Luke 24:6-7

He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.

From Background Notes [BN] for April 7^th & 8^th written by Pastor Bob Brown:

We say, “He wasn’t just an ordinary man who became a great moral teacher.” We say, “He died and rose again.”

And we say those things, not merely as commentators. We say them because Jesus who rose from the dead makes a profound difference in our lives.

The problem is trying to say that clearly to other people who have little or no information about this Jesus, or who have just enough information about him to form an opinion but not enough to look at him more closely. Perhaps that is why days like Easter Sunday are so important in the life of the church. They give the people of God a chance to tell the story of Jesus from this high water mark called the resurrection — the real meaning of the Easter celebration. Talking about the resurrection is not like talking about other ordinary events. In fact, resurrection was not readily understood in the days of Jesus — in the first century when all of these crucial

events played out on the stage of human history.

Do we really understand what the resurrection of Jesus means — then and now? What sort of language do we use to communicate what we think happened to Jesus after he died on the cross 2,000 years ago? Let’s say we do finally clarify the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection; what effect does it have on us today?

These are a few key questions worth looking at in this week’s Background Notes, and we’d like for them to shape the conversations you have over the next few days surrounding Easter Sunday.

Resurrection: What on Earth Does It Mean?

Let’s be clear. When the Bible tells the story of what happened to Jesus after he died, it uses language that ties Jesus once more to this world — to this earth. What we find in the Gospels, for instance, is not a series of visions where people report seeing Jesus in heaven immediately after his death, as if the resurrection of Jesus was somehow a space flight outside the universe that deposited Jesus back where he came from. Certainly, there are accounts of Jesus eventually going back to heaven to take his place at the Father’s side, but they are not the immediate record of what happened to him beyond the cross.

The writers take great care to speak about things like an empty tomb, empty grave clothes, meals with Jesus, and tangible encounters of the very personal kind. People saw Jesus, talked with him, touched him, shared meals with him, and engaged in physical interaction with him that left credible evidence behind. What’s more interesting, perhaps, is that most of the people who had these experiences with Jesus didn’t fully understand what was happening at the time. They struggled with the indirect evidence, and they questioned the witness of their own eyes. Even Jesus didn’t always appear to them in the same way each time, but seemed to fade in and out of their perception for a period of some forty days. Not everybody who saw him reported the same things about him. Yet the Gospel accounts leave no doubt that after Jesus died something extraordinary happened to him, and that event was accessible to them through what they saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. So powerful were these signs, they continued to dominate the testimonies of his immediate followers until they died. These were “the eyewitnesses,” and the Christian church has decided to believe their testimony ever since.   [BN, 1-2]

Join us this week in Study & Worship at ChicagoFirstChurch of the Nazarene –

* Saturday 6:00pm
* Sunday 8:30am & 11:00am, 5:30pm