Wait, There’s More!

“Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again. Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.. .but these words seemed to them an idle tale and they did not believe them.”
Luke 24.6-11

You know what an idle tale is don’t you? We hear idle tales all the time. I get a lot email forwards come my way, stories that have been circulating around the Internet. Ryan Stumph sent me a good story a couple months ago about a man who went on safari in the African bush. He encountered an aggressive bull elephant who seemed ready to charge him. But then the man noticed that the elephant had a wood splinter sticking in his foot and somehow the man managed to remove the splinter and the elephant moved away in obvious relief. Fast forward years later and this same man is at the Central Park Zoo and comes upon the elephant enclosure. One of the elephants looks familiar. This elephant keeps staring at the man in an overly curious way. Slowly, it dawns on the man that this elephant may be the same one that he helped in the African bush years ago. The elephant stares at the man and stamps his foot as if beckoning the man closer. So the man throws caution to the wind and climbs over the barriers to the enclosure and walks up the elephant to pet it. The elephant charges the man and stomps him to death. Apparently, it wasn’t the same elephant. The story ends with, “Quit sending me these crappy heart-warming stories!”

I laughed when I read that the first time. The story teaches a truth through it’s fiction: there is real truth and then there is Internet truth.

Is this what the resurrection story is like, internet truth, a nice story but loose with the facts? Some thought that at the time when they first heard about it. They thought it a tall tale, invented by his disciples.

It seems to me that people have similar reactions to the Easter story today. One response to the Easter story is to fail to appreciate the implications of the event. My son captured this response one time as we were discussing the importance of resurrection, “Yeah, but he just died on Saturday.” He was only dead a day. No big deal. Maybe that is your feeling. Maybe you’ve heard the story so many years that it fails to make an impact anymore.

Another response to the story can be a sort of belief as a matter of religious faith, but not belief as real knowledge. And if it isn’t real knowledge, real truth, then it doesn’t have much of an impact on your life. We relegate the truth of Easter to mere symbols. But symbols don’t raise dead men from the grave. And symbols alone don’t change lives.

As Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “If the Lord’s Supper is just a symbol, then to hell with it.”

If the resurrection is just a symbolic idea, then today is a big phony nothing.

And yet another view of the Resurrection Story is that the Church is trying to sell us something. Like that guy on those infomercials, we have the greatest thing in vegetable slicers, it cuts and cooks your food for you, it slices, it dices, it tells time. It shamwows you. But wait, there’s more! And if the story is not true then surely the Church has accomplished the greatest sales fraud in the history of the world.

But I want you to consider another way of looking at this story. I want you to consider if it might be, you know, true. Not internet true, or symbolic true, but really, truly, true. Because that’s what the Bible claims it to be. That’s what Jesus always said was going to happen. He said it. He said it again. He did it. And after he did it he showed up and explained to them what just happened.

I want you to consider that God did the impossible. I want you to consider that Jesus demonstrated before thousands of witnesses that he had the power to do the impossible. He routinely seemed to bend the rules of nature. They didn’t seem to apply to him. He made the blind see. He healed people of leprosy. The paralyzed got up and walked at his command. Because Jesus seemed so real and so comfortable in his skin, it always startled and amazed people when he would suddenly so something obviously supernatural. He walked on water! Like Alice in Wonderland, Jesus seemed to think of six impossible things before breakfast, and then he would spend his day doing them.

Now, as I said earlier, you can believe all the supernatural stuff up to and including the resurrection as a matter of religious faith but still not be radically changed by this truth. It can be a good religious story and not much more, except for one more thing.

Some of you know that one of my favorite stories is The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. As a kid I read those books over and over again. To my great excitement, in the late 1970’s they came out with a film version of the books. It was an animated version. For animation back then, it looked pretty cool. I managed to convince my sister and her boyfriend to take me to go see it. They weren’t fans, but to their credit they took me anyway. They had never read the books. But they gamely tried to buy into my enthusiasm for seeing the film. How was it? It was horrid. It skipped over huge sections of the story to the point that I, who had memorized the story, couldn’t make heads or tails of what we were actually watching. And then, suddenly, it ended. In the middle of everything, long before the ring had ever come close to Mt. Doom, the movie was over. Roll credits. I couldn’t believe it! I stood up in the theatre and shouted, “What? That’s it? What a ripoff!” What made it worse was the whole way home I had to endure dirty looks from my sister’s boyfriend.


Have you ever been in the midst of a good story and it suddenly and prematurely, ended? You know how disappointing that feels. Well, isn’t your life like that? Isn’t your life a pretty important story, that at some point, from your point of view, will prematurely end? Why should it end? Yeah, my body will wear down. Things are already falling apart. But my spirit won’t. Spiritually, I feel young. It doesn’t seem right that at some arbitrary number years, everything should end. Death is a bad ending to this movie.

It’s not an accident that you or I should feel this way. The Bible says we feel this way because God has implanted this desire in our hearts. It is right and God-given to want to live forever. In fact, it’s a clue that we will live forever. When we were kids we always had someone watching out for us. We still do. We have this friend who, no matter what is happening to us in life, is watching out for us. He’s on our side. And he doesn’t stop watching out for us. He’s in it for the long haul.

Someone once said that when you die, you die alone. That’s not true. Jesus is the friend who stands by us at death. The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Gospel, is that Jesus didn’t die on the cross and rise from the dead just for the whole world; he did it for you and for me. It’s personal. The Lord doesn’t want to see our story end. And he has made sure that it won’t. You and I, we’re going to live forever!

That personal and strong a love demands a strong response from us. Whatever used to be important to us in this life is not important compared to knowing the One who has made eternity for us. St. Paul is getting at this in his letter to the Philippians:

“Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. . . I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” Philippians 3.7-8, 10-11

I want to know Christ, Paul says. I want to know the One who has power over death. I need to get to know Him. He would be a good One to know. It would be good to have Him on my side. Because this story is like the one about the woman who called her pastor in to make funeral arrangements. This woman explained to her pastor that she had been told by her doctor that she her illness was terminal. She wanted to talk about her funeral service with the pastor. They went over hymns and scriptures and then she said,

“one more thing, pastor. When they lay me in the casket I want you to make sure that a fork is placed in the casket with me.”

The pastor thought that was an odd request and said so. The woman explained, “I always loved the dinners at our church. The food is always good. But as good as the meal is, my favorite part is when the ladies come around to clear off the dirty dishes and they say to me, “now, save your fork.” I know that when they tell me to save my fork, dessert is coming. And I know that it’s not just jello or a cookie, but it’s something good like cake or pie.”

“I want a fork in my hand as I lay in the casket so people know that I know something better is coming.”