This article was originally published in Sharon’s “How We Live” Bellringer column, in the 2023 Easter Season edition.
On the third day he rose again The Nicene Creed, BCP. 328, 358
Every Sunday, unless there’s a baptism when we use the Apostle’s Creed, we profess our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed. While all of the creed is of course important, the few words quoted above are at the heart of our Christian faith. While members of all three Abrahamic religions believe Jesus lived and died, only we Christians believe he rose again. And yet, while we can picture the events leading up to Easter - Jesus partaking of a last supper with his friends, being arrested in the dead of night, the sham trials, the horror of his crucifixion, we come up short when we try to picture what happened on Easter morning, because we just don’t know. Those who were alive when it happened didn’t know. The authorities tried to say the body had been stolen, but reason tells me an empty tomb, if that’s all Easter was about, would not have changed the world. But Easter did change the world. After that short glitch where our mental video goes blank, we know that after finding his body gone, Jesus’ followers experienced him once again. He walked with them, talked with them, broke bread with them, called them by name. Their experience of him was real enough that they were able to convince so many others to join them as followers of Jesus that what began as the beliefs of a small band of mostly Jewish peasants grew into one of the world’s great religions.
More than two thousand years after that first Easter we Christians still don’t know exactly what happened that day, or for that matter what happens when we die. We haven’t been there; there’s no one we can turn to who can tell us what lies on the other side of that door. But we believe, Jesus assured us and so we have given our hearts to the notion, that there is something more to our spiritual journey than the part we live here on earth. For sixty-six years I’ve believed what my father taught me in confirmation class when I was ten years old: just as an unborn child can’t possibly imagine how much bigger and brighter and more wonderful this world is than the dark, cramped, muffled world of the womb, we can’t possibly imagine how much more wonderful the next life is compared to this one. And why do we believe it’s so much more wonderful? Because we will no longer be straddling two worlds, with one foot in the physical and one in the spiritual. We will be fully present with God and all those who have gone before us, wrapped for all eternity in God’s loving embrace. We will be with Jesus, able to proclaim more enthusiastically than we ever could on earth: Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed!
