Daily Lobo column
Nobody can deny that we live in a troubled world. Evidence of that surrounds us on a daily basis: school shootings, a seriously troubled stock market, rampant divorce, a disturbing lack of morality even among a number of religious leaders and the list goes on.
I also used to feel an overwhelming sense of futility about life in this world. As Billy Graham once said, I was suffering from “cosmic loneliness.”
However, a realization, resulting from a spiritual awakening just more than 25 years ago that Jesus Christ had risen from the grave and had conquered death, changed my whole life and replaced aimless futility and loneliness with a sense of hope, purpose and destiny.
It was my newfound purpose in life that, some years later, was directly responsible for my founding Joy Junction, New Mexico’s largest emergency homeless shelter. The Lord had been so good to me that I felt compelled to pass on the good news of Jesus Christ’s resurrection to those who were homeless, spiritually adrift and in desperate need of a reason to keep on living.
Sadly, in today’s culture, an unshakeable belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is thought of as being bigoted and exclusive, or “old hat;” an outmoded system of thinking reserved for those “ignorant” evangelicals who hold to a literal interpretation of the Bible. Yet such a belief could give some badly needed hope and encouragement to the Timothy McVeighs of the world waiting in the wings looking for a place to happen and the explosively angry victims of school bullies.
Those who dismiss Jesus’ resurrection and neglect making him the basis for their lives end up mocking the very foundation upon which Easter is based. All they’re left with is the empty and unsatisfactory shell of the Christian gospel.
Look at what Easter means to one e-mailer on America OnLine’s sparsely visited Easter site:
“For years it was my family’s tradition to buy a new outfit for Easter; (boys got suits with a hat; can’t find them today and girls got fancy dresses with a hat); go to church (any church; my family wasn’t religious but felt this necessary) and then have a picnic and Easter egg hunt. Later when I had kids, I would always include a ‘special’ egg in the group for my two kids to find. It was one of those plastic ones and always had a dollar in it.”
Somebody else wrote on the same site, “Well I like to go look for eggs on Easter morning! I go see what I got in my basket and that’s how I do it!”
Now there’s nothing wrong with eggs, as long as the central theme of Easter isn’t omitted. Sadly, most of the time it is. Easter is about much more than colored eggs.
As Asbury Seminar New Testament professor Ben Witherington pointed out, the resurrection, which Easter is all about, is “not just a spiritual change in a person’s life; nor is it merely the blooming of flowers and trees when spring returns. The Resurrection is the bringing back from the dead of Jesus Christ in the flesh.”
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Witherington tells a sad but revealing story about standing outside a small English chapel on Easter Sunday morning. He was waiting to talk with a church official about the upcoming service at which he was scheduled to preach.
The man looked at Witherington and said he had to ask him one question. The church official asked, “You do believe in the Resurrection, don’t you?”
Witherington said, “Yes, absolutely, that’s what Easter is all about; it’s the heart of the Christian faith.”
The official replied, “I’m ever so relieved. The last chap who preached on Easter didn’t.”
The resurrection is the very heart and soul of Christianity; not some mythical sort of unquantifiable spiritual transformation, but a physical bodily resurrection.
Christianity is the only major world religion where the bones of its founder are not lying in some tomb. That is why Biblical literalists get so excited about the Bible and proclaim that they have found the truth.
Proclaiming that you’ve found the truth is anathema to many academics. At most secular academic institutions, it appears to be almost a badge of academic honor that you are on a continuous search for the truth.
However, try finding it. Then you’ll end up getting labeled as a bigot.
This Easter, take an honest look at the claims of Jesus Christ. Nobody has ever done so and come away disappointed.
