Occasionally someone asks me, “Pastor, what is the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do in ministry?” I always give the same answer. The experience is seared in my consciousness as if it happened yesterday.
It was Palm Sunday at about three o’clock in the afternoon more than 20 years ago. Our church’s annual Easter pageant was going to start in a few hours. I received a phone call telling me that a couple in the church, a husband and wife, had just been killed in a motorcycle accident. The extended family asked if I would go to the couple’s home to tell their two grade school daughters that their parents were dead.
I thought about that moment again when I heard about the shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville several weeks ago. Imagine delivering the news to parents or to children whose loved ones innocently went to school and lost their lives due to a senseless act of violence. What would you say to those experiencing such a sudden, horrific loss? What solace or hope could you offer?
EASTER REMINDS CHRISTIANS HOW RESURRECTION RESONATES IN OUR PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Every worldview or philosophy should have to answer that question. Would you be able to offer these families any real hope other than just wishful thinking and sweet platitudes?
Easter is the only reason I have something to say when I look into the eyes of those who are experiencing the worst tragedies this life can offer.
Easter represents the historical fact that death has been conquered. For all of human history, death had a perfect record. It was unbeaten. From the strongest and most powerful to the weakest and most vulnerable, death got them all in the end. Until Jesus.
Christians have insisted from the very beginning that Jesus died and was truly resurrected from the dead. This wasn’t a fable. As Peter said, “we did not follow cleverly devised myths” (2 Peter 1:16). Paul underscored just how essential the resurrection was to the Christian faith, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14).
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Every alternative explanation put forward by skeptics—that Jesus only appeared to die, or that his disciples stole his body, or that a group of people simultaneously had the same hallucination of seeing him “alive” again—is far-fetched past the point of absurdity.
The resurrection wasn’t dreamt up by Christ’s first followers to make themselves feel better. More than 500 eyewitnesses saw Jesus dead and buried, and then saw him alive again.
The resurrection is a fact in the past that offers hope for the future. It means death is not the end for us or our loved ones.
If we believe in Christ, we will one day receive the very same type of body he has–one that will not age or get sick or die again. We will receive a body fit for a New Creation. This world will be wonderfully freed from its bondage to sin and renewed to the abundant life God intended. Easter affirms that this future hope is not a fantasy. It’s real.
Easter also offers comfort for the present. Families who experience the sting of the death of a loved one experience the darkest moment in their lives. Perhaps you may have just experienced a tragedy or lost a loved one, and you are feeling despair and heartbreak.
The message of Easter will not erase your grief and your pain right now, but through Christ, you can experience grief differently. As Scripture says, those who place their faith and hope in Christ do not “grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:14). Easter is God’s reminder that although our suffering is real, it is also temporary.
If you are feeling the sting of death or the pain of any other loss in your life, then I would encourage you to remember the reality of Easter. What Christ accomplished through his resurrection is a fact in the past that offers hope for the future and comfort for the present for all who will simply place their faith in the Jesus who promised, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in Me will live, even though they die” (John 11:25).
