Why the resurrection changes everything

Imagine you are working on something you care about deeply, writing it out on paper by hand. You’re an author, maybe, and it’s the novel you’ve always dreamt of writing. At the end of the day, a man comes in, takes every sheet of paper and throws them onto the fire. 

As you watch the pages smoulder and shrivel up into ashes, he sends you home for the night, and you realise you cannot even remember what you have written. So, you come back the next day and start again. You pour your heart and soul into what you are doing. And at the end of the day, he comes in again, burns it all to ashes and sends you home. There’s nothing you can do to hang on to any of it; not even to the smallest scrap of memory. 

Imagine the frustration. The futility. The fury. You beg for more time. He says: “OK, you can have a week.” 

So, you get up, come into work and you write and you write. By the end of the seventh day, you’ve written so much more than you ever have before. It’s stronger, deeper, more beautiful. You love what you’ve done. But then the man walks back in, takes the sheets and burns them, just as before.

As your head hits the pillow that night, you’re more frustrated than ever, because more has been wasted. It was so good; so full of meaning; and now it’s as if it never was. It’s just dust, as dead and silent as all the other dust.

If death is the end, everything we’ve ever done will shrivel up into nothingness like paper on the fire

Now imagine that the next morning, there’s a surprise. The man greets you at the door and says he has an offer: You may have a lifetime. A lifetime to write. Then he will come and burn it all, like always, and you will go home to forget and die. 

He stands there, holding out the pen. What do you do?

You know that the pain will be even greater. So much of yourself will have been poured into this work – so much beauty, so much worth – and yet it will still be ashes in the end. Like writing with a sparkler in the night. 

You reach out and take the pen from his hand. You walk, slow as a dirge, to the desk and pull the first blank sheet in front of you. Because what choice do you have? The story might be beautiful while it lasts. You will just have to try to forget how it ends.

The message of Easter

If death is the end, the above is the story of our lives. Everything we’ve ever done – and everything we are – will shrivel up into nothingness like paper on the fire. 

But death isn’t the end because Jesus is alive. That’s not a myth, a metaphor or a flight of wishful thinking: Easter really happened. Time after time I’ve seen a simple presentation of the historical facts move people from saying: “I wish I could have your faith,” to: “I think this might be real.” In fact, the evidence is so compelling that many sceptics who’ve set out to discredit it have changed their minds and written books about why it must be true! 

To believe the Easter story doesn’t require blind faith, it just demands that we open our eyes to the truth. It’s not a leap in the dark; it’s stepping out into the light and placing our feet on solid ground. 

And in the light of the resurrection, everything looks different.  

Firm in the face of death

A couple of years ago, I attended the most moving funeral I’ve ever been to. Marcel was a friend of my wife’s. For all the years we’d known him, Marcel was a walking, talking explosion of joy. He had become a Christian when he was 18, and it totally transformed him: he was one of the warmest people I’d ever met, with a booming laugh that was wonderfully infectious. He was an actor and, at his funeral, we heard stories about how he drew an entire cast into animated discussions about God just before curtain-up at the National Theatre. We watched clips of him dancing exuberantly dressed as a caterpillar, for reasons I still don’t fully understand. 

Marcel died of an unusual heart condition in his 30s, leaving behind a wife and two young children. They were lost without him. It was unbearably sad. No one dared offer hollow words of comfort or tried to make sense of what had happened. But there was a moment in the service I will never forget, when they showed a video that Marcel had recorded with a Christian theatre company. He was portraying John, retelling the moment when he met the risen Christ. As Marcel spoke out John’s description of Jesus – alive, real and right there with him in the room – it was obvious that the tears of joy and love welling up in the corners of his eyes weren’t just a performance. At one point he looked into the camera and repeated Jesus’ words: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die” (John 11:25).

To believe the Easter story doesn’t require blind faith, it demands that we open our eyes to the truth

You could see on Marcel’s face that he really believed it. It was like he was preaching at his own funeral. 

As I watched, it hit me that Marcel’s story was not over. If Jesus was alive, then Marcel was too. It came home to me that Marcel still loved his wife and his kids, he still loved Jesus, and he was enjoying being alive with Him at that very moment. All around the room, among the tears of grief and confusion, there were also tears of poignant, certain joy. Tears of hope. Because if Jesus is alive, it changes everything.

At the end of his great chapter insisting that Jesus bodily rose from the dead (1 Corinthians 15), Paul breaks out in a shout of triumph – almost like a football fan taunting the defeated opposition: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (v55).

He explains that the “sting” of death is our sin and the condemnation it deserves, but because Jesus died and rose for us, we are free from all of that. Death had no victory over Jesus, so it has no victory over Marcel and it will have no victory over us. And then Paul draws his conclusion: “Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain” (v58).

Paul encourages us to look death square in the face and stand firm. We don’t need to lose heart or give up hope. Jesus has smashed through death and come out the other side, and so nothing we do with or for Him will ever be wasted.  

Planting seeds

To get my head around what Paul means, I find it helpful to think about a metaphor he uses earlier in the chapter. He’s explaining how our resurrection bodies will be different (immortal and perfect) but still really us; and he compares that to the way a seed, when you bury it, grows into a plant. The plant is much greater and more glorious, but it really did come from the seed. Paul says Jesus’ resurrection body is the firstfruit of a whole new creation: He is the first seed to burst into glorious life, guaranteeing that one day the rest of the harvest will follow. 

So, when Paul says: “your labour in the Lord is not in vain”, his point is this: death doesn’t get to burn up the pages we’ve written with our lives. Jesus’ resurrection was the beginning of God’s new world – which will last forever – and we get to participate in that world right now. The things we do with Jesus and for Jesus are like seeds. All death can do is plant them.

The resurrection saturates our ordinary days with profound purpose

There’s a path on my way to work that’s lined on either side with massive London plane trees. Walking beneath them makes you feel tiny in the best possible way, and when the summer sun shines through the leaves it’s utterly glorious. I love imagining the day, a century or so ago, when some ordinary gardener planted those tiny seeds. It wouldn’t have looked like much, taking those prickly brown lumps and burying them in the earth. But I like to imagine the gardener straightening up, wiping the sweat from their forehead and saying: “You know, one day, these trees will be 100 feet tall. They will be breathtaking.” And now they are. 

Every time we show the kindness of God to someone in need, a seed is planted. Every time we pluck up the courage to mention our faith at work or extend an invitation to church, a seed is planted. Every minute of hard-fought faithfulness to Christ; every patient hour of caring for family or friends; every long year of holding on to hope in the face of illness, depression or anxiety – none of it will be wasted. Jesus sees it, values it and will bring something precious out of it – perhaps in us, perhaps in other people, perhaps in a way we can’t even imagine right now. 

When Jesus raises us from the dead into a healed world and wipes every tear from our eyes (see Revelation 7:17; 21:4), we’ll see what He’s done with all the feeble, insignificant-looking seeds we’ve sown, and it will take our breath away. 

The meaning of life

I once asked my friend Joanna to write down the difference Jesus’ resurrection made to her everyday life. She said this: “I have always been very aware of my mortality and so often found most things pointless. Why should I ‘do good’ just for the sake of it, if other people aren’t going to do the same and none of it is going to matter when I die? Christianity was the only thing that told me I was inherently valuable and could have a deeper purpose beyond this life: the opportunity to join in the eternal work that God was already doing.”

The resurrection saturates our ordinary days with profound purpose. We’re not stuck trying to inject meaning into an absurd and accidental existence. We were created on purpose, and for a purpose. The creator Himself has turned up in the person of Jesus, died for us and risen from the dead. That means you matter to Him. He cares about us. He not only forgives us; He brings us into His family and calls us to get involved with the family business, playing our part in what He’s doing to bring healing, truth and hope to this weary world. 

It might be hard. It might be costly. But it will not be in vain.