You should listen to Andrew Peterson’s song “His Heart Beats” from Resurrection Letters: Volume 1.
Peterson’s song begins with a drum mimicking a heart beat, then a guitar strums some chords and he begins to sing:
His heart beats
His blood begins to flow
Waking up what was dead a moment ago
And His heart beats, now everything is changed
'Cause the blood that brought us peace with God
Is racing through His veins
And His heart beats
Peterson pauses after each line, allowing a moment for us to consider what he is saying. Imagine a body in a tomb that has been dead for two days. Then all of a sudden the heart begins to pump. As the heart beats, the stagnant blood in his veins begins to flow throughout the body again. He wakes up, begins to breathe, and then stands and walks out of the tomb. In the garden outside of the tomb he meets one of his friends who had thought she had come to tend to his corpse.
This is what we mean when we say, “on the third day, he rose again from the dead.”
The phrase that gets me everytime in Peterson’s song is this one:
And His heart beats, now everything is changed
‘Cause the blood that brought us peace with God
Is racing through His veins.”
We talk about the blood of Jesus. We sing about it. We reflect and meditate on it. Just this past Sunday, we gathered around a table and shared small cups of juice and little pieces of bread so dry it often sticks to the roof of your mouth. We believe the bread and juice are more than just bread and juice. Somehow the Holy Spirit meets us at that table and we remember again that they link us to the broken body and the poured out blood of Jesus. And then we get the surprise of all surprises. The same blood that brought us peace with God begins to pump through his body again. Christ is risen. He is risen, indeed.
It is difficult to imagine a dead man returning to life again. I am willing to guess you haven’t seen it happen. I remember reading a commentator make the rather dry observation that this was no less true in the first century as it is in the twenty-first century. Dead people didn’t come back to life with any more regularity then than they do now.
It may be difficult to imagine, but it is not difficult to understand what we mean when we say, “on the third day he rose again.” We mean Jesus was dead, and then somehow, he wasn’t. His heart began to beat again.
The question is: What meaning does the resurrection make? That is, what is its significance?
“Now everything is changed.”
The resurrection is not simply one more miracle among all of the other miracles in the Bible. The Apostle Paul argues that everything else in the Christian faith hinges on this event.
“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. (1 Corinthians 15:17-20).
It is resurrection or nothing. Why is Paul so adamant about this?
Part of the power behind Peterson’s song is it reminds us of what makes life, life. Oxygen breathed into our lungs, gets transferred into our bloodstream, which then gets pumped throughout our body to feed the cells that allow us to think and walk and eat homemade honey whole wheat bread with strawberry jam. At least that is my vague remembrance of how it works from Life Science101 which I took sophomore year to avoid Chemistry or Physics. We are physical beings. We are more than physical beings of course, but not less.
Jesus’ resurrected body is no less physical than it was before he died. In the resurrection passages in the Gospels, he isn’t floating around on a cloud. He walks and talks. Thomas touches his hands and his side. Jesus broils fish for breakfast on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. To be sure, there are some differences. People have a difficult time recognizing him for some reason. He seems to be able to come and go from places as he pleases. His body is a resurrected body, “clothed in immortality,” Paul says. I don’t know if Jesus’ DNA structure would look different than ours if we found a petrified mosquito that bit him post resurrection day and got trapped in tree sap like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. But Jesus takes great pains to demonstrate he is not a ghost.
The resurrection of Jesus, among other things, is God’s declaration that the physical world He created is still “very good” and worth redeeming. Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of the restoration of all things. He is the “first fruits” of those who have died. First fruits imply that more resurrections are to come (we’ll get to this later in the Creed). The resurrection declares that the goal is not to get from a physical earth to non-physical heaven but as the great hymn concludes, the goal is for “earth and heaven [to] be one.” (“This is My Father’s World”)
One of my favorite links in the Bible is found in Genesis 3 and Luke 24. In Genesis 3, we find the familiar story of a deceitful serpent convincing Adam and Eve to eat from the tree that God has specifically forbidden them to eat. This act of disobedience represents a fundamental break in every aspect of human life. Their relationships with God (they’re hiding in shame), with one another (they blame each other), and with the rest of creation (work is frustrated by thorns and thistles) are all broken.
Genesis puts it like this: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.“
Adam and Eve eat the fruit and it says they open their eyes to a whole new world. A world of thorns and thistles. A world of shame and sin. A world of brokenness and violence. A world gone wrong. A world marked by destruction and, ultimately, death.
In Luke 24, the first Easter Sunday, two of Jesus’ disciples (Cleopas and an unnamed disciple) are traveling from Jerusalem to their home in Emmaus. About 7.5 miles. While they are walking, Luke tells us that the resurrected Jesus came alongside them and started to walk with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him. They have a long conversation about what happened in Jerusalem that weekend - the crucifixion of Jesus and then the rumors about how some had maybe seen him alive that morning. Jesus (though, remember they don’t know it is Jesus), begins to teach them about how all that happened that week in Jerusalem was foretold in the Scriptures.
When they arrive in Emmaus, Cleopas and his friend invite Jesus in for dinner (still not knowing who he was). While at dinner, Jesus takes bread and after giving thanks he breaks it and gives it to his two companions. When Cleopas and his friend take the bread and eat it, Luke writes:
“When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight.”
Luke uses the same phrase found in Genesis 3,“then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.”
Adam and Eve took the fruit, ate it, and their eyes were opened to the world of thorns and thistles, death and destruction. The two disciples in Emmaus took the bread, ate it, and their eyes were opened to a whole new world. A world where death no longer had the last word. Life did.
When Cleopas and his friend woke up that Sunday morning, they, along with everyone else, assumed the world was the same as it has always been. The tyrants won again. Jesus was crushed on a cross by the religious and political powers of the day. And they probably assumed his movement was crushed with him. Death had won again. But after their communion meal in Emmaus their eyes were opened to a whole new reality. As Peterson sings, “And His heart beats, now, everything is changed.”
This is what Jesus’ resurrection means - nothing less than the beginning of the new creation.
N.T Wright sums it up this way:
“History matters because human beings matter; human beings matter because creation matters; creation matters because the Creator matters. And the Creator, according to some of the most ancient Jewish beliefs, grieved so much over creation gone wrong, over humankind in rebellion, over thorns and thistles and dust and death, that he planned from the beginning the way by which he would rescue his world, his creation, his history, from its tragic corruption and decay.”*
The resurrection of Jesus is the center of that plan.
I believe that on the third day he rose again from the dead.
* If you want 750 pages of why believing in the resurrection of Jesus is the most historically plausible explanation for the rise of the early church and the Gospel narratives, N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God is a wonderful study. If you want a shorter version, he has a book called, Surprised by Hope that is a lot easier to read.
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