PREACHERS CAN FEEL ENORMOUS PRESSURE for our Easter sermons to rise to the greatness of the occasion. How do we make it fresh? What if we flop? Like the guy who remarked at the door one Easter, “You’re in a rut, Pastor. Every time I come here you preach about the resurrection.”
Of course, that criticism could be a compliment! Even skeptics have recognized that the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is at the heart of the Christian faith.
A saying attributed to Voltaire has the 18th French Enlightenment philosopher and skeptic asserting, “It would be easy to start a new religion to compete with Christianity. All the founder would have to do is die and then be raised from the dead.”
The modern day atheist, the late Christopher Hitchens, when asked by a Unitarian Universalist interviewer if he could embrace a less literal, more liberal view of Christianity, replied, “I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, then you are not in any meaningful sense a Christian.” The interviewer scrambled to steer the interview a different direction.
Still, what do we say when we preach the resurrection? One sympathetic parishioner encouraged his pastor before Easter: “You don’t need to try so hard.” Just relax. “Just say what needs to be said.”
In the half-light of that early dawn, the sudden blazing-neon appearance of that angel must have nearly scared the living daylights out of those women, announcing, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.” (Matthew 28:5-6)
It makes me wonder: What if the stone was rolled away not to let Jesus out, but to let the women in? And what if our Easter preaching voiced that same invitation: Come and see. What if we said, especially to those who come to worship reluctantly, to the skeptics who brace themselves, “just come check it out”? A frontal lobotomy is not a prerequisite for faith. Take your time. Bring your questions. Bring you, the real you.
It isn’t long before the women are grasped by the great mystery that Jesus is alive. Next thing you know, the angel instructs them to “go quickly … and tell his disciples [that Jesus] has been raised from the dead” (Matthew 28:7). Go and tell! Even though they haven’t even seen the risen Lord yet! Even though they have no social status and the testimony of women would not stand up in a Jewish court of law. Still, the women are off — they are all “go and tell.”
Perhaps it is important to note that nobody ever literally sees Jesus rise from the dead. There are no actual observers of the resurrection, so no one can really prove it. The message is not: “It happened like this.” It’s not “three convincing proofs of the resurrection.” The message is: It’s happened! Resurrection can’t be proved; it can only be proclaimed.
What needs to be said at Easter is that Jesus is alive! What needs to be said is that the power of sin and death is conquered! There is no tragedy that God cannot redeem, no mess that the risen Christ cannot overcome. Everything is different now! God’s new creation has begun! There’s nothing to fear!
Indeed, all God’s people must learn to proclaim the good news of the resurrection again and again, in words and actions. For it was the resurrection message that created a believing community in the first place … and continues to do so today.
