Victory on a Cosmic Scale (John 20:1-18)

To truly appreciate Christ’s resurrection, we need to grapple with scale. I’ve had the Mark Twain quote, that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” stuck in my head. The stories of the Bible certainly rhyme, and the events of Christ life, in particular, intentionally resonate with stories across the Old Testaments. We can see elements of Elijah, David, and Moses. Jesus lives the life of a traveling miracle worker constantly put to the test. He’s the king no one would have picked out of a crowd. And, his miraculous birth involves narrowly avoiding being killed by a king willing to kill indiscriminately in a bid for power. In the climax of Christ’s story, his death and resurrection, our minds should immediately swing to the Exodus and particularly the events that culminate in God parting the Red Sea. It’s not just that they both share a connection to the Passover. Placing the events of Christ passion and rising in amongst the Passover celebration gives us a Rosetta Stone for interpreting the vastness of what occurs.

In the Exodus, God battles Pharoah and wins. The narrative frames the whole things as a battle between God and a wannabe god. The structure of ancient Egyptian society connected the power of the gods with the power of the Pharoah. It helped that the Pharoah had the most powerful military in existence. Moses serves as divine spokesmen, but God does the combat lobbing plague after plague as the artillery barrage to warn the enemy of the true strength behind God’s position. As Pharoah thinks that he can continue the fight, God harnesses the sea and defeats the unbeatable army in one go, winning the cosmic scale battle. God 1, Wannabe God Pharoah 0.

We know that Christ’s resurrection has cosmic importance, but we often tell the story of it only on a personal level. A man died – torturously – out of love for all of us. That same man didn’t stay dead long. That is what happened, but simply saying that doesn’t explain why those events contain soul saving and world shaping power. Other people get resurrected (Lazarus and the guy who got so bored listening to Paul that he fell out a window and died, for instance), and none of those events saved humanity’s collective soul.

So, what’s so different here? As with the Exodus, we again bear witness to a cosmic battle between Rome, human brokenness, and death, on one side, and God on the other.

A potent group of forces collect on the adversary side of this battle. A meme recently went around my weird corner of the Internet implying that most men think about the Roman Empire far more than the women in their lives would expect. I’ll admit that it hit home for me because I spend a huge amount of my professional life interjecting, “Think about the Romans,” into any New Testament conversation. Here, in particular, the Romans did the actual killing! In the early first century, Rome’s rise must have felt endless. They dwarfed the empires who came before, and their particular brand of power-hungry, self-interested cowardice meant that Pilot, Rome’s representative, felt perfectly comfortable doing the expedient thing to strength Roman power by knowingly putting an innocent man to death.

Evil and human failing get their own starring role. Judas proves temptable. The Temple leadership, perhaps to maintain their own power, arrest and hand over the Son of God for death at the hand of their supposed enemy, while knowing full well, who it is that they’re killing. The crowd swings in the wind echoing whatever gets suggested in the moment.  Whether we personify it in the person of Satan or not, evil and its willing collaborators do a lot of the leg work to kill Jesus. Everyone makes their own choice. Judas chooses to betray and take the silver. The Chief Priest and team actively form their own plot. Their twisted desires allow evil to strike a decisive blow and put Emmanuel, God among us, in the grave.

The absoluteness of death picks up the battle here. Death is one of life’s few absolutes. Everyone dies, and with shockingly few exceptions, they stay dead. As a species, we find this finality terrifying. Even in understanding a life beyond death, the grave still holds a primal power. You live on, but you don’t return to this life. In speaking his last and giving up his spirit, Christ enters the domain of death – a powerful and permanent one way trip into the lands of one of humanity’s oldest foes.

That Christ willing enters in this trap demonstrates for all time God’s love for us, and that he rises back out of it demonstrates God’s ability and willingness to vanquish any foe. This combination of choosing to enter a painful cosmic battle and then emerging victorious give this specific resurrection its potency. Rome (as a stand in for all powers and principalities), Evil (human failure and Satan) and Death, working together, out strip the power of a mere Pharoah. They even get presented the upper hand. Instead of sending plagues, Jesus allows himself to get taken into their grasp, never exerts his power, and dies a criminal’s death. Then, he rises revealing all other forces in the universe as pretenders to the true throne of power. On the third day, God bats them away, and Jesus steps out of that grave, securing a cosmic victory.

The intimate story of a man’s painful death matters because it proves God’s love for us, but we should never lose sight of the bigger picture. Plenty before and after have died worthy deaths. A few here and there have even risen from the grave. Christ’s death on that cross was a bold move in a cosmic battle, and the resurrection was the ultimate reminder that it wasn’t much of a fight. God just wins. And in loving and winning, God opens resurrection and victory up to us all.