Jesus is Love

We hear it said that Jesus is Love?  Why is that?  Why is that something that should be important for us to know?

At our Sunrise Service on Easter morning, we started with a Call to Worship that gives the most important statement that we can have about Easter.

Christ has risen!
Christ has risen indeed.
Faith, hope, and joy are alive.
A new age is dawning
Jesus Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed!

We gather for worship, because back then, early on that first Sunday morning, something incredible happened.

In the last post, we told the story of how Jesus was bringing change with him, and that even for the folks that believed and had faith, what he was doing was terrifying.  That's because change is terrifying, what makes it bearable is who you can trust.  Before we get to Easter morning, the faithful had had their high point in the story on that day when Jesus rode into the city of Jerusalem.

But then the events of what we call Holy Week took place.  For as high as the faithful had gotten on Palm Sunday, they fell that much further by the end of the week.

The man that they had put their faith and trust in had been betrayed by one of his own, for 30 pieces of silver. That's not a small amount of money, but is the payment worth the cost?

Jesus was brought before his own religious leaders who wanted him dealt with, but they didn’t want to get their own hands dirty. They pushed him off on Pilate.  Pilate, was the Roman Governor at the time really didn’t want to deal with Jesus, but because of who he was, the way he governed through the use of force and fear, he had to do something.  He had to give the religious leaders something, so he gave them a choice.  He let them choose between two men, one to be released and the other to be killed.

Then, because it was early in the morning when this “trial” was taking place, the crowds that were gathered were, probably, made up of the supporter of the religious leaders and not the regular people, so when given a choice, they were going to crucify Jesus.

Jesus was marched through the city of Jerusalem, and then killed on a cross.  Then his body is brought down, and he is laid in a tomb. He remains there over the Sabbath day when no one could do anything.

So it was on the first day of the week when the women went to the tomb to take care of Jesus body, only to find that he wasn’t there, which brings us back to where we started this post.

All of this was taking place for a reason.

This verse should sound familiar. We’ll see it come back again when we get to communion.  This is a basic statement of our faith, that Jesus died for us.

And why did he die? 

We talk about this as if God’s wrath is directed at us as individuals because we sin, and does God have wrath? Sure, but is it directed at us, no.  

God’s wrath isn’t like ours.  Ours is a product of living in a world that is full of wrong choices and sin.  God’s wrath is directed at our inability to live up to our creation, to who he made us to be, because we sin.

God’s wrath is righteous, so it is focused on fixing what is wrong.

God sent his Son into the world to fix what is wrong, to fix the fact that we don’t have a way of being broken out of the power of sin in our lives in a way that sticks.  You know the sins that I’m talking about, because they’re the ones that keep going in that mental list that we all keep that is full of the regrets and the things that we wish we’d never done.

Jesus came so that he could be the living example for us to know that there is a greater power out there that won’t hold us down, won’t keep us repeating that same list of regrets, that won’t control our lives through fear of what we’ve done wrong.

But as Jesus was the living example, we needed to see him take on the full brunt of what it means to be human. That means suffering for the things that have been done that are wrong and sinful.  Jesus didn’t die because God’s wrath had to be turned away from us, but because God’s wrath led him to do the one thing that could be done so that we would finally understand the hope that he brings into the world!

It’s because of that that Jesus rising from the dead is so important.  All the rest of us, if we would have died, would have stayed dead, because we don't have the power to overcome sin and the wrong choices that we make.

But Jesus rose from the dead as a living answer to sin that shows it has no control and that God gives us grace and freedom to overcome everything that would hold us back.

And so we join this morning in a celebration that Jesus started that draws us into that power that overcomes death brought on by sin.  And here it is where those same words come back to us.

While we were still weak, at the right moment, Christ died for ungodly people.
--Romans 5:6