Alive, Humanly Alive

Texts:
- Psalms 77-80
- Luke 3-4
- Nehemiah 7-10

I am often unaffected by the Easter festivity of Christ's raising from the dead. He died for my sins, but I am still committing those same sins. He made a way for me to go to heaven, but I am not right now in heaven. He hung there and was beat there and perished there for me, but I do not always feel that power, nor the flood of remorse that might be expected from a poor man like me, a sinner.

But yet, Jesus, You are risen. You are risen indeed. And what does that mean to me? Too often Easter becomes about the gruesome, horrifying, torturous death You died and not about the fact that the only reason You even went to that death was to conquer it. I look at the lives of Your disciples, Your death did nothing but scare and scatter them. But Your resurrection, Your reappearance, Your sending, Your ascension...it enabled them to walk to the same death as You, the same death that they had been so frightened and avoided when You suffered it.

It is because the power of You alive is what makes You amazing. It is the power of You alive that can deliver me from sin and pain, not the power of Your death. It is the power of Your victory over the grave that can give me confidence to live in You, not the gruesome way that You went to the grave. You alive gives power to those who believe.

And humanly alive, not as a ghost. You are still alive in human form, still providing a way to God for the rest of us humans. You are the way to God and God's way to us. Jesus, You care for all humanity so deeply that You are still working among us today, in Your human life.

I don't know how to say this succinctly, but Christ alive not dead makes Easter special. He is risen, he is risen indeed.