BLOG 3/25/13: EASTER AND “BRAINLESS TOURISTS ON A PACKAGED TOUR”
OK, I confess that having been in pastoral-teaching leadership within the Christian community for a long a time (maybe too long), I may look at what takes place on Easter in most churches, and not take it too seriously. This is especially true is one takes a serious and intelligent look at what the New Testament teaches about the resurrection and its implications for church and for those who are serious in their discipleship.
It reminds me of the classic (and humorous) work of novelist Annie Dillard in which she says: “Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute … On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with the chemistry sets, mixing up batches of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews” (Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1988. P. 40).
Does that sound strange to our ‘consumer Christianity’ ears?
Listen, then, to Paul’s take on the resurrection: “[I pray] … that the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of [Christ], having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints [that’s us], and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead …” (Ephesians 1:15-20).
Can we hear that? Paul is saying that the same power that raised Christ from the dead is now at work in us by the Holy Spirit, and by that power God is enabling his people to live lives that are totally unexplainable by merely human definition, i.e., “to be strengthened with power … to comprehend … to know … that surpasses knowledge … be filled with the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:14ff).
Annie Dillard had it right. Easter—Christ’s resurrection—unleashed into the world the power to create all things new, to empower the church to storm the gates of hell, to make known to the principalities and powers the manifold wisdom of God.
But, if Easter is only brainless tourists on a packaged tour into the Absolute, folk doing their annual Easter morning ritual (as far too many will), then they will have missed the point that the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead literally unleashed the powers of the age to come into the world, so that Christ’s church is energized for the mission of God in world—and that through the daily lives of God’s true people. They will have missed the message completely. It is not just life after death that results from the resurrection, but true lives of gospel obedience lived in Christ’s resurrection power right here and now in our lives, in the midst of the brokenness of this present context, and in the midst of those whom Jesus came to seek and to save. Question: Have we become totally immunized against that understanding of the resurrection?
Crash helmets? Safety belts? That sounds more appropriate. Easter is the beginning of God’s new age. Don’t miss it.
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