Everyone love’s a holiday; a day off from work and a day to
relax. I was just thinking about this past Friday to the coming Sunday.
Everyone is American on the 4th of July and everyone is Irish on St.
Patrick’s Day but not everyone knows about Easter and what it SHOULD mean to
believers. More important the how and why’s of having a generation of people
who have limited beliefs or no belief construct at all.
Easter is not about new clothes, eggs, the Easter bunny,
etc…yet believer give these mixed messages to the world. The churches overflow
with people who only “show up” for this holiday.
I’m reminded of a story conveyed to me where a man and his
son were in the supermarket and the boy was bombarded with the brightly
decorated “Easter aisle.” The boy asked his father what Easter was and the man
told his son “that’s when people celebrate some zombie called Jesus.” How could
the little boy think of God any way else when someone he loved and trusted
tells him such a story? Which leads me to my thought for today….what stories do
we tell ourselves that either allow us to deny the existence of God or to serve
Him in such a limited capacity?
John 19: 1 – 42
Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. 2 The soldiers
twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They clothed him in
a purple robe. 3 and went up to him again and again, saying, “Hail, king
of the Jews!” And they slapped him in the face.
4 Once more Pilate came out and said to the Jews
gathered there, “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I
find no basis for a charge against him.” 5 When Jesus came out
wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, “Here is
the man!”
6 As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw
him, they shouted, “Crucify! Crucify!”
But Pilate answered, “You take him and crucify him. As
for me, I find no basis for a charge against him.”
7 The Jewish leaders insisted, “We have a law, and
according to that law he must die, because he claimed to be the Son of
God.”
8 When Pilate heard this, he was even more
afraid, 9 and he went back inside the palace. “Where do you come
from?” he asked Jesus, but Jesus gave him no answer. 10 “Do you
refuse to speak to me?” Pilate said. “Don’t you realize I have power either to
free you or to crucify you?”
11 Jesus answered, “You would have no power over
me if it were not given to you from above. Therefore the one who handed me
over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”
12 From then on, Pilate tried to set Jesus free, but the
Jewish leaders kept shouting, “If you let this man go, you are no friend of
Caesar. Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.”
13 When Pilate heard this, he brought Jesus out and sat
down on the judge’s seat at a place known as the Stone Pavement (which in
Aramaic is Gabbatha).14 It was the day of Preparation of the
Passover; it was about noon.
“Here is your king,” Pilate said to the Jews.
15 But they shouted, “Take him away! Take him away!
Crucify him!”
“Shall I crucify your king?” Pilate asked.
“We have no king but Caesar,” the chief priests answered.
16 Finally Pilate handed him over to them to be
crucified.
The Crucifixion of Jesus
So the soldiers took charge of Jesus. 17 Carrying
his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is
called Golgotha). 18 There they crucified him, and with him two
others—one on each side and Jesus in the middle.
19 Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the
cross. It read: Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews. 20 Many
of the Jews read this sign, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near
the city, and the sign was written in Aramaic, Latin and
Greek. 21 The chief priests of the Jews protested to Pilate, “Do not
write ‘The King of the Jews,’ but that this man claimed to be king of the
Jews.”
22 Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have
written.”
23 When the soldiers crucified Jesus, they took his
clothes, dividing them into four shares, one for each of them, with the
undergarment remaining. This garment was seamless, woven in one piece from top
to bottom.
24 “Let’s not tear it,” they said to one another.
“Let’s decide by lot who will get it.”
This happened that the scripture might be
fulfilled that said,
“They divided my clothes among them
and cast lots for my garment.”
So this is what the soldiers did.
25 Near the cross of Jesus stood his
mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary
Magdalene. 26 When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple
whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, “Woman, here is your
son,” 27 and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From
that time on, this disciple took her into his home.
The Death of Jesus
28 Later, knowing that everything had now been
finished, and so that Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus
said, “I am thirsty.” 29 A jar of wine vinegar was there,
so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant,
and lifted it to Jesus’ lips. 30 When he had received the drink,
Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave
up his spirit.
31 Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next
day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the
bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have
the legs broken and the bodies taken down. 32 The soldiers therefore
came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and
then those of the other. 33 But when they came to Jesus and found
that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. 34 Instead,
one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden
flow of blood and water. 35 The man who saw it has given
testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth,
and he testifies so that you also may believe. 36 These things
happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones
will be broken,” 37 and, as another scripture says, “They will look
on the one they have pierced.”
The Burial of Jesus
38 Later, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body
of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because he feared
the Jewish leaders. With Pilate’s permission, he came and took the body
away. 39 He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier
had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes,
about seventy-five pounds. 40 Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them
wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance
with Jewish burial customs. 41 At the place where Jesus was
crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one
had ever been laid. 42 Because it was the Jewish day of
Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.
I am not a fundamentalist; I do not dare presume or
assume that everyone has to believe what
I believe but what I do know is that there is a power greater than ourselves
that makes the “whole thing” ( life) work.
I approach my faith like an insurance/assurance policy:
Insurance, in that I rather have a policy and invest in the plan and not need
it than to have a crisis and not have it; assurance in that I've tried and
tested the God I serve and He has always come through and shown love to me even
when I am utterly unfaithful to Him. I challenge you to give thought to the
following as you enjoy the holiday….
John 3:16-17 New International Version (NIV)
16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and
only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have
eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to
condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
