Hey guys,
I just got back from church and from visiting family at my grandparents' house and now am just sitting in the house waiting for it to storm. things got calm and quiet and I thought, "hey, I want to really read through the Easter story and really feel the effects of it, rather than simply thinking, "Ah yeah, Christ has risen hallelujah-jah-blah." I mean, this is all great and I love seeing everybody wishing each other a happy Easter on here, sharing scripture, and song lyrics. It is awesome that we have this day to really reflect on the events of Easter.
My problem is that often, especially in the confines of a set holiday, I stoically recall all the facts and motions without really digging deeper into what I am hearing and saying over and over. Being raised in a church, the Easter story of Jesus has become flat history to me at times. Honestly, I'm sure you have had this feeling before, where you can tell anybody what Jesus did, how he suffered on the Cross, and how three days later he rose from the dead. You can at least know that by doing this he "paid the wages of sin so that we would be saved..." But how often do we really let that soak in from our brain to our heart and soul? I felt really convicted of this today, that I should really open myself up to really feel it and understand it in a new dynamic. I read some facts and some devotions, which helped a lot. For me, however, I am a mentally inclined person at times and this creates a chasm, separating the stuff I'm taking in from emotion. Emotion is not everything, I understand, but it does help you to really grasp the magnitude of things that really are so overwhelming that we actually had toned them down into something easier to swallow. Emotions are the gateway to the heart, and God designed us to live and love with our hearts, not just legalism of our minds.
Anyway, I went about "opening my heart" by laying down somewhere quiet and playing some instrumental music, so I could then think and meditate to it. I allowed my mind to wander through what all I had been hearing at church on easter, not just today but for every Easter of my life. I believe that God showed me an approach, and that is to imagine being right there when all of the events happened. If you are feeling like I did, then keep reading and maybe what I did/am doing will help you to really put what we hear so often on a tangible field.
I chose Mitt Hjerte by Antestor, which is a great and fitting track (a Swedish ? Christian death-metal band but this ballad is non-metalhead friendly as it is instrumental) but I mean just any music that can help "assist" your emotions a bit is a great option. Next, just imagine the events in vivid detail, but imagine Jesus not as the guy you read about in the Bible, but as somebody you know really, really well. For several, Jesus himself is all you need to imagine, but for others, like myself, I have to picture somebody more "tangible" to me that lives on the earth, like as a physical person, you know? If you have a child, picture this child as Jesus, being whipped with a ninetail whip, spit on and mocked, carrying a cross, being stabbed in the side later. (If you don't have a child, imagine somebody who is innocent and pure in your eyes, or somebody you respect and love so much that your blood boils to imagine them suffering for people who could care less.)
Imagine this person hanging up on the cross, having to hold themselves up by the arms to get their lungs in a position to breathe properly, rubbing their virtually skinless back repeatedly against the wood, pulling the tendons in their hands/wrists looser and looser against the huge rusty nails. Imagine people telling you to get down, asking where your God is, accusing them of insanity. Why are these people talking to your innocent child this way? Why do they want to see him/her suffer like that when he/she has literally doen nothing wrong? You wait until a stoic soldier stabs him in the side, and all you can do is wait until all of his blood runs out along with his last breath. Imagine waiting around so you can bury the body, barely recognizable after such abuse. Watch them be dragged to a dark, dingy tomb and shut in ever so humbly...
God had to endure this pain completely. That was his son, who he created and who he needed to pay the price for so much sin (He is a just God by nature, and cannot NOT kill somebody as the wage for breaking that law is death. If He did, he would not truly be a just and holy God. What makes it worse... imagine every person that spit and laughed and kicked and punched and whipped... turning to you and saying, "we did what you wanted and killed him (her)."
God had to let this happen, and also, we as humans made this happen. It was not the Jews alone, nor the Romans. It was all of us. Every time we do something that we know goes against God, or did what we could to rule and serve ourselves, we were just filling up the pain arsenal that Jesus would have to suffer. If we had never sinned, than Jesus would not have had to die. What if your child had to die because you messed up, or because somebody who could care less about you or them deliberately messed up?
This is a long-winded post, but so am I. Anyway, I wanted to share this with you because it helped me to get over the barrier from taking in Easter as stale knowledge to a place where I could really feel it and experience it. Adjust my words and do what you can to imagine the magnitude of Jesus' death and what it means. Then you can appreciate even more what all Jesus Christ did for you, for me, and for everybody else. Pray about it, even if it feels weird, because God will give you insight. He gave me an answer through this when I prayed to Him that I basically felt like crap because I didn't feel like my reverence was genuine. Now I feel like God showed me how to personalize what happened 2000 years ago into the truth that changes lives for the better even today.
