Someone asked me this week why we celebrate Easter.

It’s a very good question, and one she was quite serious about. “What do you think people are thinking when they sing, ‘Christ the Lord is Risen Today?’”

Her questions are ones that people in the church (and outside of it) have been wrestling with for thousands of years. What is it, exactly, that Jesus’ death and resurrection do for us? We know it’s the center of our faith, but what is actually accomplished?

Peter said it well on the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2:

““Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.” When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” Acts 2:36-38, NIV.

What we hold on to, no matter what, is that God through Jesus has done everything we really needed done.

And today, my goal is pretty simple: God has done so much in Christ’s death and resurrection, that we have to be careful not to narrow it down and limit it to one thing!

We’ll look at the bible and make sure that our eyes our opened, are vision is broadened to include the fullness of what God has done for us in Christ. We’ll continue next week, as Steve Sherwood and I will both speak about this big theological word “atonement”: how we are made right with God.

It’s all beyond our comprehension, when we really face into it. Our faith is based on the belief that the great, divine creator of the universe, infinite and beyond our comprehension, loved us so much that God became a human being, chose to submit and suffer and die; and we believe all of that makes a difference in how you and I live: today and forever.

We have to get some kind of handle on this incomprehensible reality. And one of the ways we do this is through analogies or word-pictures to help us get a grasp.

I love analogies. In fact there was a time in my early 20’s when I basically was trying to reduce all of the bible and all of life to analogies…usually baseball ones. J

Analogies, stories, illustrations, and experiences that draw out a teachable moment are incredibly important to all of us.

Most speakers, including Jesus with the parables he told, use examples and word pictures to help others understand truth. But analogies aren’t perfect. Usually, they are best for getting across one main point, and doing it really well.

When we get ourselves into trouble is when we push the details too far, or when we try to make all of a complex idea fit neatly into the analogy we’ve created.

Throughout the history of the church, and even within the pages of the bible itself, we find different analogies to describe what it is that Jesus’ death and resurrection does for us.

What pictures come into your mind when you think of what Christ’s death and resurrection did for us?

This is a way to get at the analogies that we live with. What pictures or phrases have you used to describe what Christ has done? [ASK]

We read several parts of the bible together earlier in the service, each one trying to get at a different aspect of what the cross and resurrection have done for us. Let’s look more carefully at several of them, broadening our understanding, refusing to let even these good pictures in our mind limit us from the fullness of what Jesus has done!

 

One picture that Jesus himself uses is ransom.

When someone is kidnapped, the loved ones will sometimes pay a ransom to the kidnapper, in order to guarantee the safe return of the kidnapped one. So if Jesus is the payment that God, the loved one offers for the many…who is being paid off? And what does that picture tell us?

Hebrews 2: 14 and 15 gives a little more detail to the “ransom” idea:

“Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death--that is, the devil-- and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” Hebrews 2:14, 15, NIV.

The ransom idea helps in some really important ways. It acknowledges what we see: there is real evil in the world, and in so many ways human beings are trapped by it, kidnapped by it, unable to break its power. Whether we talk about war or illness or death, we know what it is like to be held captive by things that hurt us.

The book of Hebrews-and Jesus himself-see his death as payment for us. We’re redeemed, bought back, ransomed from evil, from the devil. Fear and evil and death itself, the power which enslaves us, is broken forever by the loved one who wants us back, God himself. God refused to leave us in captivity. Jesus offered his life to free us from being bound by evil and death and the devil.

There’s an important truth here; evil is more than just breaking laws. It has a certain power over us that we need to be rescued from. And Jesus does just that!

Of course, it’s an analogy with problems if we push it too far, just like any analogy. If this were the only picture we had, we might be tempted to think we don’t have any responsibility for what’s gone wrong in the world. “The devil made me do it” would become our defense for everything. That’s where the other pictures or analogies are important.

The book of Romans makes us deal with our own responsibility and guilt.

Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” All through Romans, we’re reminded that none of us have any excuse, because we have all lived in such a way that falls so imperfectly short of God’s character and God’s intention for our lives.

We’re guilty, Romans says; guilty of ignoring God, guilty of going our own way, guilty of actions that go against God’s moral character. There are difficult words describing God’s wrath and anger over how creation has been harmed and warped by our rejection of God.

This is where many have developed the courtroom analogy- the idea that we are guilty of a crime, a crime with the death penalty, but Jesus stood in our place, substituted his own death for ours, so that we could live free and forgiven and exonerated.

This picture helps make sense of our world, too. When we’re honest with ourselves, we see the way our actions have been wrong, have caused pain to God and to the world. We know we deserve justice, to be held accountable for what we’ve done, but we can’t find anything we could do that would really make up for the wrong that we’ve done.

Seeing Jesus take our place and give us freedom as a gift is a beautiful, needed part of life with God! Forgiveness, the sense that we have done wrong that needs to be made right, is almost always one of the first things anyone in the bible says that Christ’s death accomplishes for us.

But like all of the pictures, this one can get us into trouble too.

It gets us in trouble if we make God only full of wrath, and we forget “For God so loved the world, he gave his one and only Son.” The biggest danger here is what this can do to our view of God. Serious questions can get raised: does God demand punishment, even inflicting it unjustly to satisfy himself? What kind of father would do that? These are real questions real people wrestle with. 2 Corinthians 5:19 helps us fight against that, when we remember that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” I don’t pretend to understand all of what the bible says about God’s anger, but I do know that our healing comes because God gave himself.

This picture also gets us in trouble if we think that all Jesus did was give us a “get out of jail free” card.

In the book of Romans, just like in Hebrews, there is more going on then just some legal infraction. We also have something in us that holds us captive, that keeps us from doing what we want and from what God intends.

The people of Israel had animal sacrifices as a part of their history, and many parts of the New Testament use that experience as an analogy for Jesus’ death. The sins of the people were “put on” the sacrificed animal.

Even before Christ, though, the prophets were reminding the people of Israel that this wasn’t just a ticket to freedom. God had more in mind. “To obey is better than sacrifice.”

Paul knows that Jesus serves as more than a substitute for us.

Jesus identifies with us, and we are to identify with him. We join Jesus in his death, and we join him in his life.

“For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin-- because anyone who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.” Romans 6:6-8, NIV.

God has done more than forgive us!

Like we read earlier from Colossians: “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ!”

Easter is the hope of new life! God has shown his power and by choosing to become human, by choosing to draw near to us, we now are given the gift of joining with Jesus. We are forgiven AND the power of sin is broken AND we live a new life AND evil is defeated forever.

When we put all of the pictures and puzzle pieces together, we start to get a glimpse of how much God has done, and why this is the center of our faith. There’s always more to discover!

The fundamental piece of all of this is our relationship with God.

More than just breaking rules, we rejected God and broke his heart, making ourselves enemies. It was so severe that even if we wanted to, there is nothing we could do to restore the relationship. We are powerless to defeat sin and selfishness in the world and in our lives.

So God did something about it through Jesus. Jesus took our penalty and earned the final victory over evil and broke the power of sin in such a way that we can join him and live as we were meant to live. We can be restored to right relationship with God.

And as God did all that, as Jesus lived and obeyed and suffered and died, we were also shown how to live. We are, Paul said, to be imitators of Christ. We are, Jesus said, to take up our cross and follow him.

I think that’s what is overwhelming me this year as we’ve gone through Easter.

It is an incredible gift, so rich and complete, what Christ has done. But it is a way of life, not just a ticket. Jesus identified with us, joined us, and he asks us to join him.

The way to salvation is paved with words like submit, suffer, obey, and cross. I’m reminded again of the call to have the same attitude as Christ Jesus:

“Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place, and gave him the name that is above every name…” Phil 2:5-9

I hear God’s call again to not just accept Christ’s work on our behalf…but God’s call to follow the way of Jesus. If, as so many of these verse say, Jesus broke the power of sin so that we could live as God intends in the Holy Spirit’s power…then let’s do it!

Let’s read, as we close, the scripture passages we read earlier, hopefully with deeper appreciation for what God has done for us in Christ.