“Gandalf, I thought you were dead, I thought I was dead. Is everything sad going to come untrue?”
— Sam the Hobbit in The Lord of the Rings
Wouldn’t it be unreal if there would be a way in which we could reverse or undo every tragic event in history or in our lives; if everything sad could come untrue? The sadness of death, divorce, war, disease, pain and poverty. The sadness of empty, wasted lives. The sadness of abuse, abandonment and rejection.
Reflecting on the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus on Easter, author Phillip Yancey writes that Easter actually holds out the awesome promise of reversibility. Nothing — no, not even death — is final. Even that could be reversed.
Why the whole event of Easter? Why did Jesus come and die and rise from the dead, and how does that help me? The Apostle John states that the whole reason why Jesus came from heaven, lived, died and rose was so that “by believing you might have life in his name.” How ironic. Here I always thought that Easter was only about Jesus rising from the dead, when in fact the whole story is that it is also about you and me rising from the dead.
Unlike Sam the Hobbit who only thought he was dead, the Bible, and Jesus himself declares that we actually are dead, spiritually speaking. That’s the tragedy of sin. That’s the reason why we feel a sense of alienation or distance from God. Our situation is far more serious and desperate than we ever dared imagine. But the good news of the gospel is that Jesus came and lived the life we should have lived, died the death we should have died and rose from the dead in order to give us life.
As CS. Lewis puts it: “If we let Him, He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into dazzling, radiant immortal creatures, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine. He will make us into bright stainless mirrors, which reflect back to God perfectly, though of course on a smaller scale, His own boundless power and delight and goodness. That is what we are in for, nothing less.”
Jesus didn’t come to merely make a few improvements to your life, but to give you a whole new one!
Easter gives a stable basis for hope — hope that things will get better; hope that there is a good purpose to life; hope that there will be an end to pain, suffering and sorrow; hope of an afterlife.
“If I take Easter as the starting point,” writes Yancey, “the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those whom he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality. Hope then flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life. Jesus rising from the dead is THE reality which, if you believe, will swallow up all other realities.
Is everything sad going to come untrue? If you believe in Easter the answer of Jesus is yes! Some day will be the great morning, the morning of which Easter is just the foreshadow.
David Bootsma is pastor of Free Grace Vernon (freegracevernon.com)
