Either it happened or it didn’t.

If it didn’t, there’s nothing wrong with believing that it did; humanity has entertained its myths for millenia, one more isn’t going to hurt anything.

But if a guy who believed that he was a human version of the Hebrew God actually crawled out of his grave, that’s different. Death no longer has the final say. Reality is bigger than it seems.

This earthly realm is only the beginning.

For me, there are too many who believe this – who claim to have encountered this “human” “god” in a personal way – to discount it as just another religious absurdity.

I’ll admit that it’s tricky, and I’m often tempted to stop believing altogether. If God wants buy-in on something so crazy, why not do it in a way that’s a little easier to believe? Nobody can prove a resurrection happened, not to mention the rest of Jesus’ alleged miracles.

To this, Martin Luther suggested that if God proved himself to us, it would be the “end and final judgment of unbelief.” Choice would be removed. We’d all be forced into faith.

That’s not the way of God as I understand it.

“Happy are those who believe without seeing” ~ Jesus in John 20:29

Instead of me, rambling through my own Easter thoughts, I’ve curated a few from thinkers who have much more profound things to offer, and maybe a bit more authority.

What follows isn’t intended to convince my non-Christian readers to think like me, or to become religious, or convert to some ‘ism. Ultimately, I’m writing for my own benefit this Easter morning; so much of what I believe – and how those beliefs translate to behaviors – revolve around and are dependent upon the idea that death, both physical and metaphorical, is not the end.

I forget, frequently, so reading/thinking about the resurrection of Jesus is an exercise worthy of at least an annual revisit.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Through the resurrection of Jesus Christ we have fit testimony that this earthly life is not the end, that death is just something of a turn in the road, that life moves down a continual moving river, and that death is just a little turn in the river, that this earthly life is merely an embryonic prelude to a new awakening, that death is not a period which ends this great sentence of life but a comma that punctuates it to more loftier significance.”

“Easter tells us that everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”

“We find ourselves in the thesis of Palm Sunday [Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem] and then we move over into the antithesis of Good Friday [the crucifixion]. But Jesus Christ, with all of his beauty and all of his eloquence, rings out across the centuries and says, ‘There is a synthesis in Easter.’ And this means that life is meaningful, that life is not doomed to frustration and futility but life can end up in fulfillment in the life and the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

“This is the Easter message, this is the question that it answers. It says to us that love is the most durable power in the world than all of the military giants, all of the nations that base their way on military power.”

Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.

quoting from “The Battle-Field” by William Cullen Bryant

Socrates

“Apart from man’s material body, something immaterial exists in him, which is immortal.”

C.S. Lewis

“Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.”

“The New Testament writers speak as if Christ’s achievement in rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the ‘first fruits,’ the ‘pioneer of life,’ He has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought, and beaten the King of Death. Everything is different because He has done so.”

Tim Keller

“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.”

Martin Luther

“…one death devoured the other.”

“…an imprint of divine activity within history.”

“If even a few people were really to believe this, allowing this belief to move them in their earthly actions, much would change. To live from the perspective of resurrection: That is Easter.”

“Whoever drinks beer, he is quick to sleep; whoever sleeps long, does not sin; whoever does not sin, enters Heaven! Thus, let us drink beer!”

 

 

Photos by Gabe Pierce and Daniel Jericó on Unsplash