Ok, I left you on a bit of a cliffhanger Friday. I know that’s not how the story ends. Look at it from the perspective of the disciples though: Friday ends with their leader dead, buried in a cave. They haven’t understood anything he’s taught them about this moment in time, and now they’re wondering if they got any of it right. Judas is dead is a field somewhere, Peter’s probably still beating himself up about disowning Jesus, and everyone is hiding from last night’s lynch mob. I can’t imagine any of them calling it “Good Friday.”
Honestly, if the story stopped there, it’d be little more than a footnote in history, if that. Some crazy guy called himself God, started a movement, stepped on some toes, and got killed. That’s not all that uncommon, to be honest. But then comes Sunday. Easter. This is when it all comes together. Jesus’ death is meaningless without his resurrection. Without the resurrection, the whole story just falls apart. But with the resurrection…
At the moment of Jesus’ death, reality was upset. Earthquakes and the tearing of the temple veil were, I’m sure, minor compared to what happened in the spiritual realm. Someone had died without committing sin. That’s not the way God set it up. Death only exists as penalty for sin, and for Jesus to suffer the penalty for sin without committing the crime was wrong on a fundamental level. If ever hyperbole was insufficient, it would be here. This was a cosmic injustice. In fact, this was too wrong. And God would not let it stand. So God reversed death. And Jesus came back, living proof that things had changed. The debt for sin had been paid once and for all time, and God acknowledged that in the resurrection of Jesus. Good Friday isn’t Good without Easter. Without Easter, Good Friday is black and terrible and WRONG. With Easter, with Jesus’ resurrected body proving his innocence – and therefore his right to claim the sins of the world in unjust death – that Friday becomes so preciously Good. Friday was the day the debt was paid, Sunday was the day when the check went through. You cannot consider the wonder of Sunday without acknowledging the miracle of Friday.
Many other times throughout the Bible people had died and been raised to life – A resurrection to human life isn’t that out of the ordinary when God’s involved. But at THE resurrection Jesus was not just returned to human life. Jesus was brought OUT of death into new, real, eternal life. All the other resurrections throughout history just returned the person to a human life, with death still waiting at the end. This one was special. This resurrection was victorious proof that Jesus’ death MEANT something, that the fundamental nature of the universe had been profoundly altered. Jesus had defeated death, and in doing so, changed everything.
And then, mission complete, he went home.
End of story, right? Jesus paid for our sins, now we get to follow him to heaven when we die. Awesome! Don’t get me wrong, this is the absolutely most incredible, amazing, beautiful fact there is to life. This is the whole reason life is worth living. But it’s not all there is.
Jesus left us with a mandate: to go into the world and make disciples. He sent us a counselor: the Holy Spirit. He gave us his words of wisdom and instruction, and among them we find this very interesting statement. “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these…” We talked about this on the Race periodically, usually when we were about to ask God to do something really wild, like restore sight to a blind man, or heal a woman hit by a truck, or even – yes, these were the things we asked God for – raising the dead. Things didn’t always happen the way we wanted them to, and I’d be fooling you if I claimed to have faith and prayer boiled down to a formula, but we often thought about what Jesus said there. “Greater things…” What does that really mean? I think we were all pretty confident that Jesus did not set an upper bound on God’s expression of power on the Earth, and we were willing to ask God for really really big things. I sometimes wonder, though. Jesus performed many miracles while he was alive – but the greatest moment of his ministry came at his death. Dying to save the whole world, resurrected by God into eternal life, forever providing a way for frail humanity to directly access God – surely that is one thing we’ll never surpass.
But consider this: although Jesus’ sacrifice is undeniably the greatest event in the history of the human race, although what he did was beautiful, wonderful, and amazing, at the end of his mission he went home. Earth was the site of the most incredible miracle ever in recorded history, but when the dust cleared God was still seated in Heaven, and that’s where Jesus went when he completed his work on Earth. Everything else was shaken, transformed, renewed – but God did not move.
And that’s a good thing, right? God is immutable, eternal, inviolate – and that’s good news, because he’s not fickle or prone to tantrums. He loves us because he loves us and he’s never going to stop loving us, and that is incredibly, beautifully, GOOD.
But there’s one more part to all this, tucked away at the very tail end of the New Testament. There is a promise, at the very end of the book of Revelation, that God will make his dwelling on Earth. He will wipe away every tear, eliminate death and sadness and pain and evil itself, and establish a new order. It’s the most thrilling part of the whole grand story: the moment when everything is made new.
Nobody knows the date. That’s been drilled into our heads every time a false prophet shows up claiming to have figured out God’s Secret Code. But Jesus promised us signs. Guideposts. And more importantly, he gave us a mission. Remember, at the end of Jesus’ mission, he went home. I believe there’s going to be another homecoming at the end of our mission. I believe that the mission of the church – God’s body at work in the world – is to go and make disciples, to share the incredible good news of the Savior with everyone on Earth, to introduce every single human being to Love Himself, and to by the grace of God transform this planet. I’m part of a mission that will not be satisfied with going to heaven at the end. I believe in a mission that will never rest, never be content, and never be finished until this Earth has been so transformed by the power of Love that Jesus Christ, seated in Heaven at the right hand of God, looks down at Earth and says, “That down there looks more like my home than this up here,” and at the victorious completion of the final mission he COMES HOME.
And it will be Good.
