Sunday, April 21, 2024, Fourth Sunday of Easter
“Life After Easter: A Life Laid Down”
Psalm 23; Acts 4:1-12; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18
Hymns: #475 “Good Christian Friends, Rejoice and Sing”; #574 “Before the Throne of God Above”; #457 “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today”
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
I came across this story from the old Soviet Union, at a time when the Communist government was forcing everyone to live on communal farms – “collectives” they called them. Each collective had a “political leader” assigned to them by the government, who would hold weekly indoctrination and propaganda meetings that every member of the collective was required to attend. Quite often these meetings would be held intentionally on Sunday mornings.
On one occasion, the story goes – on a day that happened to be Easter Sunday on the Orthodox Church calendar - the party leader in this particular collective was giving his usual weekly spiel, going on about how “God is dead, and there is no God. There is no Christ, and there is no Easter. The only one you can trust to care for you is your government, your only God is the state, and your only allegiance must be to the Communist party, and to the common good, and to the work of the collective.”
In the middle of his speech, an old man, who’d been an Orthodox priest before the government closed all the churches, asked, “Comrade, may I speak?” Given permission, he stood up and called out the traditional Easter greeting in the Orthodox Church, “Kristos voskrese!”, which means, “Christ is risen!” And everyone in the small auditorium stood up and answered, “Voistinu voskrese!” - “He is risen indeed!” The party leader, so the story goes, left the meeting red-faced and angry. The next day, the old priest was arrested and disappeared into the Soviet gulag, and no one in that collective ever heard from him again. Only God knows what might have become of him.
Jesus says in our Gospel, “I am the Good Shepherd… and I lay down My life for the sheep.” And St. John says in our Epistle reading, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” We’ve been talking, during these “Sundays of Easter,” about how we’re God’s “after people,” His after-the-Resurrection people, living in a world where we’re somewhere between Jesus being raised, and Jesus coming again at the end of all things to raise us. So how do we live as Christians in this after-Easter world? What do we say to our broken culture? What do we do to make Jesus known? How do we testify and tell the world about what Jesus has done, and warn a world that doesn’t want to hear it anymore about what we know is coming soon?
Our after-Easter life is about laying down our lives for Jesus, just as He once laid down His life for us. The Greek word for “lay down” is tithemi, which literally means “to surrender.” Can wrap your head around what it really means to surrender your whole life to Jesus? No one ever said this was going to be easy.
“I lay down My life, I surrender My life, for you,” Jesus says. My life isn’t being taken from Me or torn away from Me. Nobody is doing anything to Me against My will. Not the high priests and Sadducees, not King Herod or Pontius Pilate or his soldiers. “I lay My life down of My own accord,” He says. For the joy set before Him – the joy of saving us – Jesus embraced the suffering, the thorns, and the pain of the cross. He didn’t avoid those things, but embraced them and faced them gladly for our sakes.
And as Jesus did for us, now we’re called to do for Him. As He laid down His life, “only to take it up again,” so goes this after-Easter life for us all. “Pick up your cross and follow Me,” Jesus says. Give up yourself, and give of yourself. Give up your own will, your own ambitions, your own agendas, and put Jesus first in all things. Throw up your hands and surrender, and say, “Thy will be done, not mine, O Lord.” Lay down your life for Him, and He will lift you up again.
In John 13, Jesus tells His disciples that the time has come for Him to leave them. Peter asks Him, “Lord, where are You going?” (And where He’s going, of course, is to die). Jesus replies, “Where I’m going, you can’t follow now, but you will follow later.” Peter asks, “Lord, why can’t I follow now? I’m willing to lay down my life for You.” And Jesus answers, “Really, Peter? Really? Will you really lay down your life for Me? I tell you the truth, before the rooster crows, you will disown Me three times.”
Peter had no idea just yet of what he was volunteering for. That valley of the shadow of death we read about in the 23rd Psalm is a scary and unpleasant place to be; it’s life in this after-Easter world. Jesus has promised to lead us through it, and to defend us, protect us, and be there for us, and to deliver us from the evil we’ll all have to face as we take the “walk of life.” But we still have to suck up our courage and take the walk, because there’s no other way to make it through to the green grass and the still waters. There’s only one way to get where we’re going.
In the book of Acts, Peter and John had done a beautiful thing; they’d worked a miracle in Jesus’ name and brought healing to a man who’d been crippled from birth. They give all the praise and glory to God for the miracle, and Peter makes use of the opportunity to tell the crowd that gathers the Good News about Jesus and His cross and His Resurrection, and to call the people to repentance and faith. And hallelujah, thanks be to God, thousands of them hear the message and believe. (That’s a great day in the mission field!)
And for their trouble, Peter and John are arrested and thrown in jail. They were “dragged into the synagogue,” as Jesus had once warned them they would be. They were interrogated and threatened, and warned not to talk about Jesus anymore. Peter testified again, with great courage, before the high priests and Sadducees and leading men of the Jews. He told them, “There is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” This wasn’t the last time they’d be arrested for not being able to stop talking about what they’d heard and seen. They’d be beaten and flogged and abused many times for the sake of their faith, and “called to testify before governors and kings,” as Jesus said they would be. And through it all, they never backed down. They “testified with great power about the Resurrection of Jesus” until the day they died, because that’s what God’s holy people do.
St. Paul, who knew a little something himself about being abused for the sake of Christ, wrote in 2 Corinthians 4: “We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We’re hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in us. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake… So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.”
Jesus, looking down on Jerusalem from the Garden of Gethsemane, saw everything He was going to have to go through for our sakes; the rejection, the abuse, the suffering, the cross, all of it. He may well have looked down and said to Himself, “Oh, this is going to be bad…” Yet He prayed, “Not My will, Father, but Yours be done.” And He allowed the mob to lead Him away, with His holy feet shackled and His holy hands tied.
And again, as it was for Him, it will be the same for us, as far as suffering for His sake goes. God gives us tasks to do for Him, and not all of them are going to be pleasant. God puts us where we’re most needed, not necessarily where we’d like to be. “My grace is sufficient for you,” God told St. Paul, “for My power so often shows best through your weakness.”
We after-Easter people are here to be God’s first responders. Much like firemen and paramedics, like policemen and soldiers, we Christians are called to run towards the smoke and not away from it. We run toward the troubles, the hurts, the pains, toward the unpleasantness things in the world, because that’s where God’s best work is waiting to be done. That’s where we’re needed.
Jesus warns us clearly about trying to hide or be safe or save our own lives. “If you try to save your own life, you’ll lose it,” Jesus says. “But if you lose your life for Me and the Gospel, you’ll save it.” Being an after-Easter person is about laying down your life. Not to die for Jesus’ sake, necessarily, although that could happen – but to surrender your time, your money, your goods, your resources, anything God has given you - for His sake and for the sake of the people He loves and wants to save. “Greater love has no man than this, than He lay down His life for His friends,” Jesus says. And as Jesus had done for us, so we’re all here on earth to do likewise. “This is how we know what love is,” says St. John. “Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” It won’t be easy, not at all; but it’s who we are and what we do.
Heaven isn’t going to be populated by wimps, folks. It’s going to be filled with people who, during their life on earth, had the courage and faith and strength to stand up for Jesus, no matter what the world did to them for it, and who held fast to their faith in their Savior and never backed down. Kristos voskrese! Christ is risen! Voistinu voskrese! He is risen indeed! In Jesus’ name; Amen.