“He is not here; He has risen, just as He said.” (NIV Matthew 28:6)
Holidays are great. We get some days off of school. We get to see our family. We get to eat a ton of food. Sometimes we even get presents. I know most people will rush to choose Christmas as the number one favorite holiday. Think of all the beautiful clichés of Christmas: the warmth of the fireplace, the stockings hung by the children with care, the lights, the songs, the general "holiday spirit." But Christmas has never been my favorite holiday, and here’s why.
I love spring. I love spring for the flowers. I love it for the new hope and the crisp air and the reminder of beginnings. I love it for Easter.
As with Christmas, we have two sides of the holiday. There’s the secular side, with the Easter bunny, his eggs and never-ending piles of commercialized candy. And while that is really nice and great, it’s not what makes it the singularly greatest holiday that we as humans get to celebrate.
Easter is the very foundation of my faith. As a Christian, I believe that Jesus Christ came to Earth as a regular mortal, lived a pure life, performed miracles, gathered followers and overall did everything the Holy Bible tells us He did. And then, on Good Friday, He allowed Himself to be killed a criminal’s death even though he had done nothing wrong.
In the Old Testament, we see accounts of innocent lambs being sacrificed on an altar to cleanse the people of their sins. Jesus became that lamb, metaphorically. We have a lot of names for Christ, but this is the most powerful imagery to me. The thought of this all-powerful God who created everything and knows everything and has all the greatness we can’t fathom becoming a regular human and then doing that… it boggles me. He became a lamb who was led away to be slaughtered. This lamb died as a sacrifice to forgive every sin mankind had ever and would ever commit.
Good Friday is anything but “good” in my mind. It’s really not a pretty picture. After being betrayed by one of his twelve closest pals the night before, He went on trial and was sentenced to a horrible, gruesome, slow death. And the Roman law had this tradition that, at just the time Jesus happened to be facing possible death, one criminal could be released. And the people chose someone else who actually was guilty instead! But I digress.
Jesus was mocked, brutally whipped, physically destroyed and adorned with a crown of thorns before being forced to carry His own means of death, a simple wooden cross, to the place where He would take His last breath. (Or so they thought. Bum bum bum!) And He was nailed to the wood without any protest or hate toward his aggressors. He even showed forgiveness to one of the criminals dying next to him. He remained this perfect image of love that He had been throughout His short life. Then He died. And everyone thought that was the end.
But then came Easter. Easter was when He did the unthinkable. He became alive again. And this is incredible because He raised other people from the dead, but His resurrection is the most important. He proved that He’s greater than death, He fulfills His promises and He created this beautiful reason to create countless worship songs with words like, “He rose and conquered the grave, Jesus conquered the grave” and “My God’s not dead, He’s surely alive.” It’s this crazy powerful message of which I may never fully understand the magnitude.
So, Easter is the day in which we skip into church and say, “Hallelujah, He has risen" and “He has risen indeed.” Because after the resurrection happened, Christianity spread like wildfire, despite persecution. The people had something so strong to believe in that it carried through all the way to modern times. The human sacrifice was powerful, but the ascension to Heaven after a miraculous resurrection sealed the deal. Today in the
I don’t pretend to be a perfect Christian or even really a good one. I don’t know my Bible verses by heart or attend church every Sunday. I mess up, and I sin more times a day than a tally board would have room for, probably. But I know one thing for sure: Jesus saved me.
And He saved me on Easter.
