Jesus rose from the dead. We have an amazing God. Go update your Facebook status and tell all of your friends why you celebrate Jesus’ resurrection.
Today there will be live streaming of Mars Hill’s Easter services all day at marshillchurch.org/live.
How in the world did the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, the most sacred and central event in Christianity, come to be represented by a fluffy bunny who lays colored eggs and gives out cheap candy to kids? The Easter Bunny is a commercialized cultural commonplace around the world (though it may be losing ground to the Easter Bilby in Australia), yet for all its familiarity, the Easter Bunny's true origins are a mystery.
Eggs and rabbits have been used as traditional symbols of springtime fertility and rebirth by various cultures throughout history. Eggs symbolize new life about to emerge, while hares and rabbits are conspicuous in the spring because they breed—like rabbits. The hare's association with Easter may be a holdover from the ancient pagan spring festivals of Europe. According to Bede, an 8th-century Anglo-Saxon church historian, the British pagans used to celebrate a spring feast in honor of the goddess Eostre, who was represented by the hare.
When Pope Gregory the Great (540-604) sent missionaries to the British Isles, he instructed them to adapt the existing religious places and festivals for Christian use. He wrote, "Since the people are accustomed, when they assemble for sacrifice, to kill many oxen in sacrifice to the devils, it seems reasonable to appoint a festival for the people by way of exchange. The people must learn to slay their cattle not in honor of the devil, but in honor of God and for their own food…" Because the celebration of the Resurrection replaced the old spring feast of Eostre, the Christian holiday came to be called Easter, and Eostre's pet animal the hare apparently came along for the ride.
The first known mention of the actual Easter Bunny comes from Germany in the 1600s, where the cute little guy was known as the Osterhase, or "Oschter Haws." German immigrants came to America with a tradition in which the kids would build nests around the house out of hats and bonnets, and if they had been good children, Osterhase would leave brightly-colored eggs in the nests. The tradition grew and spread over time, and eventually Osterhase turned into the Easter Bunny and began giving out chocolate and candy as well as eggs.
Easter is still celebrated as a major holiday all around the globe, but the truth of Jesus' gory crucifixion and glorious resurrection is often obscured by the garish cartoon bunny in the stores and the gaudy displays of springtime fashion among the religious. Traditions of cute bunnies, colored eggs, and little girls in pink dresses are harmless enough, but at the same time we must not let anything obstruct our view of the earth-shattering reality represented by Easter. There's nothing cute or cuddly about the fact that we killed God. When we were his enemies, he came to us, suffered in our place through the horror that was Good Friday, and rose from his grave on Easter Sunday so that we will one day rise from ours. The curse is broken, and we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus because we know we will one day experience it (1 Cor. 15:20-23). Let's be joyful, let's never shrink from speaking about Jesus' death and resurrection, and let's never trivialize it.
My encouragement to all Christian preachers is to not get too fancy on Easter.
It is the day we want to be incredibly clear about the death of Jesus for our sins and the resurrection of Jesus for our salvation. We do not need to be clever. We need to be clear. And we need to add to that clarity a fitting and authentic excitement for the victory of Jesus Christ over Satan, sin, death, hell, and the wrath of God while calling sinners to be saved.
For those preachers wanting to do a good job this Sunday, I felt compelled to share with you bits from a summary of N.T. Wright’s amazing tome on the resurrection, as they could be most helpful. I also want to thank my researchers at the Docent Group for doing the summary on which this blog is based. I would encourage all pastors who can afford it to consider their services.
I would encourage every preacher to go out and buy this unprecedented book. Despite his views on justification, which I disagree with, this book is so outstanding that it has to be read, as even Tim Keller evidenced by making his chapter on the resurrection in A Reason for God basically a series of summaries and quotes from Wright’s book.
N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God looks at why Christianity began and why it took the shape it did. N.T. Wright (a renowned New Testament scholar) answers these questions: What precisely happened at Easter? What did the early Christians mean when they said that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead? What can be said today about this belief?
This book is third in Wright's series Christian Origins and the Question of God, and it sketches a map of ancient beliefs about life after death in both the Greco-Roman and Jewish worlds. It then highlights the fact that the early Christians’ belief about the afterlife belonged firmly on the Jewish spectrum, while introducing several new mutations and sharper definitions. This, together with other features of early Christianity, forces the historian to read the Easter narratives in the gospels, not simply as late rationalizations of early Christian spirituality, but as accounts of two actual events: the empty tomb of Jesus and his appearances.
The early Christians' answer was that Jesus had indeed been bodily raised from the dead; that was why they hailed him as the messianic son of God. No modern historian has come up with a more convincing explanation. Facing this question, we are confronted to this day with the most central issues of worldview and theology.
A brief five-point summary of Wright’s book-length argument would be as follows:
Wright proposes that in the first century, “resurrection” did not mean “life after death” in the sense of “the life that follows immediately after bodily death.” [1] According to Wright, “Here there is no difference between pagans, Jews and Christians…Pagans denied this possibility; some Jews affirmed it as a long-term future hope; virtually all Christians claimed that is had happened to Jesus and would happen to them in the future.” [2] In other words, “resurrection” was a way of “speaking of a new life after ‘life after death’ in the popular sense, a fresh living embodiment following a period of death-as-a-state.” [3]
According to Wright, the meaning of resurrection as “life after ‘life after death’” cannot be overemphasized. This is due in large part because much modern writing continues to use “resurrection” as a synonym for “life after death.” Belief in “resurrection” meant belief in what Wright calls a “two-step story.” Resurrection itself is preceded by an interim period of death-as-a-state. “Where we find a single-step story—death-as-event being followed at once by a final state, for instance of disembodied bliss—the texts are not talking about resurrection. Resurrection involves a definite content (some sort of re-embodiment) and a definite narrative shape (a two-step story, not a single-step one). This meaning is constant throughout the ancient world.”[4]
Most books on the resurrection of Jesus begin by studying the gospel narratives and then work outwardly from this vantage point to an analysis of the appropriate pagan and Jewish sources found in antiquity. Wright takes the exact opposite approach. He begins with a study on resurrection (or, better, the lack thereof) in ancient paganism and then narrows the scope of his investigation tighter and tighter, concluding with a study of the resurrection as recorded by the writers of the canonical gospels.
“In so far as the ancient non-Jewish world had a Bible, its Old Testament was Homer. And in so far as Homer has anything to say about resurrection, he is quite blunt: it doesn’t happen.” [5] The idea of resurrection is denied in ancient paganism from Homer all the way to the Athenian dramatist Aeschylus who wrote, “Once a man has died, and the dust has soaked up his blood, there is no resurrection.” [6] Wright provides a helpful summary: “Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false. Many believed that the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism, nobody believed resurrection.” [7]
One of the most influential writers in antiquity was Plato. According to Wright, “neither in Plato nor in the major alternatives just mentioned (i.e. Aristotle) do we find any suggestion that resurrection, the return to bodily life of the dead person, was either desirable or possible.” [8]
This view is also evident in the writings of Cicero. “Cicero is quite clear, and completely in the mainstream of Greco-roman thought: the body is a prison-house. A necessary one for the moment; but nobody in their right mind, having got rid of it, would want it or something like it back again…Resurrection was not an option. Those who followed Plato or Cicero did not want a body again; those who followed Homer knew they would not get one.” [9]
After surveying several other ancient pagan writers and philosophers Wright concludes: “Nobody in the pagan world of Jesus’ day and thereafter actually claimed that somebody had been truly dead and had then come to be truly, and bodily, alive once more.” [10] Death, in ancient paganism, was a one-way street. According to Wright, “the road to the underworld ran only one way. Throughout the ancient world, from its ‘bible’ of Homer and Plato, through its practices (funerals, memorial feasts), its stories (plays, novels, legends), its symbols (graves, amulets, grave-goods) and its grand theories, we can trace a good deal of variety about the road to Hades, and about what one might find upon arrival. As with all one-way streets, there is bound to be someone who attempts to drive in the opposite direction. One hears of a Protesilaus, an Alcestis or a Nero redivivus, once or twice in a thousand years. But the road was well policed. Would-be traffic violators (Sisyphus, Eurydice and the like) were turned back or punished. And even they occurred in what everybody knew to be myth.” [11] Wright notes: “We cannot stress too strongly that from Homer onwards the language of ‘resurrection’ was not used to denote ‘life after death’ in general, or any of the phenomena supposed to occur within such a life. The great majority of the ancients believed in life after death; many of them developed… complex and fascinating beliefs about it and practices in relation to it; but, other than within Judaism and Christianity, they did not believe in resurrection.” [12]
This evidence confirms that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is unique in all of history and worthy of our full throated conviction on Sunday.
[1] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 31.
[2] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 31.
[3] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 31.
[4] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 31.
[5] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 32.
[6] Quoted in N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 32.
[7] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 35.
[8] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 53.
[9] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 60.
[10] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 76.
[11] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 81-2.
[12] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 82-3.
Darrell Bock talked to the Resurgence at the recent Christian Book Expo about how to study the Gospels.
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) began ministry at the age of nineteen and went on to be the greatest theologian America has ever produced. Additionally, the Great Awakening began in 1734 in his Northampton, Massachusetts congregation with the young people who had drifted away from the church, but suddenly wanted to begin meeting with him about his sermons. In light of the great interest and controversy surrounding the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, Edwards wrote the classic book Religious Affections to speak of the works of regeneration wrought by the Holy Spirit. To explain the Holy Spirit's work in revival he also wrote The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, and the follow-up book, Thoughts on the Revival in New England. For those who want to learn more about the teachings and experiences of Jonathan Edwards, there is now an amazing Web site from Yale that you would be well served to spend hours and hours of your time exploring: The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University.
Today, my dear friend, John Piper, who is mentioned in the Time article, carries on the teachings and passion of Edwards. Anyone who has read Piper's classic book Desiring God or any of his other books, especially his most recent book Finally Alive on the doctrine of regeneration by the Holy Spirit, are immediately aware of his affection for and learning from Edwards.
Jesus was dead, and I mean really dead, on a cross, but he's not anymore.
That's how my son Timothy, a few years ago when he was three, explained to neighbors why he was so excited about Easter. No one referred me to a therapist, or to a cognitive development seminar. Those around me didn't see the horror of what I was doing to my children. Neither did I.
We didn't know that the Gospel, like Ginsu knives and blood pressure medicine, ought to be kept out of the reach of small children.
At least that's what one church was told recently, by a publisher of children's Sunday school curricula, according to Two Institutions, a blog about family and church matters.
The pastors at this church in Raleigh, North Carolina, were perplexed when they saw the Holy Week Sunday school lessons for preschoolers from "First Look," the publisher of the one to five year-old Sunday school class materials. There wasn't a mention of the resurrection of Jesus. Naturally, the pastors inquired about the oversight.
A Discovery Channel movie claims that the limestone boxes with the names of two Mary's, Joseph, Jesus and the "Judah, son of Jesus" discovered in 1982 in Jerusalem actually contain the DNA of Jesus, his parents and his "wife" Mary and his child.
When therefore he had gone out, Jesus said, "Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him; if God is glorified in Him, God will also glorify Him in Himself, and will glorify Him immediately" (John 13:31-32).
Jesus is now alone with His eleven men. These had remained faithful to Him as real disciples. He opens His heart, more fully than ever before. What He sets before them is His glory! But what a strange thing He says regarding that glory. It is as if the Savior says, "An event will take place on the morrow which, however painful it will be for both you and Me, in reality will be the event in which maximum glory will be brought to Me and My Father!"
What actually motivates us to serve the Lord? I ask this because many of those in the ministry-even in the Reformed ministry-are working from the wrong motives. Some are motivated to make a name for themselves. Others are preaching or teaching or writing primarily to earn money. Some want to attract large audiences. Building their own little ecclesiastical empires over which they can be the authority motivates some. Then there are those who desire to impress people with their theological knowledge. Christian ministers, educators and writers who are wrongly motivated are way off track. They have forgotten that Paul's most powerful motive for dedicating his life to the ministry was the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The most significant revelation of God's grace and God's love ever given to mankind is the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. The divine mystery, revealed openly in the cross of Christ, contains heights we cannot scale and depths we cannot plumb. It is a truly amazing paradox!
The Resurgence is a movement that resources multiple generations to live for Jesus so that they can effectively reach their cities with the Gospel by staying culturally accessible and Biblically faithful.
