Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Easter: He is risen!

Sorry I have neglected my blog for a couple of weeks! But Easter is an event in eternity, a life-transforming, world-changing presence that never leaves us and never ends, so it is still timely for us to go on exploring Easter. We were still thinking about Hebrew Bible background of Easter, and one passage I don't want to omit is Isaiah 25:6-10, and 26:1-3, 14,19. "On this mountain" is Mt. Zion (24:23). The feast motif is picked up by Jesus in Mt. 8:11 where he celebrates the faith of the Roman Centurion, saying "Many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven...", and indeed Abraham, Isaac and Jacob all gave feasts, e.g., to celebrate the weaning of Isaac. The word for feast used in Isaiah comes from the verb " to drink" and describes a celebratory meal which includes drinking wine, and often music (Is. 5:12). Here the use is figurative: the great feast of the Kingdom of God. It is for all peoples; the Hebrew is literally "And will make Yahweh Sabaoth for all the peoples on this mountain..."so the idea of inclusivity is primary here. Easter is for all the world!
The rich foods and well-aged wines are "shemanim" and "shemarim", so that the oracle has lots of alliteration in it as these words are repeated, and insists that God is providing the very best! And the effect of God's offering of this food and wine is to "destroy the shroud that is cast over all peoples... to swallow up death forever... to wipe away the tears from all faces... and to take away the disgrace of his people from all the earth; and the summary name for this is "his salvation", the work of "the hand of the Lord"! What a picture of what God would do for the world on that hill called Golgotha and the nearby garden tomb! The word for "disgrace" is used to describe the shame of the Israelite army when for forty days Goliath mocked them, daring anyone to come and fight him, and they were all afraid (I Sam 17: 16,26) and for the disgrace of widowhood in a woman "cast off" by her husband. (Is.4:1, 54:4,6). God has reconciled the world to himself in Christ's death and resurrection, not counting our trespasses against us (II Cor. 5:19); the shame of all our sin and the judgment by God that includes our mortality -- all this is taken away; death is swallowed up by grace and mercy! "It will be said on that day, "This is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation! -- and of course the word "salvation" is "Yeshua", Jesus. How can we not read this passage every Easter? Isaiah goes briefly back to the theme: 26:1 describes "the city of God": "We have a strong city; he sets up Yeshua like walls and bulwarks. Open the gates so that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in! ... Trust in the Lord forever!" 26:14 affirms the reality of death, but 26:19 affirms God's gift of resurrection: "The dead do not live; shades do not arise, because you have punished and destroyed them, and wiped out all memory of them. But you have increased the nation, O Lord... Your dead shall live, their corpses shall arise! O dwellers in the dust awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew and the earth will give birth to those long dead (the shades)." Shakespeare said, "The quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven..."; so the mercy of God has come like life-giving dew to the dwellers in the dust, and we all awake and sing for joy!
The dead who belong to God by faith shall live! Happy Easter! Jesus Christ is risen, and we rise with him!
The New Testament accounts of Easter morning bring us the glorious good news of God's victory over sin and death in Jesus' death and resurrection. And there is a gift of liberating freedom in the way the Gospel stories diverge in detail and converge in the truth they affirm. The women are there in every story, but how many and which ones go to the tomb vary from Gospel to Gospel. The messenger who tells them the good news is "a young man in white clothing" in Mark, two men in lightning-bright clothing in Luke, a terrifying angel who sits on the stone he had rolled from the mouth of the tomb in Matthew, and two angels in John. (It helps to remember that the word "angel" is just a transliteration of the Greek word aggelos which means messenger, and could be used of earthly or heavenly beings. ) Each gospel includes things others omit. Yet the net effect is to help us trust the integrity of the early stewards of these stories, for they passed them down as they received them, without trying to "harmonize them". And the good news is that Jesus is not dead, he is alive, and he wants to meet with them and with us. He breathes his Spirit into his new body the church, and we who share that Spirit are able to meet Jesus in one another and experience the power of his presence in his risen body. Every Sunday is Easter when we gather with God's people to worship the risen Lord and to have him send us forth once again into the world he died to save! Happy Easter -- now and forevermore!