“I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Corinthians 6:2)
Easter is my favorite holiday. It ushers in spring and renews the hope and joy that the winter season seems to steal from so many of us.
I’ve always thought of Easter as a season of celebration. In fact, my former church in Georgia hosts an Easter production each year for which thousands will literally get off work early to go on one of the seven nights that the play is running just to get a seat. Hundreds of those who come to worship will leave and call themselves Christians for the first time. Sadly this year, they are unable to have the event due to the Coronavirus.
It’s important for all Christians to understand that Easter is not just a celebration of the death of Jesus Christ, but also a celebration of his resurrection. Remember what the angel told the two women who appeared at Jesus’ tomb on that first Easter morning: “Do not be afraid. He has risen from the dead”. (Matthew 28:5-6)
God let me know years ago that the angel’s command, “Do not be afraid,” is directed to all of us, not just to the two women who approached the tomb. More than anything else, the Easter season is a time when the finished work of Christ should be a source of comfort to us all. The truth is we no longer have to fear death and God put that promise in perspective for me through an article that was once published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
Reporter Tony Wilber had written what I thought was an uncharacteristically poignant story of a former prominent Atlanta commercial real estate broker’s struggle with cancer.
In December of 1996, doctor’s told Michael Christopher that he didn’t have pneumonia. Instead, they told him he had lung cancer, a virulent form that would ravage his body and likely kill him within a year.
Christopher was a Christian who had allowed his faith to shine right through his struggle with cancer. “I have a very strong faith,” he told the reporter. “I’m not afraid to die.”
Mr. Christopher showed no signs of giving up. The next year was one of his best years ever as he helped his company close on more than 30 transactions valued at more than $80 million.
But Christopher’s business success is not what made that year. The young husband and father of two young children readily admitted that his battle with cancer had allowed him to get to know who God was. “I am confident I will beat it. But if I don’t, then I’m comfortable with my relationship with my heavenly father, and I know where I’m going. Some days I feel like the luckiest man in the world.”
That’s what the Easter season is all about. We no longer have to be afraid. As one writer puts it, “The great Easter truth is not so much that we are to live forever as that we are to, and may, live nobly now because we are to live forever”.
Michael Christopher lived nobly and was teaching us that Easter was more than a season to proclaim that “He is risen”. Easter is an opportunity to show others why Christians can cling to the promise that death doesn’t have to be feared.
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