Communion With the Christ:: Easter: "I AM the Resurrection"

The resurrection of Jesus is the central event in all of history. Nothing can compare with it. The Resurrection is an event as no other. It speaks to us regarding the faithfulness of our God and his eternal love and desire for each and all of us.

The resurrection is the moment when our Creator, who in the person of Jesus, entered into the depths of the most helpless of conditions, that of death itself , and came forth again.

Death, the grave, the very absents of life, that place which is far beyond hope, when all is lost, it is from such a place that our Lord Jesus Christ descended and from which he came forth to great glory.

Our Lord Jesus entered that place where all humanity would have been destined to find itself. Yet, our God in his divine providence, did not create us for death, but for life, and not just life which arises but for a moment then passes away, no our loving God created us to have life eternally within deep communion with himself.

Jesus came and walked the Earth, he accepted the lowly place as a Son of Man to show us that he is the Son of God, that he wants us to know him and Jesus as the very self of God, revealed himself to us through Jesus.

Jesus gave us the most perfect clearest revelation of the great God which could possibly be conveyed to us. Jesus did not just tell us about God, he showed us about God. In Jesus we see the glorious love of the Father and the divine working of the Holy Spirit all through the Son. In Jesus all of the Holy Trinity is brought into perfect view.

Jesus moved among the people seeing their suffering and life’s struggles. Jesus witnesses the full spectrum of the human condition, whatever we might face in this life Jesus either witnessed or he himself experienced.

Jesus saw the helplessness and the seemingly futile condition of humanity and spoke to them of a sure hope that their God had not abandoned them. He healed them, comforted them and encouraged them about the future that ultimately good would prevail, not through human efforts and plans of humanity, but through the divine intervention of God himself. Even as Jesus spoke of these things, he embodied them, Jesus was and is the true and only hope of humanity.

This very one who came as the perfect expression of the love of God, the one who did no harm to any however was not exempt for the injustice and violence of the world driven by a lust for power and prominence over the lives of others. Jesus was wrongfully and illegally arrested under Jewish law and tried under false accusations and false pretenses by the very ones who were charged to prevent just such a thing from ever taking place.

Jesus, though he faced great pressures from all directions, spiritual, instructional and political Jesus kept his peace and was for the most part silent knowing that even now in the midst of all the wrong being perpetrated against him that his Father’s will was unfolding.

Jesus was standing in all of our places. He was suffering for us and with us identifying himself with us, so that we might find our identifying with him.

Though Jesus being fully God, he yet subjected himself to the will of the Father no matter the outcome of the unfolding events. Jesus knew that his Father was faithful and would not allow him to be lost to the grip of death and through his resurrection we can know that God will be faithful to us.

Jesus was not just sacrificing himself there, that day, but rather Jesus’s whole life was based upon sacrifice to the will of God. Jesus sacrificed himself his whole life, his whole life. All his life, all his life. In many ways the cross was the logical conclusion to a life entirely scarified to the perfect will of God. This means that Jesus sacrificed his “self”.

Jesus accepted the place, of the lowest status and was condemned to die. He took on the weight of the cross, a weight which would have been justly placed upon our own shoulders, but Jesus willingly took it on for each and all of us so that we might not have to.

The Good Shepherd Jesus laid down his life for the flock of humanity. He did so to show us the love of God, to show us how far our God would go just have us with him even unto death. God was saying to us all that he loves us more than he loves himself.

The cross of Jesus, there upon Calvary, was not in truth directed toward God as a legal appeasement of some law, but rather, the cross is directed to all humanity as a demonstration of God’s divine love, grace, forgiveness and so much more.

The cross of Jesus is there that we might look upon it and know that God has removed any and all things which would separate him and humanity, that none need not be excluded for entering eternal life, which is a relationship with God and one another all through Jesus.

The cross takes away all of our excuses from being left out. We may look at the cross and know that upon it that manifested work of our salvation was finished.

Jesus as all humanity must went to the darkness of the grave and closed in by the stone. From all human vantage points Jesus and movement which he began was now over, that it would be forgotten and passes into nothingness.

Out of this place of death and hopelessness however the Spirit of God moved and the one great enemy of all humanity, that of death was defeated in and by Jesus. He came forth in glory unequalled as no other has or ever could. Jesus not only has the full glory of his divine nature restored, even his humanity is risen to a place as glory as well.

No power seen or unseen could keep Jesus in the bounds of death. Not even the military might of Rome could stop the resurrection, nor the political scheming of the religious establishment, it could not, then nor now, keep Jesus in the grave.

Jesus though death and resurrection has gone and come again as no one else. The resurrection confirms the power of the cross, for without the resurrection the cross would have no meaning.

The resurrection confirms Jesus’ divine identity as the Son of God. Jesus is not the Son of God because he was resurrected, but rather he is resurrection because he is the Son of God.

Our Lord Jesus speaks to each and all; “I am the Resurrection”. Jesus told this to Martha the grieving sister of dead Lazarus to encourage her and all of us, that his power to intervene is always available even when all hope is dead, lost or gone, with Jesus it is never too late.

The “Resurrection” therefore is not just an event, but is who Jesus is.

Jesus would speak to all of now, that he is “the Resurrection” for us, that is Jesus can and will bring forth life from the dead, no matter how dead our hopes may be. Even if we pass from this Earthly life, we are assured that through Jesus our grave of death will be empty even as his is as we will share in the life eternal which awaits us.

Jesus gives us these words of comfort, each time we pounder the resurrection of our Lord, that we might take hope and comfort that in Jesus there is hope and life.

Let each and all consider this truth as we celebrate this Easter season. Jesus speaks to us all “I am the Resurrection”.

Benediction: May we each and all be ever mindful and encouraged that in our Lord Jesus our God has given us an eternal hope all through his Holy Son, today, tomorrow and forevermore. Amen.