Just a thought.....on Easter

This is one of my favorite times of the year. After the winter bleh has finally left, the trees start to bloom and you start to see the flowers blossom with all their different colors. Wednesday night, I took the little kids on a wagon ride through our community. Not that I was able to enjoy the blossoms then, I was too busy refereeing between them: stop, don’t hit your brother, don’t poke your sister; most of you know that routine. But when we got home, they wanted to hang out on the hammock for a while, so I was really cool with that.

So we’re laying on our hammock that it under a walnut tree in the backyard. I noticed that the leaves were starting to bloom out and you started to see the branches starting to fill out. The first thought that I had was, wow these are the leaves that I’ll be raking in a few months. Right after that thought, was the thought of the new life that this old tree was giving. That is what is great about this time of the year, new life. I did not do anything to make this tree sprout the new leaves, it just happens. Why, I have no clue. Horticulture is not one of my strong suits. But that really caused me to think about how God provided new life for all of us and we didn’t do anything to make it happen. God did it all.

We’re taught as kids that Jesus came into Jerusalem like a rock star on Palm Sunday just to be crucified just a few days later. At the time of Christ, the Romans ruled Palestine and the folks there absolutely hated it. The Romans could make them do anything they wanted. It wasn’t a good place to be. So here comes Jesus, who they’ve heard about over the past few years, healing folks, making water out of wine, teaching God’s kingdom to crowds upon crowds of people. Now, on his first trip to Jerusalem, the epicenter of the Roman rule in that area, the common folks truly believed that he was going to go in there and kick some Roman butt and take over the joint. Maybe they all stood a little bid prouder, maybe got a little cocky with the centurions who were making us do stuff, because JESUS was coming to kick them out.

If that is all that Jesus was supposed to do, the rest of us today would have been screwed. As much as Jesus hurt for his father’s people and the condition that they were in, God’s plan was for the redeeming of the world for all time, not just the redeeming of the people of that time. Maybe the disappointment of the people that time is what led them to scream crucify. You see Pilate gave the people a choice between Jesus and Barabbas, one of them he would release. It can be surmised that the folks there had figured out that Jesus was not going to take Jerusalem by force so they were thinking that once again they were looking for someone that would kick some Roman butt. Barabbas was jailed for an insurrection against Rome and maybe it was thought that if he were released, then he’d be the one to release the hold that the Romans had over them.

God had a different plan. He knew that as the Jewish folks in the past called out to him to save them in their mess, so too were the Jews of that day calling out to him to fix this mess too. Since the first sin was committed, God had a plan of redemption for mankind, his creation. Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. In that time, folks brought animals to the priests to sacrifice for the atonement of sins. God decided that he was going to give the ultimate sacrifice for the atonement of the world. Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet, spoke about the sheer torture that God’s son was going to go through for the redemption made available for all of us. The movie, Passion of the Christ is probably the most realistic representation of what Jesus went through that week and I would think that even that movie did not show everything that he went through.

And after all of that, the pain and torture, we have the hope of the resurrection. Jesus said it; the prophet foretold it and God did it. As the basis for our Christian faith, the resurrection is the key. Without the resurrection, our salvation really doesn’t amount to much. That, I would submit, is what separates faith in Christ away from every other faith on the planet. One can look to Buddha’s tomb and his remains are there. Likewise, to Confucius or Mohammed, however Christ’s tomb is empty. The resurrected lift that Christ has is available to all of us. That new life, that resurrected life is what we celebrate at Easter.

Just as the springtime brings out the flowers and leaves on the trees out of the ground and gives that ground new life, so does God, through the resurrection of his son, gives new life to us. We can do nothing to either the trees or to God to cause this new life to happen, but it is there for us to take hold of and enjoy. All we have to is to accept it, because God did it all.

Hope all of you have a wonderful Easter!

Peace.