”
These people had staked their lives on Jesus. They had left everything, as Peter declared, to follow him: jobs and families, homes and security. Now what were they to do? Would they have jobs to go back to? Would their families take them in? Would their company be disbanded? These men and women were closer than family. Would the future tear them apart, leave them only memories? And even those memories were being pushed from their minds. Right now, all they could think about was their Master being dragged away, nailed down, strung up, and crying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
A handful of women went to the tomb early on Sunday morning. They left from different parts of the city, but intended to meet there to properly finish the Jewish burial procedure. But as they approached the tomb, one of them suddenly remembered the great stone that sealed the entrance. “Who will roll the stone away?” they asked. It seemed an insurmountable obstacle. But heaven had solved that problem even before they had begun to worry about it! (I wonder how often that happens to us.) They arrived to find the stone already rolled away. They may have thought that Joseph, who owned the tomb, or Nicodemus who accompanied him, were acting on the same idea and were already inside, completing the burial rites.
Or perhaps something more nefarious. The stone rolled away, the Roman troops missing, the body gone—it all pointed to one thing. The authorities must have removed the body as a final humiliation. One of the women, who arrived at the tomb before most of her friends, turned and ran to tell the apostles. That was Mary Magdalene. She was out of breath when she reached them. Peter and John ran to the tomb to see what had happened, and she followed them, but she could only walk, panting.
By the time she got back, the men had already left. She stood there, crying at this final indignity. They (whoever they were) had committed one last sacrilege; they had desecrated his tomb and taken his body. They were probably doing unthinkable things to it right now, after which they would throw it on the garbage dump in the Hinnom valley, which is what happened to most execution victims.
This was too much. Not having slept for days, overcome with emotion, and finding herself all alone, she breaks into tears. When a couple of men there ask her, “Woman, why are you crying?” she bawls, “They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they have put him.” Even now, she doesn’t grasp of what has happened.
We can hardly blame her. The world has turned upside down and inside out. The prophet once said, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” But God had done just the opposite, had turned evil to good, put light for darkness, and transmuted unbearable bitterness into something unforgettably sweet.
Have you ever looked at something for a few seconds without really seeing it? Then suddenly it dawns on you what you are looking at? These people in the restaurant are your friends—this is a surprise party for your birthday! The face in the window isn’t your neighbor. It’s your oldest friend – you haven’t seen him in three years – and he’s laughing at you from the other side. Or this place … this is the town you stayed in thirty years ago, when you first got married. We’ve all had that experience, when things seen but not understood suddenly come into focus. For the Magdalene, everything came into focus at the sound of her name: Mary. Suddenly she knew the men to be angels, the Gardener to be her savior, and the Garden tomb a little bit of heaven.
Some of us have had a similar experience. We see the tomb with the stone tossed away. We believe the tidings of the apostles. And then God speaks our name. That’s when everything comes into focus. This, all of this, was also for you and me. The stone was not only rolled from the Garden tomb; it’s been rolled from our graves, as well.
In this retelling of the events of the first Easter, John the Apostle and Mary Magdalene narrate the story of the morning of Jesus’s resurrection from their own perspectives. Two of California Road Missionary Church’s resident actors, Cam Matteson and Janelle Rundquist, bring their stories to life. Watching this will give you a new appreciation for the biblical account of the resurrection!
There is a story in 2 Kings chapter 18 that reads like the Hollywood script of a twenty-first century political thriller. A country’s young leader is faced with a dreadful decision. His country must either submit to a ruthless foreign power’s unfair demands or go to war against an opponent whose military might dwarfs their own.
The young leader is Judah’s King Hezekiah, who reigned around the turn of the seventh century BCE. He was an excellent leader who won his people’s confidence in the early years of his reign. But after fourteen years on the throne, Assyria, the superpower of the day, demanded that Hezekiah and his people pay the Assyrians tribute. Hezekiah did not want to do this, but neither did he want to expose his country to a hopeless war. He paid the tribute.
But yielding to a bully only invites further bullying. It was not long before Assyria was back. This time the demand was nothing less than the dissolution of the nation. The king of Assyria sent his shrewdest envoys, backed by a large army, to Jerusalem to negotiate the dissolution of the Judean government and the transfer of national land and wealth to Assyria.
What follows is something like a chess game. The king refuses to speak to the diplomatic team from Assyria but sends representatives out to them. The Assyrian king’s underlings are not important enough to speak directly to Israel’s king. If they have something to say, let them say it to his subordinates.
But his subordinates are completely outmatched by the Assyrians. Their spokesman insists on holding talks before the public. This is not because they care about the public, but because they think they can leverage the public into pressuring the government to surrender. The Judean representatives ask that negotiations be conducted in Aramaic rather than Hebrew. They worry that Judah’s citizens will believe the malicious propaganda that is being spread. The Assyrians completely ignore them and continue speaking in Hebrew – perhaps more loudly than before.
The Assyrian representative publicly blames the conflict on Judah’s king by claiming that he has “rebelled” against Assyria. He then mocks Judah’s defense plans and berates her (potential) allies. He makes the idea of going to war against Assyria appear absolutely ridiculous. He even taunts Hezekiah with a wager: “My master will give you two thousand horses to help you in your war (though I doubt you can find two thousand horsemen to ride them), and, even so, his B-team will still destroy you!”
Because the Assyrians know that King Hezekiah is a pious, God-fearing man (and that many of Judah’s citizens are not), they mock his faith. “Oh, you are trusting in your God! That’s just what the people of Hamath and Arpad said, right before we wiped them out. That’s what Samaria claimed, before we conquered them and took their land.”
“Besides,” he taunts, “who do you think sent us to conquer you? It was the LORD himself, the God you worship. If you fight us, you are fighting Him.”
The Assyrian spokesman then addressed Judah’s people directly in their own language. (It would be like an English-speaking representative of the Chinese government purchasing air time from broadcast companies and streaming platforms to directly petition the American people to defy their president.) Using Hebrew, he warns the people not to put their trust in the LORD for deliverance. “That’s the kind of thing all our enemies think—right before we destroy them.”
This story, with its high stakes, devious tactics, and diplomatic intrigues shines a bright light on James 1:2-3, which states: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.”
James understood that our trials are a test of faith. This is so hard for us to remember. When we face a difficult trial – think of Hezekiah and the people of ancient Judah – we assume that our courage is being tested, or our intelligence, or our strength. Perhaps they are, but the primary test is always of our faith. Will we trust God or not? In the course of any trial, we may be tempted to doubt God’s intentions (2 Kings 18:25) or power (18:33-35); question our fitness (18:23-24); worry about our past actions (18:22); fear for our future (18:27); and make compromises for our comfort (18:31).
But it all boils down to one thing: will we trust God or not? We think it is more complicated than that. But once we know what the right thing to do is (which can be very difficult to determine), the only question left is whether we will trust God and do it. It is our faith, as James clearly states, that is being tested.
It helps to know what we are being tested on. If I have a major exam in my History of Western Civilization class, it will help me prepare if I know what the subject of the test is: is it on Greek supremacy from the time of Alexander through the Carthaginian War, or the Western response to Hitler’s expansion in pre-World War Two Europe, or the rise of nationalism in western nations in the first quarter of the 21st century? I’d better know what I’m being tested on.
We do know what we are being tested on when trials come our way: our faith in God. The test is not meant to fail us but to show us where we are and help us get to where we want to go.
How do we get better at faith? We start by doing what we know God wants us to do. We don’t need to go off to a monastery or enroll in seminary (unless that is what obedience to God requires). There are things for us to do right where we are: invite the neighbor we don’t know well to dinner or to church; love a fellow church member by a word of encouragement (or even rebuke); speak well of a former friend who speaks evil of us (blessing those who curse us); fast for a day and pray—or a thousand other things perfectly suited to our lives. Every act of obedience exercises, and so strengthens, faith.
In the final tests of faith, death and judgment, it is those who have exercised faith (Paul refers to this as “the obedience of faith”) who pass the test.
There was much more going on at Jesus’s “Triumphal Entry” than most of us realize. This sermon examines the various groups that were present and the motivations behind their actions. It also shows why Jesus’s entry in Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday is relevant to us in the 21st century.
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Today is Palm Sunday, when the church celebrates what is known as “The Triumphal Entry.” It was Jesus’s highly symbolic entrance into the Capitol City just days before he was betrayed and executed. Most of us know the broad outlines of the story. Jesus rode into Jerusalem amid the cheers of a welcoming crowd. Five days later, those same people shouted for his execution. The fickle crowd turned against Jesus and had him crucified.
But that is not the entire story. It is not even the same story. For us to understand what is going on as Jesus rides into Jerusalem, we need to know who the different groups are that were involved and how each looked at what was happening.
The first group is comprised of Jesus and his disciples, though we should probably distinguish between them, since Jesus and the disciples understood what was happening in very different ways. The disciples were – this is the Evangelist Mark’s description – “astonished.” Jesus, who had always skirted the “messiah” question – warning his apostles not to talk about it, ordering the demonized to be silent – was now leading a massive crowd of pilgrims into the city, like a general marshaling his troops. Jesus had taken charge.
I suspect the disciples thought: “Finally! We’ve been waiting for this for three years! This is the beginning of the revolution. Jesus is taking his rightful place at last.”
When the crowds acknowledged Jesus to be the coming one – that’s shorthand for Israel’s messiah and the king, and he didn’t silence them; when the Pharisees begged him to tell the crowds to be quiet, and he refused, replying that if they were quiet the very stones would cry out – that’s when the disciples knew it was really happening. I think they must have been frightened, invigorated, and deliriously happy all at the same time.
The next groups are the crowds, and I say “groups” intentionally because there is more than one and we won’t understand what is going on unless we distinguish between them. The crowds that hailed Jesus as Messiah and king comprised one group. For the most part, they were pilgrims who had traveled to Jerusalem from Galilee for the Feast of Passover. That group included some of the same people who, a year earlier, tried to force the kingship on Jesus. (You can ready about that in John 6.) They want change and they believe Jesus is one to bring it.
But Galileans don’t comprise the entire crowd. There are thousands from around Judea and from Jerusalem. Many of these people know about Jesus and some have heard him teach, but they have had far less face time with Jesus than the Galileans. And there are still others from Jewish communities in Syria, Egypt, and around the Mediterranean, most of whom have never heard of Jesus. It is primarily the Galileans who chant Psalm 118:26, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.” Others in the crowd doesn’t know what to think.
So, it wasn’t the people hailing Jesus as king who turned against him five days later. They probably didn’t know about his crucifixion until it was already happening. The people who shouted for Jesus to be crucified were Judeans who only knew what their leaders – Jesus’s enemies – told them.
Those leaders comprise yet another group. They have been opposed to Jesus for a couple of years, and since the Feast of Tabernacles, which was six months earlier, they have been working on plans to get rid of him. As they watch him entering the city, they do not see the arrival of their new national leader, like the Galileans; they do not see a Messiah, like the disciples. They see a volatile firebrand who is about to bring the iron fist of Rome down on them. They’re scared. At a recent meeting of the nation’s highest ruling body, members were saying: “What are we accomplishing? …If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him…” (John 11:47).
The raising of Lazarus from the dead had sent the nation’s leaders into a tailspin. It had happened a few months earlier, and the religious leaders had been beside themselves ever since. All their efforts to stop Jesus had failed, and now he had performed an outstanding miracle right in their own backyard. They were desperate to get rid of him. “If we let him go on like this,” they had concluded, “… the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation” (John 11:48).
The other group present werethe Romans – the Roman army, to be precise. Each year at Passover, the Roman prefect deployed troops to Jerusalem to keep the peace. Passover was the Jews’ Independence Day, and at Passover nationalist fervor ran high. There had been much civil unrest at past festivals, even violent insurrections. So, now, at Passover time, you can’t look left or right without seeing a Roman soldier. They’re everywhere.
So, why didn’t the soldiers see what was going on? Or if they did, why didn’t they stop it? That presents such a problem to some scholars that they have claimed the church made up the triumphal entry. They insist that if anything like what John describes had really take place, the Roman military would have intervened.
But they are mistaken. They forget that the Roman army was comprised of men from all around the Mediterranean. There were Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Italians, Asians, Cappadocians, Libyans, and many others. But there were no Jews. Jews didn’t serve in the Roman army. That means that there were few, if any, military personnel who understood what the crowds were yelling in Aramaic. They would have heard the noise and the cheers, but they would not have seen that as a threat.
Neither would the Roman soldiers have grasped the symbolism in Jesus’s choice of a donkey’s colt for a mount. Romans – especially Roman soldiers – knew all about “triumphal entries.” Whenever Caesar or one of his generals returned victorious from a battle in which at least 5,000 enemy combatants had been killed, a great celebration – a triumphal entry – took place. Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem didn’t look anything like that.
When Caesar returned from battle, tens of thousands lined the road into Rome. They cheered as he rode by in a chariot, pulled by great steeds. Behind him was a long line of captives, including kings and generals. The procession would wind its way to the arena, where thousands gathered to watch selected captives fight wild animals.
Is it any wonder the Roman soldiers missed the triumph of Jesus’s triumphal entry. They did not see a mighty warrior. They saw a man in commoner’s clothing. There were no great steeds, only a young donkey. And where were the captive kings and generals? They saw peasants and children
Here is something to remember. What God sees as important and what people see as important are two different things. For the most part, the world is always excited about all the wrong things. If we follow their lead, we will miss the right things – we will miss what God is doing in the world. This is a big problem for many of us who confess Jesus Lord.
Now that we know the parties involved, we are ready to look at what is taking place. Look at verse 12: “The great crowd that had come for the feast…” (These are Galilean festivalgoers who arrived in Jerusalem before Jesus. The Jerusalemites hadn’t come for the feast; they were already there.) “…heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him…”
But palm trees don’t grow around Jerusalem, which is another reason historians doubt the validity of the Triumphal Entry. They do, however, grow in Jericho, and thousands of Galileans had just passed through Jericho on their way to the festival. Jesus himself had come through Jericho at the head of a caravan just days before. The fact that they had cut palm branches and brought them with them suggests they had this in mind before they got to Jerusalem. This was, I think, a second attempt on the part of Galileans to force Jesus to declare himself Israel’s king. And this time, Jesus did not stop them.
Alongside the Galileans is a sub-group of the Jerusalemites. There are the people who were present when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and the friends whom they had told about it. They also came out to meet Jesus. This is verse 17: “Now the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word. Many people, because they had heard that he had given this miraculous sign, went out to meet him.”
As Jesus rode by, people in the crowd (these are probably the Galileans) began shouting, “Hosanna,” which is Hebrew and means something like, “O save!” I say, “something like” because by the first century the word was used as a general shout of praise or celebration. If you’d asked the people shouting it to define it, they might have struggled. It was like our word, “Hooray!” We all know what it means but not many of us could define it.
They also cried, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the King of Israel!” (John 12:13). If the Roman soldiers had understood Aramaic, there would have been problems right then and there. They didn’t; but the Pharisees and scribes did. The crowd was shouting to Jesus the words of Psalm 118, which was sung every year at Passover.
“The one who comes” or, literally, “the coming one” was a title for the Messiah. These people were hailing Jesus as Israel’s savior and king. Some of the Pharisees begged Jesus to stop people from chanting this. But this time, for the first time, Jesus welcomed it.
Look at verses 14 and 15: “Jesus found a young donkey and sat upon it. As it is written, ‘Do not be afraid, O Daughter of Zion; see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.’ At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that they had done these things to him.”
Why a donkey’s colt? If Jesus wanted to make an impression, wouldn’t he have done better to borrow a horse—maybe even a chariot? Peddlers rode donkeys, not kings. But Jesus knew something that the Roman soldiers didn’t know and that the disciples momentarily forgot: in the Old Testament, Zechariah had prophesied that Israel’s king would ride into Jerusalem on a donkey’s colt.
Jesus was intentionally fulfilling Zechariah’s prophecy: “See, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt” – in other words, coming in peace. But the disciples, even the ones Jesus sent to get the colt, didn’t realize at the time that Zechariah was writing about Jesus. They were caught up in a great big story, playing a role in it, and didn’t even know it.
I think that happens to us too. Whenever we do what Jesus says, we get caught up in his story and become a part of it, even when we don’t realize it.
When Jesus’s adversaries heard the shouts, saw the palm branches waving, and cloaks being laid on the road in front of Jesus (which was what people had done at the coronation of King Jehu), they were confounded. Look at verse 19. “So, the Pharisees said to one another, ‘See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him.’”
The Pharisees and their fellow-conspirators had decided not to arrest Jesus during the feast, for fear of inciting a riot. Now, they were having second thoughts. Could they afford to wait? The whole city could be a bloodbath by week’s end.
Blood was shed, as we know, but it was Jesus’s blood. The story of which he was a part – was the lead character – the story that had begun long before Zechariah’s prophecy, that went back to the foundations of the world, was coming to its climax. The Lamb of God was being offered – was offering himself – for the sins of the world.
This is the story that we are in, the story of the God who pursues us, the maker who restores us, the Father who comes running to meet us. It is a love story, an adventure story, and a divine comedy all rolled into one. And everything turns out all right for those who belong to Jesus.
But from inside the story, things often look like they will turn out all wrong, which is why “we live by faith, not by sight.” After a tornado swept through a small town, a local builder had more work than he could handle. His own home had been destroyed and he and his wife were living in a one-bedroom apartment while he worked on everyone else’s homes. He worked hard and was fair to everyone, with the possible exception of himself and his wife.
His final post-tornado build was for a businessman who owned properties all around the area and for whom he already had done a great deal of work. This was not a repair; it was a demolition and new construction. The businessman visited the worksite weekly, and sometimes several times a week, to make sure everything was being done to his satisfaction. The builder just wanted to get this one done, so he could finally start work on his own place, but he was conscientious and he did his work well.
When the house was finished, the businessman was there to receive the keys. He said to the builder, “Look, I know I’ve been tough on you. You have been working hard and I pushed you even harder … but I wanted this house to be just right because I was having it built for a special person.” Then he handed the keys back to the builder and said, “These are yours. You didn’t know it, but all this time you’ve been building this house for yourself and for your wife.”
As we go through life, doing our work, struggling over hardships, helping others for Christ’s sake, we don’t realize that God is using these things to build us. We won’t fully realize that until we stand before the Lord in glory.
“At first his disciples did not understand all this. Only when Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that they had done these things to him.” I suspect that when we get to heaven, we shall have this same experience repeatedly.
Things we didn’t understand, that made no sense to us at all, will light up with meaning. We will see God’s hand everywhere, bringing good, righting wrong, redeeming the time. Sometimes we will see that his hand was operating – to our joy and amazement – through us. Sometimes – to our shame – that his hand was operating despite us. But, at all times, he was doing what was right and good.
The key to making sense of our past – and our present, for that matter – is found in the words, “only when Jesus was glorified…” When Jesus is glorified, the light that comes from him makes things clear. But in isolation from Jesus and his glory, our circumstances are a book written in a language we can’t understand.
We don’t have to wait for the new age to glorify Jesus. Our lives can be all for his glory now. When they are, things we’ve never understood will shine with meaning. But we see this only in the light of Jesus’s glory.
One of the books I most enjoyed reading is J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Professor Tolkien’s character, Aragorn, reminds me of Jesus. Though many people criticize him and some hate him outright – and almost no one understands him – he labors for their good in relative obscurity. Only a handful of people know who he really is: their rightful king.
Then the day comes when he enters into the great city and reveals his true identity. A herald proclaims: “Here is Aragorn son of Arathorn, chieftain of the Dunedain of Arnor, Captain of the Host of the West, bearer of the Star of the North, wielder of the Sword Reforged, victorious in battle, whose hands bring healing, the Elfstone, Elessar of the line of Valandil, Isildur’s son, Elendil’s son of Numenor.”[1]
Then the herald cries, “‘Shall he be king and enter into the City and dwell there?’ And all the people and all the host cried ‘Yea!’ in one voice.”
This scene has a parallel in real life. Every time a person acknowledges Jesus as Lord and welcomes him into his or her life, there is a triumphal entry. And those who welcome him now will be welcomed by him then, when the King returns. He will say, “Come, you blessed of my Father, enter into the joy of your Lord!”
Today, I serve as herald to the King of Glory. “Here is Jesus the Messiah, the Second Adam, the Bright and Morning Star, the First and the Last, Son of David, Son of Man, Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, Fear of Jacob, Lion of Judah, Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.”
Shall he be king and enter your life and dwell there? What say you: Yea or Nay?
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[1] Ken Langley, Zion, Illinois, in Preaching Today.com
Biologically speaking, before you became who you are, you were a zygote—a single fertilized cell with mind-bending potential. Soon afterwards – within a matter of hours – you were a morula (Latin for “mulberry”). A morula is comprised of 60 or more cells, all lumped together. At this point in your biological development, you looked like a microscopic mulberry. Your biological potential, originally housed in the DNA of parental gametes, was still unthinkably vast, yet slightly reduced.
By about five days into your biological journey, you became a blastocyst. At this point, you were comprised of something like 150 cells. At each stage of development, you became bigger and better defined, but always at the cost of potentiality. You started with the potential to be anyone within the confines of the DNA in your cell. Since there are 3.2 billion nucleotide pairs on our chromosomes (humans have 46 of them), and every one of those pairs can combine in four possible ways, that is a lot of potential. By day 5, the billions of different versions of you that had been possible had decreased. You were on your way to becoming yourself.
You were an embryo before you knew it—quite literally. Significant development occurred during the embryonic phase, which means that your potential (though still vast) has been further narrowed. Nine weeks in and you are a fetus. You’re beginning to look like a human being and even like a particular human being, but advances in development always comes at the cost of diminishing potential.
By the time you were born, your biological potential (for example, the color of your eyes, the shape of your face, the complexion of your skin, your body type) was narrower than it was when you were a morula. With each step of development, the breadth of potentiality is diminished. In return for this expenditure of potential, you became more substantially (and not just potentially) yourself.
I am now a 67-year-old man. My potential as a biological creature has been significantly reduced from when I was a child. I have paid (and continue to pay) the piper of potentiality. What I have received for that payment has been me—not a potential me, but the real-deal, existential me.
I hope I’ve been worth the price.
But even though I am past middle age, I am still becoming. This seems a hugely important fact about me and about all humans. It’s true that my potential has been diminished by the volitional choices I have initiated and the biological changes I cannot stop, but it has not been exhausted. I have become a particular me rather than many possible versions of me, but the particular me is not yet fixed. I can still change, grow, and become. The potential to become something I am not now is at the heart of what it means to be human.
(What I’ve written in the paragraph above is not meant to convey the idea that I am who I am solely on the basis of my own choices. My choices are an important factor in my development, but hardly the only one. They are, however, the one for which I am responsible.)
Humans never stop changing. Still, an older person, say someone my age, might say: “Of course, I changed when I was younger, but not anymore. I settled into who I was going to become a long time ago.”
Nonsense. People continue to change, regardless of their age. Their bodies change whether or not they want them to. Brains grow and atrophy. Muscle mass increases for a time, then begins to decrease. Our bodies replace billions of cells every day. We are always developing into something different than what we are now.
Change on the biological level is not the only kind of change humans experience, nor is it the most important. Humans are a biological/spiritual hybrid, and transformation happens across both areas. Man (in the generic, Genesis 1:27 sense, comprised of both male and female) is becoming something that he/she is not now, but whether that something is godlike or devilish depends on the individual.
That is what C. S. Lewis had in mind when he said: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.”
A serious thing indeed. I am progressing toward an end in which I will be joyful and joy-inspiring or wretched and revolting. That I will be one or the other is certain. Which I become depends on my attitude (in the sense used by pilots) toward God—my orientation in reference to him. If I am moving toward him, I am moving toward godlike joy. If I am moving away from him, I am headed toward wretchedness and ruin.
This is why Lewis claimed: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”
I will still be in process of becoming when I die. It is the resurrection that will seal who I will become, though the process of growth and change may (and, I think, will) continue. To be human is to change. God sent his Son so that the change might be into eternal joy and not unending wretchedness.
When he looks at me, I hope he thinks the price was worth it.
Nearly everyone who knows anything about the Gospels would say that Peter was the leader of the apostolic band. There is good reason for saying so. His nickname (Peter) appears 156 times in the New Testament and his given name (Simon) dozens of additional times. Peter was the first of the apostles to declare that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah. Jesus spent more time with Peter than he did with most of the other disciples, and gave him more tasks to do than he gave the others. In lists of the apostles, Peter’s name always comes first, which was an important indicator of rank in ancient literature.
Peter certainly seems to have been the leader of the apostles and yet there was a time when his leadership seems to have been in question. Witness the arguments among the disciples, which happened on more than one occasion (Mark 9:34; Luke 9:46; 22:24) about which of them was the greatest. Peter’s supremacy was apparently not taken for granted by the other apostles. They even argued about it on the eve of Jesus’s crucifixion!
Very interestingly, Peter disappears from each of the four Gospels for a period of time before the triumphal entry. (I first learned of this from Leon Morris’s great commentary on John.) For example, Peter is not mentioned between chapters 19 and 26 of Matthew. It was during this time that James and John, the sons of Zebedee, went secretly to Jesus to request the highest positions in his organization. That was probably not a coincidence.
In Luke, the absence occurs between chapters 18-22, which covers the same time span as the gaps in Matthew and in the more condensed narrative of Mark. In John’s Gospel, the gap occurs between chapters 7 and 13. Peter is conspicuously absent at the raising of Lazarus. This is particularly apparent when Thomas steps up as spokesman for the apostles (John 11:16).
That Peter is not mentioned is successive chapters of the Gospels is not sufficient evidence to prove his absence from the apostolic band, but the fact that these reference gaps occur during the same time period across all four Gospels is very persuasive. So, let us assume that Peter had to leave the apostolic band for a space of time – a few weeks to a couple of months. Let us assume that family issues forced his temporary departure. (He was, after all, married, and his mother-in-law had been seriously ill at an earlier time in the Gospel record.)
We can imagine that Peter might have been a little uncertain of his position of leadership when he returned to the apostles. What may have made things worse – may have caused Peter considerable anxiety – was the seating arrangement at the Passover meal on the night of Jesus’s betrayal. If Leon Morris was right (and I expect he was), Peter was not seated on Jesus’s immediate right or left—the highest places of honor. This seems to be the case, since we know that the unnamed disciple (probably John) was sitting next to Jesus when Peter signaled him to ask Jesus which of the disciples would betray him. Seating arrangements were carefully planned in first century Israel, and if Jesus had Peter seated well away from himself, both Peter and the other disciples may have interpreted that as a demotion.
Peter’s return to the apostolic band, which seems to have happened not long before the Triumphal Entry, may have led to the crucifixion eve argument over which of the apostles was greatest. Peter himself was likely uncertain about where he fit—and worried about it. This might explain why he stubbornly told Jesus, who had washed the feet of one disciple after another, that he would never wash his feet. It may also lie behind Peter’s vehement contradiction of his master when Jesus predicted that all the apostles would forsake him. Peter, remember, said: “Even if all fall away” – that is, all these other guys – “I will not.”
It may also explain why Peter, who carried a short sword, followed Jesus all the way to the house of Annas, the former high priest who still called the shots in Israel’s politics. Did Peter think that liberating Jesus from the enemy would prove his worth?
One can imagine Peter thinking to himself: “Which of us is the greatest? That’s easy. The one who risks his life. The one who frees his Lord or dies trying. He’s the greatest.”
Of course, Peter didn’t die trying. But something in him did die that night: his self-confidence, self-importance, and misplaced sense of honor. Three days later, they were resurrected and transformed into confidence in God, the importance of friends, and honor for his Lord.
The Way Home 
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