In a garden, just at dawn
Near the grave of human violence
The most precious Word of Life
Cleared His throat and ended silence
For the good of us all
And He’s here when we call Him
Bringing health, love, and laughter
To life now and ever after
For the good of us all
(John Bell)
It interests me watching modern evangelicalism struggle more and more about what to do with Easter.
Good Friday was a spiritual pause, a pause that lasted until the acknowledgment of resurrection on Sunday morning.
Now any thought of pause seems something to be avoided and Good Friday seems to be identical to Easter Sunday.
How can you pause and rest in God when the focus is on the productivity of your own response to grace.
We can never allow the weekend that focuses on resting in the work of God to become the primary example of a never-ending striving to perfection.
From David Zahl.
Faith that more often than not begins with an admission of losing and need morphs into a hectic competition for spiritual justification, in which we baptize our busyness with religious language. Before we know it, God has ceased to be a good shepherd and turned into the Taskmaster-in-the-Sky, or worse, another name for the persecutor within. “I just couldn’t keep it up anymore!” is the refrain I’ve heard from many a refugee from performancist churches.
If there’s a difference today, it has to do with the vanishing of outlets where the pressure of perfection might be vented. It’s easier to develop a sense of enoughness, for example, when your pool of peers is in the hundreds rather than the millions, when the primary venues of comparison close shop at 5:00 p.m. Similarly, it’s a lot harder to recover from a youthful indiscretion when the internet has made the record of your adolescence permanent and searchable.
Capital-R Religion once provided a space to come clean and maybe even be absolved of shortcoming and guilt. Church wasn’t busy. If anything, it was boring and full of silence, a respite from the noise of daily demand, a local repository of peace and forgiveness. The good ones at least.
A matter of perspective: the crowd thought they saw a king coming in triumph, when what they saw a a king coming in sacrifice; and yet in the sacrifice was the triumph they needed.
Which is helpful to remember as we prepare for Easter – Jesus is the Saviour we need, not the one our desires demand.
From Simon Camilleri at Gospel Coalition Australia.
…the crowds were right! They were right to praise Jesus as king – for that is who he is. They were right to say “Hosanna!” which means “Lord, save us” – for that is what he came to do. They were right to expect that he had come to Jerusalem to establish God’s kingdom and reconcile people to God. They were simply wrong in how they expected he would do it.
The story finishes with the disciples being confused: “His disciples did not understand these things at first.” And I don’t blame them. Jesus was the king, but he came to Jerusalem on a donkey. Jesus was supposed to be the Messiah, but he talked about dying. How did it all fit together?
Well, it then tells us: “but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about him and had been done to him.” It’s only after Jesus was glorified in his death and resurrection (John 12:23 & 17:1) that the disciples remembered the Old Testament prophecies like the one from Zechariah and saw how the puzzle pieces all fit together.
Fortunately, we live in the time after Jesus has been glorified. And every Easter we can remember the great work on the cross he did to die for sinners like you and me.
These words were written with the season of Lent in mind, but they could easily be true of Good Friday as parts of Protestantism observe it.
Each year we spend forty days pretending Jesus is going to die; we go hungry and grow—despite ourselves—angry; we prepare for what is going to take place. But it has, dammit, it has taken place. Christ has died and redeemed us and has risen from the dead. We are new and alive. Love should be our concern now (read St. Paul) and instead we mope around and bewail our sins, which have killed our Savior. Well I have more to bewail than anybody, of that I am certain, but I’m tired of bewailing and I’m tired of going hungry and growing angry, and I’m tired of pretending Christ is going to die. I am forgiven my sins and the bridegroom is among us.
The focus on resurrection is similar, though,
On the other hand, there is the current tendency to concentrate only on Easter, only on the risen Christ. We are saved. We are good. This is the Worship tendency;…
Christians need both. At once. All the time.
The relation must be made between the absurdities of existence and the coherence of Christianity, between Lent and Christ suffering in our contemporaries, between Easter and Christ showing us our ultimate triumph. Lent and Easter are not merely personal experiences. They reassert the divine economy of salvation. It is criminal, therefore, to reduce Lent to self-reproach and Easter to self-complacency.
A reflection on the biblical character Barabbas by Jason Eady, someone I hadn’t heard of before.
It has some interesting phrasings and perspectives.
“Well the guilt hangs twice as heavy when it’s followed by a surprise
I’d surrendered, I was ready to give up and do my time
I did not know his name, did not know why he was there
But on this side of forgiveness we both have our cross to bear”
I’m glad Easter is not just one day a year for Christians.
Paul Tripp writes a thoughtful meditation on the brave love of Joseph of Arimathea, the man who publicly identified himself as a disciple of Jesus when all seemed lost, and who provided a tomb for a much shorter period of time than he would have thought.
From the article:
While the other disciples were hiding in confusion and fear, Joseph of Arimathea acted with remarkable courage and love. If you noticed from the passage, this man had everything to lose with this move. He was a member of the inner council of the Sanhedrin, and it was his peers who had just put pressure on Pilate to try Jesus for treason and hang him on a cross.
Asking for the body of this crucified man was a public declaration of his love for Jesus. Joseph of Arimathea would no longer be a secret disciple (John 19:38). When he could have remained under the radar, Joseph inserted himself into the middle of a religious and political drama, the very drama that sent the rest of the disciples into hiding. In one move, Joseph risked everything: his wealth, his reputation, his power, and even his life.
But Joseph of Arimathea loved his Lord too much to let his body rot on the cross or be ignominiously thrown with other criminals into some shallow public grave. With a heart of worship, he gave to the Messiah a tomb, and with a heart of love, he buried his Lord with honor.Read the whole post here.
