Spent quite a bit of time preparing for our Easter morning worship service today. I noticed something very strange while we were planning this and I really don't have a clue as to why this is true. It is very difficult to find worship music that is centered on the resurrection. Almost every song we found was more about Good Friday than Easter Sunday. Why is that? Why are most of these songs centered on the cross and not the empty grave?
My only thought is that for some reason it must be easier for us to conceptualize Jesus on the cross, than it is for us to conceptualize Jesus raising from the dead. Maybe this is because of the world of visuals. Artwork abounds with the cross (like this giant one featured at the top of this post), but what kind of artwork is there of the empty grave? I don't know anyone who wears a symbol of the resurrection around a chain on their neck. To illustrate this lack of illustration presented below are the first two images that come up when I Google Image the word "Easter."
I wonder what the implications are to this lack of resurrection thought? I've notice (and have nothing empirical to back this up), that a lot of Christians struggle with the idea of resurrection. Even the earliest Christians struggled with that idea, remember Thomas? If not, Ben Linus has a speech in LOST about Thomas. There are a good number of Christians who demonstrate a lack of foundational thought on the resurrection in three ways that I've noticed:
1. Bodily Resurrection? A lot of Christians seem to think that when we are raised from the dead we will be spirits living in some netherworld with God. The body has no part of this future life. This thought is sometimes demonstrated in the following phrase: "We are spiritual beings having a physical experience." I'm sorry, but this is just flat heresy. Read Paul's ideas in 1 Cor 15. We will be raised with a bodily resurrection, just like Jesus. Maybe then we shouldn't just focus our spirituality on the inner experiences. Maybe our bodies also have a role in our spirituality. I've been thinking about this for a few weeks and will probably unpack this idea next week sometime.
2. Spiritual warfare. This is an observation that I noticed while a student at ORU. A lot of energy is spent by some to lay out the specifics of the demonic world. Don't get me wrong, we need to intercede to our Father against the powers of darkness. But we have faith in this because of the resurrected Christ. I got the feeling that sometimes in these spiritual warfare conversations that the reality of the resurrection was never really understood. Why spend our time trying to outline the demonic, instead of focusing our energy on the power of the resurrection.
3. Sanctification. My Wesleyan roots come out on this one. Many of us, if not most of us, don't actually expect, nor have we experienced, a transformed life. We keep living in the same cycles of sin and destructive that we have always known. Many of us don't actually believe that we can be free from lust, gluttony, gossip, anger, or pride (to name a few things that seem to enslave us). I heard Don Chaffer recently say (supposedly quoting George Barna, which I don't know if this is actually true but I can't argue with it based on my own observations) that there is no real difference between Christians in America and non-Christians in America except that Christians were less likely to recycle. I think this lack of noticeable difference in our lives is based on a lack of belief that resurrection is the reality of our faith. If the resurrection is the reality of my life, than I will experience newness of life personally. The sin that has enslaved me cannot stand up against the power of the resurrection. The resurrection has set me free, and my our lives can actually demonstrates this freedom.
For many of us, we celebrate Christmas almost to a fault, but have no idea what resurrection is about; most of us have no idea how Easter intersects our lives.
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