Easter Day April 12, 2009

OK. Let’s do it one more time. "Alleluia, Christ is risen!" ("The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!")

This, in a nutshell, is not just the message and the meaning of Easter, it’s the message of Christianity. "Jesus is Lord" was the earliest creed of the Church, and it carries with it some very powerful personal and political implications. If Jesus is Lord, then neither Caesar, nor the Queen of England, nor the President of the United States, nor any other earthly ruler can be our Lord and King. Jesus - God the Son of God - stands alone in this place. All our other allegiances, even the most important of them - citizenship, marriage, family - must take second place or less.

If Jesus is our Lord, then our primary kingdom is the Kingdom of God which he came to proclaim, and teach, and live, and die for to be raised again. Notice I didn’t say Jesus came to establish the Kingdom. The Kingdom has been here from the beginning of Creation. We aren’t the owners of this world we live in; we are only tenants, stewards whom God created to care for Creation itself.

There is probably no stronger statement of this key Christian belief than in Eucharistic Prayer C in our Prayer Book. I’d like you to turn to page 370 now and join me by responding to the first four sections of the prayer.

... ...

Jesus came, and lived, and died, and rose again "to open for us the way of freedom and peace." That way is none other than the way of the Cross. Jesus makes this very clear in all four Gospels. I choose to quote Luke as my example. Peter has just identified Jesus as "... the Messiah of God’, and Luke continues: "Then Jesus gave them strict orders not to tell this to anyone. He also told them, ‘The Son of Man must suffer much and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the teachers of the Law. He will be put to death, but three days later he will be raised to life.’

"And he said to them all, ‘If anyone wants to come with me, he must forget himself, take up his cross every day, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his own life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.’" (Lk 9:21-24)

The classical Christian understanding is that Jesus was put to death as the sacrificial offering for our sins. This has its roots in the Exodus story of the first Passover, when the Hebrew slaves slaughtered the Passover lambs and marked the lintels and doorposts of their houses with the blood of the lambs to protect them from the plague which killed the first-born of the Egyptians. This is what lies behind John’s identification of Jesus as "... the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." (Jn 1:29) There is a very strong strain of this "substitutional theology" in our Eucharistic Prayers. But there is another way to understand Jesus’ death, and it’s evidenced in both Euchariatic Prayers A and C.

In Prayer A we say, "... you (God) in your mercy, sent Jesus Christ, your only and eternal Son, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us (not "for us"), to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all." (BCP, p 362) In Prayer C we say, "And in the fullness of time you sent your only Son, born of a woman, to fulfill your Law, to open for us the way of freedom and peace." (BCP, p 370)

There is certainly a sense in which Jesus died for our sins; but Jesus died for a lot more than that. Jesus died because he was stubbornly committed to live for the Kingdom of God. He was killed because he insisted that the justice of God must ultimately replace the injustice of imperial human rule in this world.

When Jesus chose to be born as one of us, he committed himself to die as one of us. He chose to live his life in keeping with the prayer he taught us to pray: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven." He calls us to live by this same prayer, to live lives transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit of God.

I close with these words from Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan’s book, The Last Week.

"Good Friday and Easter, death and resurrection together, are a central image in the New Testament for the path to a transformed self. The path involves dying to an old way of being and being reborn into a new way of being. Good Friday and Easter are about this path, the path of dying and rising, of being born again.

"All of the major witnesses of the New Testament testify to this. It is the "way" that Mark speaks about with his correlation of following Jesus and the path of death and resurrection. ... ... It is the path of transformation that Paul had experienced when he wrote, ‘I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me." (Gal 2:19-20) He affirms this path for all Christians when he writes about baptism as a ritul enactment of dying and rising, death and resurrection. (Rom 6:1-11) The result is a new self, a new creation:

‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.’ (2 Cor 5:17)" (The Last Week, pp 210-211)

"The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!"