The Easter Revolution
How the church can recapture the revolutionary power of Jesus' resurrection
There’s no other way to describe the impact of Jesus’ resurrection on the ancient world except to call it a revolution.
In The Rise of Christianity sociologist Rodney Stark shows the depth of the revolution by tracking the growth of the Christian faith from its earliest beginnings as an obscure religion on the fringes of the civilized world to three hundred years later when it became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. The statistical trend that Stark projects is eye-opening:
1000 believers by 40 AD
7500 believers by 100 AD
40,000 believers by 150 AD
2 million believers by 250 AD
6 million believers by 300 AD
33 million believers by 350 AD (half the population of the Roman Empire)
Stark’s work puts to rest the notion among secular historians that the Emperor Constantine’s recognition of Christianity in 350 AD as the official religion of the Empire was a cynical political play made in order to consolidate his power. The evidence shows that Constantine didn’t so much “Christianize” the Empire as that he was forced to recognize that the Empire had become Christian.
According to Stark, several factors contributed to the advancement of the Christian faith. For one thing, during times of plague (there were two notable plagues during the first three hundred years of the Christian era), Christians stayed in place and ministered to the sick while pagans fled the cities. Another was that in an age that routinely practiced abortion and infanticide, the Christians revered life. Their example impressed the culture while growing their own families faster than the pagan families in the surrounding culture. Another cause was the respect given to women, a radical departure from the Roman practice of regarding women as second-class citizens. Finally, there was the impact of martyrdom. When the Empire began cracking down on dissidents like the Christians, they willingly went to their deaths instead of caving to political pressure. Their radical commitment no matter the cost made an indelible impression on the lives of ordinary Roman citizens.
But by far the most important factor behind the church’s rise to prominence was its unwavering belief in Jesus’ resurrection. The early believers were so convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead that they were willing to make any sacrifice to serve him, go anywhere to please him, undergo any opposition to bear testimony to him. John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople during the later years of the fourth century and one of the best known preachers in the early church, captured his fellow believers’ passion in one of his Easter sermons:
"O Death, where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory? Christ is risen, and you are overthrown. Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen. Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen, and life reigns. Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave. For Christ, being risen from the dead, is become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep."
Jesus’ resurrection was the core conviction of the early church—that’s why New Testament scholar N.T. Wright says the strongest evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is in fact the existence of the church. No other factor can account for its rise to prominence. No other consideration can answer its resilience in the face of persecution. No other cause can justify the spiritual and moral authority it brought to bear on the ancient pagan world. His conclusion is that Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead is the only way to explain the stunning growth of the Christian movement in the first years of the church’s existence:
The Question of Jesus’ resurrection lies at the heart of the Christian faith. There is no form of early Christianity known to us that does not affirm that after Jesus’ shameful death God raised him to life again. That affirmation is, in particular, the constant response of earlier Christianity to one of the four key questions about Jesus that must be raised by all serious historians of the first century. I have elsewhere addressed the first three such questions, namely what was Jesus’ relation to Judaism? What were his aims? Why did he die? The fourth question is this: Granted the foregoing, why did Christianity arise and take the shape it did? To this question, virtually all early Christians known to us give the same answer, “He was raised from the dead.”
As historian, church leader (he serves as a bishop in the Church of England) and passionate believer, Wright describes the first Easter in the only way that does justice to the historical record. It was, Wright says, “the day the revolution began,” the moment that God began the work of restoration that will be completed at Jesus’ second coming.
But for many today Easter isn’t revolutionary at all. For some, it’s little more than a gateway into spring break, those days when students and their families shake free from the routine of school, work and take mini-vacations. For others, Easter is when the cold weather of winter gives way to the milder temperatures of spring. Outdoor hobbies and sports become the order of the day. Then there are those folks who look to Easter as one of the two occasions each year when they feel obligated to attend church. I once heard of a church member like that who had a confrontation with her pastor following an Easter service. When the pastor closed the service by wishing his congregation, “Merry Christmas,” the member demanded to know why he made such a silly remark. “Because I won’t see you again until then,” he replied.
While not everyone is as sensitive as that church member, Easter and Christmas are the bookends of what many people think of as their religious duties. Going to church on those two occasions—even in our secular culture—is still somewhat expected. When aging parents ask their children or grandchildren to attend church with them at Easter or Christmas, there’s less resistance than at other times.
But at the corporate level of church life the tension between the two holidays reveals a more unsettling truth. Many churches today regard Easter not as the revolutionary conviction that once changed the world but as just another holiday to be treated according to their strategies and needs. What I mean is how, for a growing number of churches, Christmas receives the lion’s share of attention while Easter is assigned a lesser role. A very large church I know of recently made the decision to do away with most of its Easter celebrations and instead focus on a packed schedule of Christmas events and programs. Their reason? The church can generate larger crowds at Christmas than at Easter. When churches make leadership decisions based on pragmatism more than faithfulness, those kinds of results aren’t surprising.
It’s not hard to understand what’s going on behind the scenes. Christmas focuses on emotions and experiences that the church shares (on a superficial level) with the prevailing culture, things like joy, generosity and wonder. Easter sends a different message, one so far out of step with the world that it’s no wonder that fewer people want to come to church to hear it. It’s the message of the Son of God who died on the cross for our sins, who was resurrected from the dead and who calls us to repentance and faith. It’s a message not designed to generate crowds but to tell the truth.
I’m not trying to be a Scrooge but Christmas—for all the beauty and wonder of the Incarnation that it celebrates—can’t be understood by itself but only as the prelude to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. The four Gospels themselves give scant attention to Jesus’ birth (Mark and John don’t even mention it) and instead devote the great bulk of their attention to his passion. To devote the majority of a church’s attention to Christmas over Easter skews the biblical record. What’s more, it trivializes the church’s ministry.
One of America’s largest churches is in the headlines just now because its leadership edited its Easter message to suit the culture. In a recent interview the church’s Digital Director explained how the church thinks it’s unwise to mention the resurrection in their Easter invites:
“I'm putting a lot of my focus, energy, time, resources toward what I would call the ‘cold audience,’ people far from God,” the digitial director said. “I'm not going to say the word ‘Calvary,’ not going to say the word ‘resurrection,’ I'm not going to say the ‘blood of Jesus,' I'm not going to say any of these words that make someone feel like an outsider. This is really an important guide for how we develop language. Anyone can be a part of our church; it might not be for everyone, everyone might not like it, but anyone can come.”
So what can the local church do? What should we do? There are four key ways I think we can shift our attention—or start to shift our attention—back to celebrating Easter in ways more in line with the way that its importance merits:
Make Easter a priority in our service schedules, programming and special events. If we’re devoting more time, attention and resources to various performances at Christmas or other seasons of the year than to events and worship services at Easter, we’re out of balance. It takes a deliberate resistance to forces inside as well as outside the church to make this happen, because the momentum is in the opposite direction.
Have fun at Easter but keep turning attention back to Resurrection. I love Easter egg hunts and Sunday School class parties and musical presentations. But the church must intentionally place those events in a distinctively Easter context. We have to keep turning attention from the events themselves toward the Resurrection. The difference between Christmas and Easter celebrations is nowhere more obvious than here. The events surrounding Christmas events have a way of standing on their own because of the general cultural acceptance of the Christmas story. A Christmas party at work will often include much of the same verbiage, imagery and conversation as one at church. Not so with Easter. There’s no such cultural acceptance of the story of Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection. It takes an intentional choice to keep the Christian message the priority.
Help our congregations prepare for Easter. The liturgical denominations that observe Lent are onto something. Beginning with Ash Wednesday, forty days before Easter, these groups carefully and deliberately make spiritual preparation for Easter. By the time Easter arrives their people are in a position to celebrate in truly meaningful ways. I’m not necessarily advocating a liturgical approach for, say, Baptist churches. But I do think that a more intentional preparation for the coming of Easter would go a long way toward putting many of our churches into a more biblical mindset.
Keep the cross and resurrection front and center at Easter worship. Easter isn’t about the return of spring. Or eggs and bunnies. Or mythology. Or the good feelings inspired by an old story. Or families who come to church together and go home to eat the ham dinner prepared by their grandmother. It’s the church’s recognition of the miraculous intervention of God the Father in raising his Son to life. It’s the radical, life-changing truth that what God did in dead Jesus he wants to do in the lives of everyone sitting in our churches on Easter morning as well as the unbelievers in our community. It’s a revolution that changed the world once and can change the world again.