163 Sermon Illustrations on Easter

The Christian faith is not a mere collection of doctrines — a bag of truths. Christianity is a comprehensive truth claim that encompasses every aspect of revealed doctrine, but is centered in the gospel of Jesus Christ. And, as the apostolic preaching makes clear, the gospel is the priority.

The Apostle Paul affirms this priority when he writes to the Christians in Corinth. In the opening verses of 1 Corinthians 15, Paul sets out his case:

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you — unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.

Paul points directly to the events of the cross and resurrection of Christ. He is not concerned with just any gospel, but with the only gospel that saves. This is “the gospel I preached to you,” Paul reminds the Corinthians. The same Paul who so forcefully warned the Galatians against accepting any false gospel reminds the church at Corinth that the very “gospel I preached to you” is the gospel “by which you are being saved.” Their stewardship of the gospel is underlined in Paul’s words, “if you hold fast to the word I preached to you.”

Paul’s statement of priority is a vital corrective for our confused times. Without hesitation, Paul writes with urgency about the truths that are “as of first importance.” All revealed truth is vital, invaluable, life-changing truth to which every disciple of Christ is fully accountable. But certain truths are of highest importance, and that is the language Paul uses without qualification.

And what is of first importance? “That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,” and “that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” The cross and the empty tomb stand at the center of the Christian faith. Without these, there is no good news — no salvation.

Paul gets right to the heart of the matter in setting out those truths that are “of first importance.” Following his example, we can do no less. These twin truths remain “as of first importance,” and no sermon is complete without the explicit affirmation of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So it was then, so it is now, and so it ever shall be until Christ claims his church.

As Paul reminded the Corinthians — and now instructs us — the gospel is at the center of our faith, and the cross and the empty tomb are at the center of the gospel. “So we preach, and so you believed,” Paul encourages us. [1 Cor. 15:11]

May the power of the cross and the victory of the empty tomb fill every pulpit, every pew, and every Christian heart — and may the Good News of the gospel be received with joy by sinners in need of a Savior.

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. [1 Corinthians 15:56-58]

On Pascha, Orthodox Christians everywhere sing, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.” We affirm boldly and with great joy our belief in Christ’s real, historical resurrection from the dead, which is the basis for our faith and hope.

Reared on happy consumerism, one might feel satisfied to view holidays such as Easter (or Pascha) in isolation, a special day that is set apart to celebrate an event that has significance for us only insofar as it appeals to our sense of convention and propriety. Even if we are moderately religious, we cannot escape the cultural fascination with secular tropes, where the “special day” adheres in our consciousness as a celebration not of an historical event that has immediate significance even now, but which appeals to us mainly from the basis of what we experienced in our own childhoods, the memory of our own individual Easter celebrations or family rituals, whether idealized or not. Even those who despise “organized religion” and treat it with contempt do not seem to mind an only somewhat disorganized religious ritualism that is signified by bunnies and eggs, dressing up for a religious service on hopefully a beautiful spring day, hidden eggs colored a variety of shades of blue and pink and yellow and red, often dyed the night before by excited children, and baskets filled with chocolate and other goodies.

In the context of the worship of the Church among those believers who participate in the fasts and feasts of the Church calendar year, the celebration of Pascha is not just one special day of revelry to commemorate a specific religious event, but it resides within the context of a much longer story, one that continues throughout the entire year, but narrows in intensity during Lent. People who pop into services once a year to celebrate Easter in the same spirit as one might go to a movie or stand on the side of the road to watch a parade may find themselves made happy by the celebration, which is a good thing in itself; but they miss so much of the substance of it that it might be compared to reading the CliffsNotes or mistaking the preview for the movie.

But that also is a bad comparison -- the difference might actually be between watching the preview and playing a role in the film as an actor, familiar with the subject, filled with the raw experience of the life of Jesus Christ, who comes not in order to entertain us, nor to judge us, nor to teach a particular branch of science or an ethical system. But he comes, we find in the icon of the Nativity, peculiarly wrapped in what appears to be graveclothes, his cradle oddly resembling a coffin, the cave in which the baby lies not just a random hole in the earth, but made by his presence into the entrance to the very heart of the earth. He comes to die, and those who follow him do not merely watch, but die with him, baptized into his death in a manner that is above all rationality.

So during Holy Week we follow the Passion, not to meditate on the violence done to Jesus nor to feel sorry for him, but to mourn our own weaknesses and sins. We do not engage in the process of reflection on our own behavior in order to try to feel pathologically guilty or to punish ourselves, but in order to turn away from the behaviors which ruin us and other people, so that we might progress to mutual healing and communion. During Lent and Holy Week we seek forgiveness from every creature for the nasty things, or perhaps just the unkind things, we have done in our lives. We seek to humble ourselves with Christ as if we too might be humbled to the point of death, in Him, not as a mere memory, but as a mystery of the unity and communion in Christ that not only breaks the barriers between the physical and immaterial worlds, but transcends space and time as well.

We do not attend for a mere memorial or to play with dead symbols in meaningless ceremonies, but we identify with Christ in his Passion, and we identify with those who killed him for whom he prays when he is held aloft on the cross that they would be forgiven. If Christ does not rise from death, thereby trampling down death by death, then we remain dead, victims of death and undone by the tragedy of death. If his resurrection is merely a myth to imbue our lives with meaning, the meaning is spoiled by its lack of veracity and it becomes as insubstantial as stories of the Easter Bunny. St. Paul writes, “...if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile.” But if it is a myth that is also true, both historically and subjectively, that Jesus died and was resurrected so that when we die in Him we may also be raised with Him, then it has the power and potential to transform all death, all separation, all tragedy, all failure and all suffering into a path that leads to resurrection, life, justice, beauty and communion with God.

As the late theologian, Fr. Alexander Schmemann writes:

All Christianity, therefore, is the experience of faith repeated again and again as if for the first time, through its incarnation in rites, words, music, and colors. To the unbeliever, it may indeed seem like a mirage; he hears only words, he sees only incomprehensible ceremonies, and he understands them only outwardly. But for believers, all of this radiates from within, and not as proof of his faith, but as its result, as its life in the world, in the soul, in history. Therefore the darkness and sadness of Holy Friday is for us something real, alive, contemporary; we can cry at the cross and experience everything that took place in that triumph of evil, treachery, cowardice, and betrayal; we can contemplate the life-bearing tomb on Holy Saturday with excitement and hope. And therefore, every year we can celebrate Easter, Pascha, the Resurrection. For Easter is not the remembrance of an event in the past. It is the real encounter in happiness and joy, with him whom our hearts long ago knew and encountered as the life and light of all light. Easter night testifies that Christ is alive and with us, and that we are alive with him. The entire celebration is an invitation to look at the world and life, and to behold the dawning of the mystical day of the Kingdom of light. “Today the scent of Spring begins,” sings the church, “and the new creation exults...” It exults in faith, in love and in hope.

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[The original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #13290]

Is it all about us, or about Jesus and Him crucified? Today, Ash Wednesday, we enter what may be the most counter-cultural season of the church calendar, Lent.

In many ways, today is one of the strangest days of the year. Everywhere — at work, the grocery store, shopping, exercising — we’ll see all kinds of people walking around with dark smudges on their foreheads.

Now whether or not their own church participates in this ritual, most Christians will know that the smudge is the sign of the cross, and that today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent.

To the unbelieving world, Ash Wednesday is at best quaint (it’s sort of cool to have traditions, you know). At worst, it’s somewhere between bizarre and even anti-social. After all, to a culture committed to the pursuit of self-fulfillment and feeling good about oneself, this whole fasting and self-sacrifice stuff is an existential smack in the face.

Think of how these words contrast with our contemporary illusions of autonomy and self-determination: I am not my own. And I will die one day. And so will you. As the minister tells us when he rubs the ashes on our foreheads, “remember thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return.”

And here’s the bolder statement still, a way-more-weird and counter-cultural claim — We are rotten to the core. We are sinners. So much so that God became a man and died on a cross in our place. He loved us that much! And then, get this: He came back to life. His body wasn’t eaten by worms in a tomb. He was resurrected from the dead.

What happened on that Resurrection Day, which we’ll commemorate 40 days from now, is the most important event in the history of the world. As Russell Moore has said, “Christians from all over the world, despite all this science and all this progress and all this technology, [still confess] what the earliest believers in the catacombs of Rome cried out: ‘Christ is risen indeed.’”

We confess it because what it says about God, the universe, and us is TRUE. On Ash Wednesday and during the season of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving called Lent, we redouble our efforts to heed Jesus’ call to pick up our crosses and follow him. We meditate and remember with Paul that we have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us.

Crucified with Christ! Our hopes, desires, politics, intellect, and yes, even our sexuality — crucified with Christ. What a thing to say! Jesus, who redeemed us by His blood, lays claim to all of these things.

This is not the God of what sociologist Christian Smith has dubbed “moralistic therapeutic deism,” a god who demands nothing more than that people take it easy on themselves and be nice and fair to one another.

This is a God who says the two greatest commandments are to love Him with all of our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And as Jesus said, to love Him is to obey Him (talk about counter cultural!) and to believe in the One He has sent. To love our neighbors, we preach the Good News of Jesus’ death and resurrection and His triumph over sin and death. We feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, take care of the widow and orphans.

Friend, what could be more authentic, more relevant, than to conform our lives to Jesus, who is the Way the Truth and the Life? Jesus did not and will not conform Himself to the culture. Why would we? How dare we urge others to? As Paul says, we were called to freedom in Christ, which is a freedom from conformity and from the desires of the flesh and a freedom to serve one another in love, joy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5).

Now that’s a lot to swallow, which is one reason that for nearly two millennia, Christians have taken this long season of Lent as an opportunity to repent of our conformity to the world, draw near to Jesus, and prepare ourselves to celebrate the day that changed the universe.

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Copyright (c) 2015 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Perhaps you remember a 2014 piece at The Federalist by one M.Z. Hemingway that ran with the headline, “Will Someone Explain Christianity To The New York Times?”

It focused on a travel piece that, once corrected, included the following material about tourism in the tense city of Jerusalem. The crucial passage stated:

On a recent afternoon in the Old City of Jerusalem, while fighting raged in Gaza, Bilal Abu Khalaf hosted a group of Israeli tourists at his textile store in the Christian Quarter – one of Jerusalem’s tourist gems.

Dressed in a striped galabiyya and tasseled red tarbouche, Mr. Abu Khalaf showed his visitors exotic hand-loomed silks and golden-threaded garments from Syria, Morocco and Kashmir that adorn Israel’s most luxurious hotels and ambassadors’ homes. ...

Nearby, the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus was buried, usually packed with pilgrims, was echoing and empty.

Yes, that was what the Times piece said after it was corrected. What did it say before that? Believe it or not, it said, “Nearby, the vast Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus is buried, usually packed with pilgrims, was echoing and empty.”

In this case, it’s easy to discern what the meaning of the word “is” is.

Hold that thought.

Did the world’s most powerful newsroom (that title would belong either to the Gray Lady or the BBC) actually publish that telltale sentence? Luckily, someone had a screenshot. [original article shows screenshot of the paragraph]

Let me pause to note that the journalism question here is slightly complex. No one is asking the editors in the college of cardinals at the Times to accept the Resurrection as a fact of secular history. In this case, the journalism question is whether “many Christians” believe that Jesus is, in fact, buried you know where.

Do many Christians believe that? I mean, there are liberal Christians (Hello Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong) who deny the Resurrection or attempt to redefine it. But would the folks in that unorthodox tribe actually say Jesus is buried at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher? They would not.

Back to Hemingway’s 2014 piece, before we move into the present.

M.Z. noted, logically enough, that (a) the tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is empty, (b) this historic and very complex sanctuary is also known as the Church of the Resurrection and, to wrap things up, (c) small-o orthodox Christians do not believe Jesus is dead and buried. This is not obscure stuff we are talking about.

This brings us to a recent Times arts piece that ran under this title: “Jerusalem as a Place of Desire and Death, at the Metropolitan Museum.”

This review was the subject of a First Things essay by Mark Movsesian, of the St. John’s Center for Law and Religion, with this title: “Why Do Christians Revere Jerusalem? The Times Misses a Step.” Here is the Times passage that will interest readers:

Three major faiths have laid claim to that city. For Jews, it’s the place where, at the End of Days, the Messiah will appear; rebuild the Holy Temple, twice-destroyed; and sort out the righteous from the rest. For Muslims, the city is sacred as the point from which the Prophet Muhammad, after a miraculous night flight from Mecca, began a tour of heaven. To Christians, Jerusalem is a giant walk-through reliquary of Jesus’ life and death, with every street, every stone, soaked in his aura.

Movsesian notes that we are dealing with work by a journalist who, in the past, has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. One can assume that he chose his words with care and that his editors respected his choices.

This, Movsesian raises a question:

Jesus’s “life and death”? Actually, according to the Gospel accounts, Jesus didn’t spend a lot of time in the city, except for one or two important episodes. Most of his life he spent in Galilee. And “death”? It’s true that Jesus died in the city. But wasn’t there something else important that happened to him in Jerusalem, according to Christian belief? Think about it, I bet you know. Right – the Resurrection, the central event of the Christian faith.

The Resurrection, not Jesus’s “life and death,” explains why Christians revere Jerusalem. It explains why they built the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the most important Christian pilgrimage site in the world, in Jerusalem, right above the place where they believe Jesus rose from the dead. It’s why Christians down the centuries have sacrificed so much to travel to Jerusalem and why all the major Christian communions have striven, often against long odds, to maintain a foothold there. The Resurrection is not a minor doctrine. To omit it is to miss the basic teaching of Christianity, one that has had a huge impact on Western history, thought, and culture – including, of course, Western art.

Ah, but should Christians expect the Times to print material about the Resurrection? After all, that is, you know, a miracle. Maybe the Gray Lady doesn’t want to write journalism about miracle stories?

Oh, wait.

It’s odd, therefore, that a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic would miss the point, and that the Times’s culture editors wouldn’t notice the omission. It can’t be because the Times was trying to avoid offending non-Christians by referring to a miracle only Christians accept as true. The Night Journey and the expected return of the Messiah are also sectarian miracles that only believers accept (or expect). ... The Times lists them without hesitation. If one were trying to be objective, one could simply write the factual statement, “Christians believe that Christ’s Resurrection took place in Jerusalem,” and leave it at that. No one could be offended.

So what is going on here? That’s a journalism question.

It would be hard to answer that question with certainty. (Movsesian's full article is at #65811).

As a student in a Baptist college I heard in a chapel service that it wasn’t important whether Jesus literally and bodily resurrected from the dead. I was told as long as the influence of Jesus lived on in me, that was the important thing.

Denying the miraculous was not uncommon in our Baptist institutions almost a half-century ago. For those who get weary of hearing about battles for the Bible, let me remind you that eternal vigilance is necessary to preserve the truth. The battle for the Bible will never be over until Jesus returns.

The testimony of Jesus Christ is found in every book of the Bible. The Bible is our only reliable witness of the historicity of Jesus and His words. Jesus’ resurrection was clearly evident on Easter Sunday to Mary Magdalene and the women at the tomb, Peter, the eleven disciples and the two disciples traveling to the village of Emmaus.

Easter is a good time to reintroduce others to the literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus as the foundation of the Gospel (1 Corinthians 15:3,4).

Without the resurrection, the cross is a sad ending of a good man; with the resurrection, the cross is the sufficient sacrifice of the God-man. The apostle Paul put it plainly that “if Christ is not risen, your faith is in vain; you are yet in your sins!” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Without the resurrection, we have no hope; but with it, we have the assurance of eternal life.

With the resurrection’s promise of a glorious future, believers will not live in eternity as disembodied spirits but will receive resurrected bodies like Jesus. “We know that when he is revealed, we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). We have much to celebrate.

Christians observe the resurrection every Sunday when we gather to worship. A life-changing experience is available with the risen Lord. This is what Christianity is all about. To that end, the living Lord Jesus puts within us a desire to tell the Good News like the women on that first Easter morning.

It’s easy to find bad news; let’s be bearers of the Good News. He’s alive!

The celebration of Christ’s resurrection stands in contrast to Christmas joy.

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Easter joy has been harder to come by this year. Between the growing ugliness of American politics and the acrimony within the church body, I’ve found it harder to anticipate looking up from the broken body of my Lord to rejoice this Sunday in the resurrected and ascended Christ.

When I shared my struggle with a good friend, he suggested I revisit a collection of sermons that the 19th-century priest John Henry Newman preached in Oxford in response to the challenges of his own day. After turning to Newman, I found a surprising insight: In his view, my tempered joy is not merely acceptable or tolerable but rather called for as a deeply Christian response to Easter.

In a sermon titled “Keeping Fast and Festival,” Newman begins with a comparison of Christmas and Easter. At Christmas, he says, we rejoice with the “natural, unmixed joy of children.” Easter joy, however, is not the same. This joy is experienced as “a last feeling and not a first.” It grows out of tribulation, as Paul writes in Romans 5, emerges from the harvest (Isa. 9:3), and comes after (and out of) Lent and Good Friday.

In other words, if living through Lent teaches us even a little about how Christ bears the world’s suffering, then our Easter enthusiasm should look different from our response to God’s arrival as a baby at Christmas. It should feel more seasoned, more aged, and more worn. Easter joy isn’t the joy of children, says Newman, but rather of convalescents who have received the promise of healing, who are starting to get well but still regaining our strength after a Lenten season of confronting our weakness and sorrowing over our sin.

Newman’s image of Christians as convalescents brings to mind the story of healing at the end of The Magician’s Nephew by C. S. Lewis. At the culmination of the book, Diggory, the young hero, watches Aslan plant a magic apple in the newly created Narnian soil. A tree immediately grows from it. In Narnia, the apples have immense power of healing and strengthening. Aslan then gives Diggory a fruit from the tree and sends him back to our world to help heal his sick mother.

When Diggory gives his mother the magic apple, he doesn’t see immediate recovery. In our world, filled with the vigor of redemption, not creation, her healing is slow and gradual. Diggory first notices that her face looks a little different. Then a week later, she’s able to sit up. Finally a month later, she’s well enough to sit in the garden with her son. In the midst of this process, Diggory struggles to believe that her healing is really happening. But “when he remembered the face of Aslan, he [does] hope.”

We, too, should often (although not always) expect our healing to look more like Diggory’s mother’s — one marked by a tempered joy that doesn’t preclude struggle. As George Herbert writes, even as we grow in faith and rest in God, we still often feel “thin and lean without a fence or friend ... blown through with ev’ry storm and wind.”

Like many exposed to various stripes of evangelicalism, it’s easy for me to place a high premium on subjective experience, emotiveness, and outward expression. As such, it’s easy for me to fear that my perceived lack of joy at Easter — or any other time of year, for that matter — is due to weakness and sinfulness. While that may be true at times, Newman challenges the belief that it is always true, rejecting the lie that “since it is the Christian’s duty to rejoice evermore, they would rejoice better if they never sorrowed and never travailed with righteousness.”

However, worrying about my own lack of “appropriate” emotion is not the solution and, in fact, may be part of the problem. When I refuse to let go of disappointment with my own brokenness and that of the world, I fail to recognize not only “the languor and oppression of our old selves” that persists this side of heaven but also the reality of the new life given to me. The solution is not to emote more or blot out the sorrows of this world but rather to turn in prayer, not inward, but upward.

“We must beg Him who is the Prince of Life, the Life itself,” says Newman, “to carry us forth into His new world, for we cannot walk thither, and seat us down whence, like Moses, we may see the land, and meditate upon its beauty!”

Easter joy does not require us, then, to leave this present hour behind or to be unbruised by the events of this world. Instead, it comes when, like Diggory, we return to the brokenness around us (including our own brokenness) with the comfort of Christ’s presence and the instruments of grace that he provides for us throughout the paschal season.

In this act of return, joy comes wearing a different, darker guise, but it also appears deeper, better, and more miraculous than anything we could ever expect.

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Elisabeth Rain Kincaid is an assistant professor of moral theology at the Aquinas Institute of Theology. Her research focuses on questions of moral formation, the development of virtue, and the intersection of law, business, and theology.

A different version of this piece originally appeared at Covenant, the weblog of The Living Church magazine.

In the middle of scenes of Jesus’ resurrection, the Gospel of Matthew recounts the birth of one of the oldest conspiracy theories.

On Easter morning, while the women are on their way to announce the resurrection of Jesus to the disciples, Matthew 28:11–15 highlights another movement: Some tomb guards report the weekend’s events to the chief priests. These men, in turn, then consult with the elders and decide together to conceal what has happened. At no point do they investigate what happened to Jesus’ body. They know from the start that what they might discover will not please them.

Instead, they invent what would today be called a conspiracy theory, with the “alternative facts” that support it: The disciples came to steal Jesus’ corpse. Never mind that those who had fled in fear after the arrest of their master would have needed to come at night to face a guard of several armed men. Never mind that they would have needed to loosen the seals on the tomb, roll away a massive stone, and remove the body of Jesus — all without waking anyone who could raise the alarm.

This version of the facts is absurd. Not only in and of itself, but because the disciples would later risk their lives to proclaim that Jesus had risen. If they had known it was a lie, where would they have found the courage to face the authorities threatening them? Why preach a knowingly falsified gospel? The audacity of the apostles, their courage, their zeal, their perseverance, and the whole expansion of Christianity is inexplicable without the Resurrection.

But all this, the elders do not yet know. So they try their luck and make a deal with the soldiers. The proposed lie is not without danger for them — the guards obviously weren’t supposed to fall asleep — but there is money involved, and the Jewish leaders assure them of their protection.

Thus, this version of the story, the text says, has spread among the Jews to this present day — the first century of our current era. But it is also our reality today, where theories to eschew the truth of the resurrection of Jesus continue to be propagated.

But it is probably not because of their credibility that these explanations persist. In fact, the explanation of the guards is so implausible that the apostle Matthew takes the liberty of mentioning it in his gospel, knowing full well that anyone who wanted could go and check this account.

When you want to drown out a truth, your lies or half-truths don’t have to be believable or well-founded. It is enough that your version suits what your listeners want to hear or avoids confronting them with a reality that disturbs them.

An ominous light

One might be surprised at the response of the Jewish leaders. The one announced to be the Messiah had just come back to life. An extraordinary miracle! A staggering truth! But instead of euphoria, they react with anger.

There is a certain irony in the text: After warning Pontius Pilate on Saturday that the disciples might steal the body, the chief priests and Pharisees themselves demand a seal be placed on the stone and that guards watch the tomb (Matt. 27:62–66). These precautions that they are responsible for end up confronting them with evidence they do not want to see.

Perhaps their doubt might be justified without these measures. But now they face an unsettling conclusion regarding Jesus’ body — and yet are refusing to entertain anything that might challenge their worldview.

What this attitude reveals about human hearts is terrifying, but perhaps not so surprising. Twenty-five years ago, German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg told the magazine Prism:

The evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things: First, it is a very unusual event. And second, if you believe it happened, you have to change the way you live.

All of this is deeply disturbing. Imagine the discomfort of the leaders who passed as religious in front of everyone but rejected the one who now turned out to be the Messiah. Accepting this new reality would irredeemably upset their position and influence. Accepting this as true would mark the end of the life they have built for themselves. Believing in Jesus would be their death.

So they try to have it another way. The elders deny the truth and drag others into their denial. They prefer to stay in their way of thinking than to know the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

We humans often prefer the darkness that does not disturb us to the light that could set us free. The apostle John tells us:

Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. (John 3:19–21)

Even as we may judge the religious leaders, we also ought to be able to see ourselves in them. Our actions are motivated by fears of losing relationships, status, livelihoods, communities, dignity, and control. When these feel threatened, we become incentivized to find a different, more comforting narrative that allows us to maintain our status quo. The issue, then, is not so much the search for facts as the protection of a self-justifying narrative.

In order not to see the fragility or the deceptive nature of what we have clung to, we sometimes try at all costs to hold together the pieces of a puzzle that is falling apart. No one wants to see their world collapse.

Christians vulnerable to misinformation?

Matthew’s account also offers a reason why Christians might be inclined to embrace conspiracy theories: Since Easter morning, certain forces at work in the world have attempted to obscure the most basic truth of the gospel. From the beginning, the world has been developing an alternate history in which Christ is not resurrected.

Consequently, our Christian identity has accustomed us to the idea that the truth is something not everyone will accept or follow. We become habituated to a disconnect between what we accept as the truth and what the world at large accepts as such.

For Christians, then, there may be a smaller step than for others to embrace alternative explanations on different topics. Also, for some decades now we have been living in a period of the decline of Christendom in the West, a time in which Christian culture has been increasingly pushed to the margins. Many Christians find themselves at odds with the prevailing discourse on gender, creation, or pluralism in public education or the media, often feeling these institutions are leading us astray. In these circumstances, it may be tempting to be less careful about, for instance, supposed facts supporting the idea that all Western elites are corrupt or praising the greatness of some leader presented as the protector of “Christian values.”

It can be flattering to believe we know something that others do not. However, the knowledge we have received from Jesus Christ is grace from God. It does not come from any moral or intellectual superiority that we have over our fellow humans, nor does it entitle us to believe that we know better in all things.

Further, we must not assume that our knowledge of the Bible inherently keeps us safe from deception. As the attitude of many religious leaders at the time of Jesus shows, knowledge of the Scriptures does not guarantee the acceptance of the truth.

We are told that few people will accept God’s truth. But while these words may encourage us in our faith journey when facing opposition, they can also be applied out of context to a range of beliefs that have little to do with any claims about Christ.

Taking the first step

How then can we walk with fellow Christians who we believe have lied to themselves? We are all convinced that some people live in illusion, and some people think the same of us. One thing we all share is that we live in a world where the truth is not always easy to access. And we have all, at some point, been lied to. Today, the Russian government’s propaganda impresses with its cynicism. But throughout history, even some of the most respected governments, institutions, and leaders have lied to cover their actions.

The world is complex. In Matthew’s account, the elders and guards aren’t on equal playing fields. Some know the truth fully and have a responsibility to it. The others, while willing to lie for money, are less scripturally literate and likely don’t have the same knowledge of the issues. And what about those in Jerusalem trying to make up their own mind according to the various things they’ve heard?

If we want to continue to understand each other, we also need a way to recover from our mistakes when we come to acknowledge the truth. We need cultural scripts that allow us to confess our errors, change our paths, and receive grace.

It is not up to us to change the other. However, we can model a world where our belief in the resurrection of Christ offers us the confidence to consider not only what reinforces our points of view or our status, but also what nuances them, or even challenges them.

The first followers of Jesus who received the news of the Resurrection continued to have their reality shaken. As Jews, they too had their worldview and status challenged by the integration of non-Jews into the people of God. Peter, for instance, needed to hear the same message three times in a row (Acts 10:9–16). The way is not always easy, but in their footsteps, we continue to learn how, in Jesus, we are no longer prisoners of the fear of death (Heb. 2:15).

It may seem difficult to hope that people trapped in the lies they have fabricated or promoted will come to light. The blindness of the priests denying the Resurrection is striking. How could they have walked away from the lies they had spread? If Matthew knew of this conspiracy between the leaders of the people, one has to imagine that one of the guards — not the religious leaders — tipped him off to the story.

A few years after this episode in Matthew’s gospel, a very religious Jew and fierce persecutor of the church saw his life transformed by an encounter with the risen Christ. In giving up his religious status, his privileges, and his old worldview, the apostle Paul faced many “deaths” in Christ, but he witnessed unto the end the power of the Resurrection.

In God’s hands, there is still hope that those who lead the world astray will change. Perhaps even those who cling to conspiracy theories may one day become the boldest defenders of truth.

As for us, let’s live out our Resurrection convictions in such a way that others see our lives as evidence of what lies beyond death.

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Léo Lehmann is publications director for the Network of Evangelical Missiology for French-speaking Europe (REMEEF) as well as CT’s French language coordinator. He lives in Brussels, Belgium.

This article was originally a sermon Lehmann preached on April 4, 2021.