Get This Straight
My brother Ken and I pulled into a gas station with his 1950 Meteor. "Whoa!!" gushed the attendant. "They don’t make cars like this any more! You can have a wreck in this car at 60 miles an hour, and walk away from it!" Are you kidding me? He was wrong on both counts.
I love old cars, but I have no illusions about "the good old days." I love to read history, but I don't like rummaging in the past. I like looking forward. But every once in a while you have to look in the rearview mirror, don't you?
It’s been true in Europe for a long time. And isn’t it even more obvious today in Canada? We live in a world and a country that really doesn't want a lot to do with the authentic Jesus of the Bible. Because the authentic Jesus is so gauche that he - can you believe it? - he makes exclusive claims! How did those early Christians do so remarkably well in the midst of an in-your-face world? There is a lot of hostility to Christ and to Christian teachings in our world. But their world was even more appositional than ours is. As far as I can tell none of us has been thrown to the lions to entertain the crowds yet. Quiz time. - In what year do you think most Christians were killed for their faith? What was the year in which their were more Christian martyrs than any other year?
Time’s up.
The year was last year, 2003. And 2004 may outstrip last year. Christians today face death in many parts of the world. The early Christians did, too. They didn’t glamourize it. It wasn’t something they sought or romanticized. They weren't passing out t-shirts that said, "I survived paganism." But they did thrive in their pagan environment. One of their keys was that Jesus was central. That gave their lives power. It still does.
It’s nothing new that the world doesn't want to hear what Christians have to say. But let’s hope that they won’t ever be confused about what we're saying. There are people in the church who, every once in a while fudge around the edge about Jesus to satisfy a hostile world. They’re afraid to be straight about Jesus. But there is no power in satisfying a hostile world. There is power is bringing the clear message and actions of Jesus to a world whose hostility masks deep wounds and profound sadness. So what is there about Jesus that we need to get straight?
We must be clear in a world that doesn't want to know that Jesus is the risen One! There has not been another issue about the message of Jesus that has been more frontally attacked than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Why? If you're an enemy of Jesus, you don't want Him risen from the dead, because it proves there is coming a time of accountability. We don't want him risen from the dead, because it is a validation of every single claim that he made. So throughout history, and even today, you pick up books by scholars who want to pretend that Jesus didn't really die on the cross. So, if he didn’t die, he didn’t need to be raised, right? If he didn’t die, then what happened? According to some, Jesus just kind of swooned. He didn’t die, he fainted.
Really? He swooned? First of all, hands and feet nailed to a cross. He hangs there, which immediately creates a problem of suffocation. Because in the act of crucifixion the body collapses on the lungs. Then a soldier comes along and puts a spear in his side. He looks dead, so they wrap him up in cloth head to foot and put him in a grave and roll a stone in front of him. He's there for three days. He fainted? Doesn’t it take more faith to believe that than it takes to believe the Resurrection?
Maybe his followers stole him from the grave to put up this big hoax. Can you just see it? There are these big, burly Roman guards, right? Spears, armour, and all the baggage. Peter comes up and says, "Hey, you guys. Would you move over a little bit? In fact, you're bigger than I am. Could you just kind of roll that stone away? I'm going to just take this body away."
Or actually, they might claim, this Resurrection thing is a later story. It was made up years later by the church to give credibility to its claims. But what triggered more persecution of the early church than anything else? It was the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus Christ that provoked it! That's why Paul spent time in prison, because he proclaimed the resurrection. If they just cooked this story up, the pressure from this story was so big, that somebody would have ratted on the story before long. Just as the Roman police were about to break their knee caps, they would have caved in.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ was proven by the simple fact that he came back after the resurrection. For forty days he came back, appearing to his disciples, opening his hands and side for them to test the wounds. He appeared to five hundred people. The resurrection of Jesus was the energy, the power, that drove the early church. Because Jesus was risen again there was another world to which they would go. They would see him again someday. Their Saviour was alive, and they would die for that truth, if necessary. If he wasn't risen from the dead, would even one of them have died for some fabricated scheme or swoon or story?
Several times, I’ve read a marvellous story about a Russian Communist by the name of Nikolay Bukharin. He was a cohort with Lenin, a member of the politburo, who dedicated himself to go throughout all the Russian Empire to discredit the claims of religion and Jesus Christ. No, it wasn’t an election campaign. He called people to the higher calling of atheism in a multicultural Soviet. He gets on a train and goes down to the Ukraine to Kiev and to a large hall where thousands of Ukrainians gather together. They listen to him for over an hour as he berates against the claims of Jesus Christ, the claims of the Resurrection. He calls them to atheism, which was much more intellectual and reasonable and modern and away from their old superstitions and the old crutches that they had to get through life, this Jesus stuff.
After an hour of his harangue, he finished and said to the crowd, "Are there any questions?" The crowd grew still. After a long stillness, a man in the back stood up and shouted in Russian, "Christ is risen!" And the whole crowd stood up and responded in Russian, "He is risen indeed!"
Christ clearly claims that he is the only way, and that he is the risen One. But he also claims that he is the only God. Talk about tension in a pagan environment like post-9-1-1 Canada! Do you remember John 8:58? Everything else would have been pretty good. Except that the political establishment was upset about the fact that all the crowds were paying attention to Jesus. They weren't paying much attention to them anymore. That was a power loss, a loss of control and political influence, and they were really upset about that. But they were never so upset as they were when Jesus Christ said this. Don't miss it. Without flinching, Jesus said this to the crowd: "Before Abraham was," and then he took an Old Testament name of God and ascribed it to himself. He said, "Before Abraham was, I Am." He claimed to be God. The moment he said that, the monkey died, the tent fell in, and the circus was over. The moment he said that, the gig was up. He claimed to be the I Am, the only God. Isn’t that how Jesus still challenges all of our idols?
The early church was desperately tempted to back-pedal on that claim a little bit. Because to be a good citizen of the Roman Empire, to avoid the hungry lions, to dodge being burned with pitch in the streets, what everybody did once a year was say that the government is God. Early Christians knew that Jesus was God, and the only God. They could not say with all the rest of their world that the government was God. They got it straight that only Jesus is God. He has every divine right over our lives, and over our direction, and over our destiny, because He is God.
Philippians 2 was a hymn of the early church. And the closing chorus of the hymn was this: "At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord." That's our song; that's our celebration. Will any of us go to that day in shame? Will we have to make up for how in all kinds of subtle ways we denied the deity of Christ in our lives or from our lips? All of life, every moment, every choice, is a warm-up to that day. Our lips today have the opportunity to say that all the time. Our hearts are invited to live it. Every choice we make gives us the opportunity to follow Jesus because He really is God.
Isn’t it an unspeakable privilege, even against all odds, to be able to keep that message straight?
Response - 3.3 Jesus Christ: Truly Human
