Easter Politics

Through Holy Week we presented a series entitled Change. Happened. Here. And what we signified at each point of the journey (Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter) was the real change the Easter gospel has brought about.

As a conclusion to the Easter season and the Easter message I would like to reflect on one aspect of the real change that has happened because of Jesus. I would like to consider for a moment “the politics of Easter”. For if Easter is a transcendent event, the moment that defines the meaning and hope of the world, then it is no mere religious event. It cannot be contained in such narrow and confining things as religious practices and institutions. Resurrection, by definition, is bigger than religion. It is a material-spiritual event that not only redefines reality but all human enterprise in light of that reality. Resurrection changes all value and meaning, all action and hope. Resurrection is, in other words, also a political event.

It is not hard to see that the first Easter took place in a political environment. Competing groups attempted to use power to advance their agendas. There were the Romans who imposed their empire and the various brands of Jewish terrorism who sought ways to make their stay as uncomfortable as possible. There were the competing Jewish parties, the Pharisees and Sadducees, each proposing solutions for a Jewish state living under Roman domination. And then there was Jesus who was none of the above. While all of these political solutions have either failed or became irrelevant in time, their ideological offspring are still with us.

On Sunday we reflected on this text from Acts 1:6

when the apostles were with Jesus, they kept asking him, “Lord, has the time come for you to free Israel and restore our kingdom?”

This represents, of course, a set of political questions: who would rule them? what hope could they have for their nation? how could they endure the humiliation and abuse of a dominating empire? And all such questions were pinned to their view of Jesus as Messiah. Wouldn’t he now solve the issues that defined their times?

Indeed, he would. Indeed, he had. But it would not be through politics as usual. While so much of political change works from the top down, or from the outside in, the kingdom of Jesus works in an opposite direction. The politics of Easter works from the bottom up, from the inside out, from the gift of grace that works toward personal and social change over time. Jesus changes everything through self-sacrificial love, through forgiving grace, and through a reversal of power as we usually know it. Jesus brings a kingdom into reality, but a kingdom that subverts our brand of politics. Instead of top-down, we change from the bottom-up. Instead of the outside-in change of policy and law, we embrace the inside-out change of Spirit.

Our pastor Chris sometimes talks about “a more complicated hope”. To call hope complicated does not mean that it is a hope that is less than what we need it to be -- quite the opposite. The hope that Jesus brings is complicated because it doesn’t completely satisfy us when we start with our self-initiated plans and schemes. No, it is more complicated than that -- it is a hope that breaks us out into new territory, bringing to light a reality we never could dream up on our own. It is more complicated because we find ourselves wrestling with what it is that we are looking for, even when we don’t know what it is we are looking for, and even while we wait for that unseen reality yet to come.

The resurrection of Jesus begins something new in the human journey, a reality yet to be fully realized. But it is not merely the answer to a religious question, be sure of that. It introduces a change we might even consider as political, a reality that encompasses every conceivable aspect of human experience.

This Sunday we begin a new series which we hope will address issues of materialism and consumerism in our culture. We are calling the series The Story of Stuff. Join us this Sunday at 9:29 and 11:11 am.

Bob