I love Easter. I love everything that
goes along with it. I love Good Friday, this year thanks to the new
Pope I accidentally gave a crap about Holy Thursday, and Palm Sunday
is always fun with the kids at church hitting each other with wisps
of palm leaves(let's be thankful it wasn't baseball bat Sunday,
right?). When we compile all of this with the ending of winter and
the beginning of spring it's borderline magical.
But then, like Christmas, it ends. The
chocolate bunnies go on sale, all the ham in the northern hemisphere
is eaten, there isn't standing room only in church, and we're back
with our regularly scheduled programming Jesus died and rose again
for the reconciliation of mankind to God, so how are the Red Sox
looking in spring training?
One of my atheist friends put up a
status that said, “Remember everybody, Jesus had a really
inconvenient weekend to redeem us all from our sins.” Like most of
these things I reacted first with an eye roll, then took a little
offense, and finally figured out what God was showing me. Now, I ask
that you read til the end of this before you write me off as a
heretic.
While the redemption of man was the
only reason Jesus came to earth it wasn't the most time consuming
part of His life or ministry. It was the most painful, it was the
most important, but it really was the quickest. It was the climax of
the story. It was the section where all the rising action peaked and
then it was concluded in the resurrection and Ascension. Jesus showed
the Universe who was boss and now we're stuck in the sequel that
will hopefully end soon.
But ask yourself this question: If
Jesus came to die for our sins why did He wait 33 years? He could
have been a child savant that was killed at the age of 9 because of
his miracles and teachings. Hell, Jesus could have been a still born
baby and it would've sufficed. The goal was perfect life, perfect
death, save the world Why wait the 3 decades? Earth couldn’t have
been that much fun in comparison to heaven, could it?
In
Luke 19:10 Jesus
tells us His scheme. He had a two fold mission of seeking and saving.
While the saving was he most important, He did spend the lion's share
of His time seeking. That's all the miracles were. That's all that
the teaching was. Jesus did not come just to provide free health care
and encourage a good moral compass. He totally could have done that
without dying. He came to seek out people. He came to show people
their need for saving. He spent the first thirty years posing a
question and exposing a need, and three days providing the fix.
Philippians 2:12 is not a coffee mug,
t-shirt verse because it is one of the most honest verses in the New
Testament. Fear and trembling is not something we often connect with
Salvation. It's true though, isn't it? Half the time we're worried
that we're not doing it right. The other half of the time we're
worried that everybody is going to see us for what we are and the
n
we're going to embarrass God and completely screw up what Jesus did
on the cross all because we can't quick smoking or looking at porn on
the internet. We live in victory but we also live in fear and
trembling. The majority of our life is spent showing off why we need
salvation.
Jesus'
life modeled this. Salvation, death to sin, victory over death, while
not the easy part, was the quick pull off of the band-aid. It's the
same way when we accept Christ. It's easy to see our need. It's easy
to see His fix. But that is just one quick, yet important, moment in
the rest of our lives. But the three decades of walking, teaching,
healing, being talked about, lied about, betrayed, used, and
abandoned. The three decades of all that, and still trusting in God,
still praying to the Father, still doing the Creator's will; that's
the marathon. That's the punch. That's where Jesus modeled the fear
and trembling. That's where He modeled walking the walk.
That's
a lot more than an inconvenient weekend.
