The Resurrection Lens
All over the world this past Sunday, Christians celebrated the resurrection of Jesus. For many, it is merely a time for egg hunts, bunnies, and candy. For the believer, however, it is the celebration of a monumental event—a dead man rising from the death back to life as he had promised, and the impact of that for human history and destiny. The resurrection changed everything.
Consider the New Testament. Without the resurrection, the books contained within it would not have been written. All were written looking back through the lens of the resurrection. Think about the tens of thousands of Christian martyrs over the centuries. They put their lives at risk because of the hope of the resurrection.
Consider the impact of Christianity on culture. At the time of Jesus, slaves, women, and children were not truly valued beyond their ability to perform certain tasks and roles in society. Children were often killed because of their gender; slaves were property and, as one commentator says, merely human tools that were discarded when they were no longer useful; and women had few rights and were treated by most men as merely child bearers and housekeepers. Divorce was as simple for men as saying, “I divorce you” three times. Lepers and other people with diseases or handicaps were ostracized, avoided altogether, or left to beg along the streets.
For the early believers, this all changed after the resurrection. Jesus had demonstrated the value of children and women during his ministry, and the Apostle Paul highlighted the standard by which husbands should treat their wives, and how masters should treat their slaves. The treatment of non-Jews (i.e., Gentiles) also changed. Jews considered Gentiles “unclean” and would not associate them unless it was unavoidable. But the early believers began to accept the idea (albeit slowly) that Gentiles could be considered brothers and sisters in the Lord, just as the Lord had shown Peter. And the sick and disabled were no longer viewed as “untouchable” or cursed by God for their sin. All of this because the resurrection validated all that Jesus taught and did during his three years of ministry. If he hadn’t been raised from the dead, his life would have been of some historic significance, but along the lines of Aristotle or Socrates. He would not be worshipped and celebrated around the world.
The question for us is, how do we view life through the lens of the resurrection? Is it transformative in what we believe and how we live as it was for the early Christians? Since Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century, for so many down through the centuries, the faith became a set of beliefs that didn’t have transformative power. Belief in Jesus and the resurrection was slowly replaced by a set of doctrines for the mind. Unlike embracing Jesus and the power of his resurrection which transformed lives, the embracing of a set of doctrines made it possible to live as a confessing Christian without any of the transformative power. Thus, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, killing of so-called heretics such as and Jan Hus and William Tyndale, and the racist churches of the South.
Christians are not called to believe merely in a set of doctrines, but to surrender our lives to Jesus, who, through the same power that raised him from the dead, can transform our lives in ways that will be unmistakable to the world. Sound doctrine is important, but it has no ability to transform. Only Jesus through the power of his Holy Spirit can accomplish that.
