There are at least two ways sceptics deny Easter and its boast that Jesus Christ of Nazareth rose from the dead. For two thousand years the popular move has been to simply deny the fact and then offer explanations for the empty tomb — the real Jesus never hung on the cross, Mary and the disciples mistakenly went to the wrong tomb, he was briefly comatose, recovered quickly and then went into hiding, etc. In the original denial story, Matthew’s gospel reports the Jewish elders paid the soldiers guarding the tomb to say the disciples stole his body while they were asleep. Explanations have multiplied because none actually fit the facts.But I said there are two ways to deny Easter and the second way is far more insidious. Don’t stop celebrating Easter. Just turn it into a celebration of something entirely unrelated. Here is an example. The International Trans Day of Visibility (TDOV) has been celebrated on March 31 since 2009. But this year, Christianity’s highest and holiest celebration and the Trans Day of Visibility happened to coincide. So, to honour the day the Calgary Unitarian Church has replaced whatever else it had planned for Easter Sunday with a cross-dressing celebration called Drag Me to Church.I’ll have more to say about Easter Sunday cross-dressing in a moment, but first, let me ask you to turn your mind to a recapitulation of the significance of Easter. Never forget, the resurrection of Christ took place in order to raise human beings from their fallen state into something approaching divinity (“Then shall the righteous shine like the sun,” Mat. 13:43. See also Rom. 4:25), and to make this possible the Creator of the universe sent His Son to suffer the divine wrath that our sins deserved (Isaiah 53:6).What does this mean? If Easter is real it is such a stupendous display of divine love and mercy that even the most sincere worship humans are capable of is an inadequate response. What God did, sending his eternal Son to become one of us and die for our sins, is such a tremendous act that merely to ignore it becomes a kind of blasphemy. But to substitute for worship a grotesque parody of human sexuality is a sacrilege of such horror as to be truly indescribable.Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting these performers and the leadership of Calgary Unitarian should face the wrath of God. Quite the opposite. I believe the mercy of God is such that if they and their audience repent and turn to God they will find Christ died for them too. No, what I’m saying is, that the contrast is so great between the high, holy event called Easter and the loutish, garish, perverse display that will take place at the Unitarian “Church” this Sunday that the mind boggles. One strives in vain to imagine how these people can bring themselves to be involved, let alone express pride in what they do.The only comparable event I can think of is the drunken feast put on by the Babylonian king Belshazzar in which he ordered the vessels taken from God’s temple in Jerusalem to be used to drink to the praise of his false gods. If you don’t know how that turned out you can read it for yourself in Daniel Chapter Five of the Bible.“But,” someone may say, “drag queens dancing on Easter Sunday only becomes blasphemy if Easter is real.” It’s a fair argument. So let’s think about that for a moment. The story of Christ’s death and resurrection is first told in the four gospels of the New Testament and you can rest assured that those four gospels are history or they are nothing.That they are not nothing is indisputable. On this point C. S. Lewis, who almost never boasted of his credentials, explicitly referred to his training as a literary historian in order to declare authoritatively that “whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing.”Well, then, what do these non-legendary, history recording gospels have to say about the death and resurrection of the man called Jesus of Nazareth?Collectively they report that he died while hanging on a cross, that he was buried in a sealed and guarded tomb and that on the third day he came out of the tomb overflowing with life... So much life that Lewis could only say in wonder, “The Resurrection narratives are not a picture of survival after death; they record how a totally new mode of being has arisen in the Universe: as new as the first coming of organic life. This Man, after death, does not get divided into ‘ghost’ and ‘corpse’. A new mode of being has arisen.”But not just a new mode of being for Jesus. Rather, thanks to his resurrection, the world is offered a new mode of being for all who believe in him. Just before his death, Jesus boasted “I have overcome the world,” meaning, it turns out, that through his personal sacrifice and the resurrection that followed, it could be said, in St. Paul’s paraphrase of the immortal words of the prophet Isaiah, “death has been swallowed up in victory” (Isaiah 25:8)!What kind of victory? From the same verse, “God will wipe away tears from all faces.” The only way for that to happen is for death to be reversed. Moreover, states the prophet Isaiah, through Christ, God “will remove the disgrace (sin debt) of his people from the whole earth.”The next verse (Isaiah 25:9) is possibly the only fitting end for this piece. “On that day his people will say, ‘This is our God; we have waited for him, and now he will save us. This is the LORD; we have waited for him. Let us rejoice and be glad because he will save us.’” To that, godly people can only say, “Amen.” One last word. Find a place to worship this Easter where these biblical words form the theme of all that is said and sung. You’ll be blessed forever. Calgary-based Shafer Parker pastored churches for more than 40 years, and in retirement remains an activist apologist for Bible-based Christianity
