Relocating To Elfland

I was recently asked by a local newspaper to submit an Easter message for readers. What follows emerged from some pondering of Acts 17:30–31.

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Tim Hill’s Hop is topping movie charts as we enter this season: can Easter in all its confectionary glory be saved? I couldn’t say what the world would be like without our friend the bunny, but as a Christian, I’m deeply interested in the question: what would the world be like without the resurrection of Jesus Christ?

To put this question in perspective, it helps to think about how totally disruptive Jesus’ resurrection really was. People die every day and don’t come back. We think it’s normal. We grieve, but there’s no stopping it, we think. And unless someone rises from the dead, dying is normal. It’s as normal as living, no better and no worse. It’s just part of how things are. It happens.

Jesus’ resurrection blows this all to pieces. In raising Jesus from the dead, God pronounced judgment on death. He announced to the world that death isn’t normal; it’s not how it’s supposed to be. It’s something terribly wrong with the world. It needs to be fixed.

But if, by raising Jesus, God judged our existence as we experience it in the world, if He delivered a verdict on our living and dying, He also announced something else: there’s a way things are supposed to be in this world, and there’s a way things aren’t supposed to be. “What is” doesn’t simply equal “what’s right.”

We may resent this judgment, we may think we’re perfectly competent to decide for ourselves how things ought to be – but there stands the resurrection of Jesus, in which God declares His judgment on our living and dying. Lots of people refuse to look this squarely in the face. Many simply deny the resurrection, little realizing that in doing so they are rejecting God’s judgment on our existence; and that, in rejecting God’s judgment, they are also rejecting any ultimate basis (beyond human preferences) for distinguishing “what is” (life and death) from “what ought to be” (life, not death). All that’s left is “what is”; there’s no objective basis for calling one thing “good” and another “evil.” Everything just happens. Whatever is (death, evil, suffering, etc.) is “normal” – and one “normal” thing is as “good” as the next. This would be our world without the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But Christ has risen! and why would we reject God’s verdict on our living and dying in His resurrection? It’s a verdict that promises life! It’s an announcement of grace: it tells us that the tragedy of death can be swallowed up in the everlasting comedy of life restored, and that Jesus is the Way to that life. We can live forever, body and soul, through Jesus; through Him, and no one else, God will finally put all things right. Jesus’ death was God’s judgment on human sin (“He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree”); His resurrection was God’s judgment on death, and it stands as the promise that anyone who believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life. These are the alternatives: embrace God’s verdict on our living and dying, and trust in the resurrected Jesus; or accept a world in which everything is normal. We should be thankful that, because Jesus is risen, this second alternative has forever been rendered an illusion.