There never was an event in the whole of
history like the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was the trigger for an
explosion that echoes throughout the world to this day. It fulfilled the
promises God had made long before to a tiny nation called Israel, turning their
faith into a world religion. The faith to which it gave birth, Christianity, has
sent out missionaries, from the first apostles to the present day, to proclaim
the Good News throughout the earth, most often at great cost and suffering, all
of which, in his name, have been accepted joyfully. It has been the power
through which civilizations have risen, through which empires have been laid
waste. It has been the focus, throughout the ages, of ongoing hostility and
attack, often bringing it low, but from which it has always risen again. More
even than those of the Big Bang, its repercussions surround us still, and the
hedonistic and secular world in which we live has been powerless to
still it. The consequences of that empty Easter Sunday tomb haunt us still.
Why should this event, by world secular
standards so insignificant, have had so tremendous an effect? It begins with the
very evident facts of suffering, sorrow, sickness, pain, toil and above all,
death. Human beings have tried to make sense of these things for millennia. Our
in-built sense of justice rejects them as wrong. There have been many proposed
solutions to this problem, none of them of any lasting significance.
Israel, from whom our faith comes, saw the
problem as the disconnection of human beings from their Creator, an event so
dramatically represented by the tale of Adam and Eve in the garden. Man, made,
as the Hebrew anthropology would have it, of the dust of the earth and the
breath of God, becomes a living being. Rejecting his unity with God, wanting to
become like God, he forfeits that divine life, and becomes mortal, “returning
to the dust from which he came,” with all the sad consequences with which we
are already familiar.
God, however, out of love, even for his
aberrant creation, has a plan for us. Central to this plan are two essential
elements: a Covenant he has made with his people, and a mysterious figure
called the Messiah, the Anointed One, who will finally redeem mankind from sin,
suffering and death. Israel worshipped their God, not just as the God of
Israel, but as “King over all the earth.” They foresaw a time when all nations would
come to know the true God through Israel, a “light to the nations,” when
Jerusalem would become the capital and religious centre of the whole world.
The key to this was that mysterious figure,
the Messiah.
He was originally a king, a successor of David, who would sit on
David’s throne for ever. As their kings fell into disrepute, and their kingdom
was divided, the Messiah deepened into a figure proclaimed by their prophets, a
figure who, like the prophets themselves, became a Suffering Servant of God, on
whom “lies a punishment that brings us peace.” Finally, as their kingdom was
destroyed, living in exile, they understood that their only hope lay in a
direct intervention of God from heaven itself, as the prophet Daniel would have
it: “I gazed into the visions of the night, and saw, coming on the clouds, one
like a Son of Man.”
Then came Jesus. For a time, he seemed to fit
the profile of the Messiah. His teaching cut across the casuistry of the Jewish
leaders, for he “spoke with authority.” His miracles certainly made a
tremendous impression on his contemporaries. The hope of many in Israel, after
centuries of depression and oppression, was fixed on him. True, he said some
strange things, like his claims to divinity or his prophecies of suffering and
death, but at the time, these were rather glossed over.
Then came disaster. He was arrested,
tortured and crucified. His death was regarded as a cursed death, which put the
nail in the coffin of all his followers’ expectations. It was the end of
everything they had dreamed of, and made a mockery of their hopes that the
fullness of time had come, that Jesus of Nazareth was to be the Messianic
fulfillment of all God’s promises to Israel.
Then, the unbelievable happened. An empty
tomb, rumours of strange events. Then the shattering reality as he actually appeared before his disciples, showing
himself to have risen from the dead. In a flash, it all became clear to them.
All those prophecies about suffering were real and literal! He really had risen
from the dead! Jesus, descended from the house of David, the Suffering Servant, the Son Of God sent by the Father, really was the Messiah! All that God
had promised to Israel in the pages of the Old Testament, really had been
fulfilled in Jesus, but in a way they could never possibly have imagined.
But most of all, His death really had
destroyed death. For the Jews, death was the climax to sin and suffering. If it
was destroyed, so were all the others. If Jesus had really died and risen – and on the
evidence of the gospels, there can be little doubt of this – then death was no longer the ultimate reality. There was real hope for the world, since at last, all that was wrong with it,
could be set right.
After that, it was unstoppable. It spread
through Israel, the Middle East, the Roman Empire, the world. It is spreading
still. Its message is simple: in Jesus’ own words, “He is risen! He is Lord! He has ascended! he will come again! Repent and believe in the
Good News!” The key to this Good News in a nutshell is “He is Risen!”
We are the heirs to his promise. And through
faith in Jesus Christ, in submitting our lives to his will – which always wants
only the best for us – we are called to share in that promise. In the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ, death is no more than a passage to
indestructible, eternal life with him.
In the simplest command he ever gave us,
“follow me,” lies our hope of salvation. He has gone before us to prepare a
place for us. He loves us and wants us to follow him. He is our Way, our Truth,
our Life, the only path to the Father in heaven. In this world, we may still
have sorrows, but he calls upon us to stand firm; by dying and rising from the
dead, he has already conquered the world. He is our Resurrection and our Life.
Let us worship him and praise him, for he is our only hope. "The Lord has truly Risen. Alleluia!
Alleluia!"