This post is the Easter message I gave yesterday for a small church group. I hope it encourages you. He has risen, indeed!
Paul the Apostle said, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith . . . If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:13-14, 19; NIV).
If we have hope only in this temporal life, what a horror that is. If there’s no resurrection, we have been deceived into some kind of cult. Worse than that, evil ultimately wins. If there is no resurrection, all those who have been abused and oppressed over thousands of years of human history, who did not see justice in their lifetime, will never see it. The slaves that were born and died over hundreds of years in the American south died in futility. The men who lynched 14-year-old Emmett Till and bragged about it afterward got the last laugh.
To believe in the resurrection is to believe in justice.
Much of the Bible was written by people who suffered under oppression. The psalmist cries out to God, “Do not reject us forever! Why do you hide your face and forget our misery and oppression?” (Psalm 44:23-24).
The people who gave us the Bible were trampled on over and over by brutal governments century after century. Their country was destroyed and they lost everything—their nationhood, their land, their loved ones. Mothers and fathers and children were killed. People were uprooted and forced to walk on death marches hundreds of miles to a foreign land.
There are actually Assyrian pictures (carvings called “reliefs”) that portray some of these events. Families with wagons of belongings forced out of their city. Children watching as Assyrian soldiers torture men by flaying them alive.
In the book of Lamentations, we read a vivid description of what people in Jerusalem suffered:
“My eyes fail from weeping,
I am in torment within;
my heart is poured out on the ground
because my people are destroyed,
because children and infants faint
in the streets of the city.
They say to their mothers,
“Where is bread and wine?”
as they faint like the wounded
in the streets of the city,
as their lives ebb away
in their mothers’ arms. . .
To what can I liken you,
that I may comfort you,
Daughter Zion?
Your wound is as deep as the sea.
Who can heal you?” (Lam 3:11-13)
Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 587 BCE. For more than 500 years before Jesus was born, the Jewish people lived under the occupation of foreign governments. After the Assyrians and Babylonians came the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans. In five hundred years, a lot of people died without ever seeing justice.
During this time, the Jewish people wrestled with their faith in light of suffering. The writers of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Wisdom of Solomon asked why do bad things happen to good people? Where is God in all this suffering?
Their tradition taught, if you do good, God will bless you and if you do bad, God will punish you. The writers of Job and Ecclesiastes challenged that traditional teaching. They argued that good people can and do suffer. They didn’t always know how to make sense of that. But they concluded that somehow, someway God is trustworthy, and so they chose to sit in the discomfort of the mystery.
The writer of Wisdom of Solomon goes a step further, saying it’s not just a mystery.[1] Justice is coming. If you did not get justice in this life, justice will prevail in the age to come. In the Old Testament, there’s not much written about the afterlife. But during this time of living under oppression, Jewish theology became increasingly confident that God had not abandon them, and that God would make things right in the end.
The singer Brandi Carlisle has a song called “The Joke,” where she sings about people who have been bullied and ridiculed. She says don’t worry about the bullies because the joke is actually on them:
“Let ’em laugh while they can
Let ’em spin, let ’em scatter in the wind
I have been to the movies, I’ve seen how it ends
And the joke’s on them.”
I have been to the movies, I’ve seen how it ends.
That is exactly what the writer of Wisdom of Solomon says. He describes the end of the movie like this:
“Then the righteous will stand with great confidence in the presence of those who have oppressed them. . .When the wicked see them, they will be shaken with dreadful fear, and they will be amazed at the unexpected salvation of the righteous. They will speak to one another in repentance, and in anguish of spirit they will groan, ‘These are people we once held in derision and made a byword of reproach—what fools that we were!’” (5:1-4; NRSVUE).
Did you know the whole concept of hell was originally good news for the downtrodden? It meant oppressors’ eyes would be opened to the evil they had done, and they would weep in repentance. Hell is, in part, their anguish upon realizing the horror of the atrocities.
Early church father, Gregory of Nyssa described hell as the pain of being purged of evil. He writes, “The divine judgment [involves] separating good from evil and pulling the soul toward communion in blessedness. It is the tearing apart of what has grown together which brings pain to the one who is being pulled.”[2] In other words, God will wrench out the evil that has become embedded in a person, restoring their wholeness.
In the end justice wins because even the oppressor comes to repentance and is transformed. That is why the early Christians longed for the resurrection. At the resurrection, “Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” When the slaveholder bows in repentance to the King of Kings, that is the ultimate day of truth and reconciliation.
To believe in the resurrection is to believe in justice.
And if we ever doubt the resurrection, we have only to look for the ways resurrecting power is already at work, even as we await its fullness.
In Ephesians we read, “When you heard the word of truth, the good of your salvation, and believed in him, you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it” (Eph 1:13-14).
The Holy Spirit’s activity is the guarantee, the evidence we have right now.
Paul prays for “you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being” (Eph 3:16). The very same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives within you at this very moment (Rom 8:11).
Scripture says, “We know we have passed from death to life when we love each other” (1 John 3:14). We know, that is, gain confidence in, the resurrection when the Spirit empowers us with patience, kindness, selflessness, and forgiveness toward others (1 Cor 13:4-8). Jesus says his followers are those who love, not only their neighbors, but also their enemies (Matt 5:43-44).
We so often want signs and wonders to reassure us of God’s existence and activity, including the promised resurrection. But isn’t the ability to love people who hurt you a supernatural miracle? Isn’t the capacity of the oppressed to show kindness to an oppressor stunning? I’m not talking about submission to abuse or turning a blind eye; I’m talking about extraordinary grace that humbles the wicked (Rom 2:4).
If you need reassurance of the coming resurrection, look around you. Where is the Holy Spirit empowering you to love when it seems impossible? Where do you see justice for the oppressed? Where do you experience peace in the midst of a storm? Where do you witness the joy of the Lord amid grief? Where have you found strength to put one foot in front of the other for another day?
When I look around, I see the work of Sally at CenterPeace healing divided families, bringing together conservative Christian parents with their LGBTQ children. I see David and Shelley pressing forward in racial justice work with Let’s Talk Race, even while grieving the loss of their son, Jeremiah. I see staff at the local Christian memory care changing diapers and feeding residents with dementia and Alzheimer’s, including my father-in-law.
The resurrecting power of the Spirit is lifting us up beyond self-interest. Scripture says, “Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good” (1 Cor 12:7). Not only does the Spirit increase our capacity to love, the Spirit also gives us gifts to advance the work of justice. The Spirit empowers us with spiritual insights, wisdom, discernment, words of exhortation, healing, organizing skills, prophesying, teaching, hospitality and more (Rom 12; 1 Cor 12; Eph 4). All for the common good. For justice.
“The Kingdom of God is justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17; DAR).[3] Both now and forever. So, Lord, we pray, open our eyes to see your resurrecting power at work in everyday life, and may it remind us of the wonder yet to come.
[1] Wisdom of Solomon is an ancient Jewish book included in early Christian biblical canons and still part of Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. Much later, Protestants decided not to keep it as Scripture, but reformer Martin Luther still considered it useful devotional material.
[2] Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and Resurrection, trans. Catharine P. Roth (SPCK Publishing, 1993), 84.
[3] While often translated “righteousness,” the Greek word dikaiosynē also means justice. In fact, in ancient Greek, the root of this word, dikaios, typically meant justice. An English translation bias has led to overly translating the word as “righteousness” in the New Testament. Unfortunately, the term righteousness has become equated with personal piety rather than social action. But righteousness also means to make things right.