It’s Easter. People are eating Easter eggs and chocolate Easter bunnies, and some are going to church for the first time this year. (The second time will be Christmas.) In Europe, Friday and Monday are national holidays in most nations. But why?
Christmas is good news: God born as a man, God with us. Easter, though, is the Good News: the central message of the Gospel. We all know that we have done wrong in our lives: lied (I ‘ve done that), stolen (that too), hit our sisters (and that) and our wives (that too). And those are just the first things that come to mind. God’s standards are easily summarized: love God with all your heart, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself. But we fail, time and time again. The penalty for that failure is permanent death; not the simple, physical death which we all face, but that which Revelation calls ‘the second death’: permanent cessation of our existence. At Easter, Jesus took that punishment on himself, dying in our place.
Easter originally coincided with the Jewish Passover; Jesus was crucified during the Passover celebrations. Passover is the celebration of the Jews’ exodus from slavery in Egypt. The last of the ten plagues sent against Pharaoh for refusing to release the Jews from slavery was that every firstborn in Egypt died in a single night. Only those who paid attention to Moses’ warning, slaughtering a lamb and spreading some of its blood on their doorposts, were spared. That was a foreshadowing of Jesus’ death on the cross; everyone will die the second death, because we’ve all fallen short of God’s standards. Only those are exempted who “spread the lamb’s blood on their doorposts”: claim Jesus’ death on the cross as the sign of desiring to live with God.
Jesus rose from the dead because he did keep God’s standards. The good news of Easter is that death has been overcome, and if we pay attention to God’s warning, we will live with him.