What Easter Really Means - Easter - 2025
What Does Easter Mean?
Acts 10:34-43; Luke 24:1-12
Acts 10:34-43
Then Peter began to speak to them: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”
Luke 24:1-12
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.
Prayer – We celebrate in your love, O God of the living, for you made the tomb of death the womb from which you brought forth new life through the resurrection of your son, our Lord, Jesus. Help us to see a new meaning for Easter, one based on grace rather than atonement; one based on new wineskins rather than old ones; one based on your choice of boundless love rather than our everyday choices – amen.
This morning is probably going to be a little different than the typical Easter morning Hallelujah, the Lord is Risen, service. It may be more about deconstructing some Easter beliefs in order to expand some Easter beliefs. It may be about what Easter really means if you believe that grace, true grace, is true.
Over the last several years you have heard me preach about grace quite a bit. It is my favorite theological notion to say the least. And you may wonder why? I am going to try and wrestle with that question with you this morning. For a long time now I have believed that all of God’s children, red, yellow, black and white; Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, and non-believer would be saved, not because of anything we do, but because God’s intent, God’s will is that every person be saved – otherwise evil would win and love would lose. Scripture tells us time and time again that God is love and that God’s love trumped death.
Over the years as I have become more and more convinced that God would save every person, I tried to hold on to my traditional Christian formulas – salvation no longer being the sole possession of a specific culture, religion, denomination or person. Salvation belongs to God. It is what God does in the lives of all of God’s children. Perhaps my biggest challenge had to do with atonement theology – I mean I was born a Presbyterian and from Calvin to Barth that meant I, we, all people are stained by original sin and Jesus had to pay the debt for all of us. And though I wanted to pour new wine into my old wineskins, I quickly learned that old wineskins can’t hold this new wine.
My theological mind had to expand; I had to abandon old formulas I’d been taught, had preached and defended. I’d insisted that Jesus had to die; Jesus came only to cancel our debts of sin; Jesus had to be the Paschal Lamb; Jesus had to go to the cross in order that I, we, all people could be saved. It hasn’t been easy leaving those old wineskins behind. What I realized is that atonement theology demands a payment and that idea totally contradicts the idea of grace. Why must sins be paid for? If God is a God of grace and mercy, why is a payment necessary? I have been forced to decide whether grace is really true.
Atonement theology is an age-old idea and a theme in many religions and philosophies; it is embedded in Jewish and Christian theology. It’s easy to defend in our Christian tradition and scripture. It resonates with our human obsession with justice. We may doubt the truth of grace from God, but we are convinced that sins – especially the sins of others – must be atoned. The only problem with atonement theology is that it contradicts the ethic of Jesus. Jesus rejected an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth theology. Rather than demanding payment for injury, he commanded us to turn the other cheek, 70 times 7 times. Jesus championed grace and ridiculed the meticulous justice record-keeping of his religious peers. He offered forgiveness so freely to everyone he encountered that his opponents were threatened and realized he was a threat to their very way of living. Thus, Jesus was dangerous to the Jewish, and Roman, way of life.
If grace is true, then the idea of salvation for all is not as scandalous as it sounds. It may offend our sense of retributive justice. It may offend the traditional belief that God only forgave after the debt of sin had been cancelled by Jesus’ death. It may offend the idea that God demanded a pound of flesh on a blood-drenched cross in order to be gracious. If grace is true, then the ideas of a cosmic transaction between God and Jesus becomes uncomfortable, it doesn’t fit with the idea of grace. “Nothing but the blood of Jesus” no longer made sense to me. The forgiveness of sin no longer required the death of Jesus; it only required God’s redeeming choice to forgive – a free gift of grace. Grace isn’t about Jesus paying for our debts – grace isn’t about Jesus delivering us from the hands of a wrathful God; rather, it is about God removing our transgressions – forgiving because that is what a loving God is and does.
As I have reflected on Easter in recent days the question that keeps coming into my mind is this – does God save or destroy? It seems that for thousands of year’s theologians and the church have been convinced of God’s malevolence. Do we really believe that divine favor can only be purchased in blood? Both Judaism and Christianity accepted this assumption of sacrificial forgiveness with little critique. Early Christianity, influenced by its Jewish roots, interpreted the death of Jesus through the lens of sacrificial forgiveness – i.e. – Jesus became our religion’s sacrificial lamb who atoned for the sins of the world. Rather than emphasizing the love and grace of God, early Christians portrayed God doing precisely what God forbade Abraham to do to his son Isaac. Only in the atoning death of Jesus was God’s wrath satisfied.
Traditional Christian theology has argued that God is ‘torqued’ that God made us, seeks our destruction, and forgives only after the debt is paid. Thus, Jesus’ purpose was to save us from God!!! Grace, rather than being an expression of God’s love, becomes a grudging willingness to forgive and favor only those ‘washed in the blood.’ I can no longer preach or defend forgiveness that depends on the shedding of blood – it just doesn’t work for me, and honestly, I don’t think it should work for you either.
When salvation becomes a sacrifice, forgiveness and grace become commodities to be bought rather than gifts of God. More troublesome, Jesus ends up saving us from God rather than from evil. Jesus shields us from a vengeful God rather than leading us toward an abundant life. I can remember thinking not too long ago, “Salvation is Jesus picking up the check for the entire room.” The problem with such analogies is they portray God as a stingy accountant unsatisfied until every penny is paid. Jesus is glorified at God’s expense. Jesus is gracious and God becomes a cold-hearted scrooge.
Atonement theology, with its demand for balanced scales, only sustains the ancient fear of the divine while refusing to allow God the freedom to simply love us enough to cancel the debt. Atonement theology ultimately says that unless blood is shed, God is powerless to forgive. The death of Jesus didn’t enable God to forgive, nor did it change God’s mind about us. Jesus wasn’t born to die. He came to teach us how to live in God’s grace.
Rejecting this idea of atonement has created some new questions for me, and perhaps for you. If God didn’t need a sacrifice, then why did Jesus die? What is the meaning of the cross? How do we understand the resurrection? How can we continue to speak of Jesus as the Savior? What does it mean to be saved? Could it be that we have missed the point of the events of 2000 years ago?
How and why would God need a "blood sacrifice" before God could love what God had created? Is God that needy, unfree, unloving, rule-bound, and unable to forgive? Once you say it, you see it creates a nonsensical theological notion that is very hard to defend. Many rightly or wrongly wondered, "What will God ask of me if God demands violent blood sacrifice from his only Son?" Particularly if they had a rageaholic or abusive parent, they were already programmed to believe in punishment as the shape of the universe. A violent theory of redemption legitimated punitive and violent problem solving all the way down--from papacy to parenting. There eventually emerged a disconnect between the founding story of necessary punishment and Jesus' message. If God uses and needs violence to attain God's purposes, maybe Jesus did not really mean what he said in the Sermon on the Mount, and violent means are really good and necessary. Thus our history.
So if grace is true, then perhaps Jesus didn’t have to die. If grace is true, then Jesus’ death was not God’s will and God didn’t send Jesus into the world to atone for sin. Perhaps Jesus was born to live, learn, and know God – just like each of us. There is no doubt from scripture that Jesus experienced a profound intimacy with God and at the age of thirty Jesus felt led to challenge many of the inaccurate images of God that were prevalent in his day, many of which continue today. Jesus hoped that people would respond to his message and live as people of grace. Jesus never intended to start a new religion, he was Jewish, not Christian, and his task was the establishment of God’s kingdom – a kingdom of goodness and grace.
Unfortunately, not many people glimpsed that kingdom that Jesus was demonstrating and embodying. His words of grace were discounted by all those who were eagerly awaiting God’s wrath on those they deemed as evil. The people of Israel wanted a worldly king and what they got was a divine vision grounded in grace. Jesus died because the clash between unwavering love and unyielding pride and intolerance always results in a cross or assassination or torture or imprisonment or persecution. The cross is simply one more sign of humanity’s resistance to grace.
Calvary was not the fulfillment of a divine plan. It was not the final installment of a cosmic debt. It was not necessary to satisfy some bloodthirsty deity. The crucifixion was the cost of proclaiming grace. The more insistent Jesus was of God’s grace, the more likely his eventual death on the cross. His death was a human act, not a divine sign. People, not God, demanded his crucifixion. Perhaps the cross doesn’t have to be seen as a payment for human sin, but a reminder of the cost of being gracious in an ungracious world. In focusing on the cross, Christianity has missed the point. We’ve become so morbidly fascinated by the cross we failed to appreciate the true symbol of our hope – the empty tomb – the resurrection. Without the resurrection, Christianity is an empty husk.
Across the gospels the specifics of the resurrection are fuzzy at best. And to say he is risen is a pretty incredible claim. In some accounts he seems like a ghost, passing through doors and walls. In others, he can be touched and eat some fish. In a few, he isn’t initially recognized. The Gospels are brutally honest about the attitudes of the disciples immediately following his death – they were in hiding, depressed and discouraged. Yet something transformed this band of peasants and fishermen – something inspired their message of resurrection – they believed Jesus lived. And so do I.
God did something glorious in Jesus. His resurrection settled once and for all the question of God’s attitude toward humankind. God has determined to love and redeem. In the crucifixion, we said no to God, but in the resurrection, God said no to our rejection – this is the triumph of grace. God has never been undecided about our destiny – God always intended for us to be with God. God has not been waiting for an appropriate sacrifice or our acts of contrition or our cries for mercy. God doesn’t need to be appeased and does not require a scapegoat, which is another name for a Paschal Lamb. Jesus didn’t have to die on the cross in order for us to be forgiven. Jesus’ death did not convince God to be merciful or ransom a sinful people from the wrath of God or die to satisfy the requirements of justice.
Jesus revealed what has always been true – God is our Savior. God is the one who created us. God is the one who sustains us. God is the one who redeems us from death and claims us as God’s own. The grace of God was the message of Jesus. Unfortunately, many Christians have become so enthralled with the messenger that the message has been neglected. It’s an easy mistake to make. God was present in Jesus in the same way God wishes to be present in all of us. And perhaps the takeaway of this Easter morning is that we be far less obsessed with celebrating Jesus’ death and far more interested in living his life.
The good news of this Easter morning is believing that God loves us unconditionally, that is, with no strings attached – we don’t have to earn our salvation; we don’t have to pray a sinner’s prayer; we don’t have to be perfect; we don’t have to even believe very well or perhaps at all. We can even abandon our misconception that we are rejected because of something that happened in our past or that we are only accepted if we are good to a certain standard. The good news of this Easter morning is trusting that God loves us beyond comprehension and desires us to be his, no matter what – that is what Easter means – thanks be to God – amen.
Adapted Philip Gulley and James Mulholland – If Grace is True