By Stephen Smoot
Human understanding, generally expressed by human grammar, reaches its limits when it meets the divine. Hence the phrase “He is Risen,” which comes to the mind, heart, and mouth often during the Easter season.
“He is not here: for he is risen, as he said” said an angel of God when approaching a group of women, who also told them “fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus who was crucified.”
Therein lies the answer to the problem posed by “The Preacher” of Ecclesiastes approximately 900 years ago. He wrote “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” In frustration, he cried “there is no new thing under the sun.”
But there would come a new revelation under the Son.
In the spring of the year 33 Anno Domini, or “the Year of Our Lord” in English, Jesus Christ was tortured horrifically, crucified on the Cross by Roman custom, then died on Good Friday. As the Apostolic Creed states, He “was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he will come to judge the quick and the dead.”
During those days He showed Himself to His Disciples and prepared them to carry His ministry forward without Him.
It should be noted here that the general Jewish population of Judaea did not advocate for the execution of Christ, who was divinely appointed King of the Jews. Only those in Judaea who held positions of favor and feared the Roman response to the rapid spread of the Ministry of Christ wanted the Romans to crucify Him.
As Pastor Mark Flynn of Duffey Memorial Methodist Church in Moorefield explains, therein lies the heart of the Christian faith, the victory of Christ over death and His promise to humanity of eternal life with God.
“I have been preaching on Easter since 1977,” shared Pastor Flynn. Many of those Easters saw him compose multiple sermons specifically for sunrise and also traditional services. Pastor Flynn has drawn from all of the Gospels at one time or another for explanation, saying “it does not trouble me that the four Gospel accounts don’t tell the story of the Resurrection in the same way.” He added that “it gives an opportunity to make preaching the Gospel that much richer.”
Each Gospel was penned by a different disciple, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Gospel According to Matthew, for instance, provides the Joe Friday “just the facts ma’am” approach. That written by John, however, takes an intellectual and philosophical approach to explaining the life of Christ.
The authenticity of the account is more difficult to dispute because “we don’t have everyone telling the story in exactly the same way,” said Pastor Flynn, who compared it to police detectives doubting a group of criminals’ stories when they match up too precisely. He explained that each told their own experience and “shared what they knew.”
Regardless of which account, the Resurrection of Christ serves as the core belief defining the Christian faith. Pastor Flynn explained that those who do not acknowledge that fact miss much of the point of Christ’s experience on earth. It also reaffirms the role that Christ has in the Christian faith.
St. Athanasius of Alexandria, who lived in the early 300s AD, puzzled over a problem. He wrote in On the Incarnation that it was unworthy of God to at the same time allow His creation in mankind to die and decay into corruption because of the work of the Devil. St. Athanasius at the same time stated that it was also unworthy of God to go back on his own condemnation of humanity after the Fall recounted in the Book of Genesis.
The answer lay in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. St. Athanasuis stated that Christ would “maintain for the Father His consistency of character with all. For He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate all, an worthy to suffer on behalf of all, and able to be an ambassador for all with the Father.”
From this logic came the doctrine that Christ serves as a link between the realm of immanence (humankind and the “world”, what Saint Augustine referred to as Civitas Mundi) and that of transcendence (the omnipotence and omniscience of God.) Jesus Christ’s existence on earth provided a conduit of understanding through which mankind could comprehend the divine in terms of the three-in-one Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Pastor Flynn sees those truths best stated in Romans 10:9 “that if thou shalt confess with they mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” Belief in the Resurrection of Jesus leads to the rest of the core doctrines, that victory can be had over death through Christ and Christ’s teaching on how to win that victory, through both faith and honest repentance.
As the winds of war stirred disturbance in Europe in 1939, one of the most beloved gospel songwriters fell to a debilitating stroke. Though partly paralyzed and unable to even leave his home, Eugene Monroe Bartlett Sr did not believe he had lost anything, but was actually on the verge of his own triumph through Christ.
“I heard about His groaning, of His precious blood’s atoning,” wrote Bartlett, who expressed with simple and beautiful eloquence another important aspect of the Resurrection. The second verse explains that “he sought me and bought me with His redeeming blood” then “plunged me to victory beneath the cleansing flood.” Christ’s death prior to His victory over it paved the superhighway of redemption that each person may follow if they so choose.
In 1 Peter, one of the chapters that Pastor Flynn finds inspiration in, it reads that Christ “verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world.” Those that “do believe in God, that raised him from the dead, and gave him glory,” through that belief comes the “faith and hope” of conquering death. 1Thessalonians 10 adds that Christ also “delivered us from the wrath to come.”
Using the word “risen” in the present tense for an event that happened nearly two millennia ago may sound unusual to modern ears that do not understand that “Risen” is both a historical and also a current event. Pastor Flynn explained that in his sanctuary, there is a spot with two identical candles side by side, representing both halves of Christ’s nature. “We believe He is fully God and fully man.”
“Risen” remains a permanent and enduring part of Christ because, as Pastor Flynn explains, Christ is the “only one who can make that connection” between the divine and the human, the “only one who can win for us the victory over death,” and the “only one who can reconcile us to God. Until the end of days, Christ does that for mankind because it is part and parcel of “Risen.”
