The Awkwardness of Easter

Christianity makes bold claims. Among its boldest: the world was created in six days by a triune God who has no beginning. The second person of the Godhead became man, being born of a virgin. He walked the earth two thousand years ago. Then He died. But perhaps the boldest claim of Christianity is what happened next: He walked again.

It’s quite interesting that people who give little thought to the bold claims of Christianity are willing to darken the doors of a church on the day we focus on one of its boldest claims. Instead of following the modern Sunday routine to which they are accustomed, they’re now in a pew singing ancient songs, observing an ancient meal, and hearing an ancient story. Perhaps it’s nostalgia, tradition, guilt, curiosity, or some combination of these that compels them to come and observe this covenant rehearsal of God’s people. Whatever the motive, they find themselves in the tension between skepticism and faith, between the comforts of a secular worldview and the possibility that Jesus Christ really did walk out of the tomb that early Sunday morning. They are on the precipice of eternity when their natural flesh is wired to look no further than their present happiness. This makes for an awkward collision of the unspiritual with the spiritual.

To the unspiritual mind, believing in and celebrating a dead man’s coming back to life is pure fantasy. It is the height of foolishness. But to the spiritual mind, it is of first importance: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3–4). What matters most, Paul argues, is that Jesus died for our sins and then rose from the dead, just as the Old Testament said He would. This bold claim is the most foundational truth of Christianity. But the Apostle knows well that the natural person will not—indeed, cannot—accept spiritual things: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).

The unbeliever who comes to church on Easter cannot accept the things of the Spirit. And yet he’s confronted with a profoundly unsettling problem: Is Jesus really who He says He is, and if so, what are the implications of that for my life? Or was Jesus a fraud? The Scottish preacher “Rabbi” John Duncan (1796–1870) referred to this predicament as the trilemma. C.S. Lewis popularized this trilemma in Mere Christianity: Jesus must be either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord. Lewis famously writes:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. . . . Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

When the unbeliever enters the sanctuary on Easter morning, he too must make a choice: Who is Jesus? When he looks at the liturgy, observes God’s people worshiping Him in spirit and in truth, and sees the setting of the table of the risen Lamb, he is confronted with this dilemma afresh.

Churches and Christians also have a choice. We can water down the bold claims of Christianity, making them more palatable and less awkward, or we can embrace the awkward and proclaim the whole counsel of God. In doing so, we trust the Spirit to convince unbelievers of their sin and misery, enlighten their minds in the knowledge of Christ, and renew their wills, persuading and enabling them to embrace Jesus Christ, freely offered to them in the gospel (see Westminster Shorter Catechism 31). If this work is to happen, it is to be a supernatural work of the Spirit. He gives spiritual eyes to the elect as His people boldly proclaim the gospel of Christ.

The boldness of the early Christians caused the world to brand them as topsy-turvy world-turners (Acts 17:6). Are we, too, willing to be branded as weird and disruptive? The gospel and its doctrines are, in fact, weird for the natural and unspiritual man. But this didn’t compel the Apostles to gut the Christian gospel of its supernatural components. The earliest Christian preaching was not merely about ethical living and self-improvement. It was about an unusual historical event: “This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses” (Acts 2:32). The first Christians did not risk their lives because they found Christianity inspiring; they died because they were convinced through eyewitness testimony that Jesus is alive. They were persuaded that He is the risen Lord before whom every knee must bow (Phil. 2:10). They did not, therefore, soften the blows of Christianity.

At the moment when we’d expect the Apostles to evade the offensiveness of the gospel, the Spirit empowers Peter instead to lean into that very offensiveness after he healed a crippled beggar: “Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by him this man is standing before you well” (Acts 4:8–10, emphasis added). The chief priests and Sanhedrin were confronted with the same dilemma that unbelievers face when they make their unique visit to church on Easter: “This Jesus God raised from the dead. What say you?”

This confrontation, this tension, is awkward. But it’s also a glorious opportunity. It’s an opportunity for us not to shrink back (Heb. 10:39) but to boldly declare, through the ordinary means of grace that we attend to each and every Lord’s Day, that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. As Lord of all, He demands faith and repentance, and we are His instruments to proclaim repentance for the forgiveness of sins in His name (Luke 24:46–49). May we joyfully embrace the awkwardness of this collision and glory in the resurrected Savior.