Roadblocks to God's Mercy, Part I--Counterfeit Repentance
Releasing Resurrectional Power in Your Life.
Social surveys have shown that, for reasons unknown, more women than men tend to be late for appointments. But on one momentous occasion—the greatest in human history—women arrived long before any men did. Their early dawn arrival at the scene with embalming spices on that first Easter morn reflected more than mere punctuality. It reflected the women’s eager, irrepressible, burning, faith-fired love. Their beloved Jesus was dead. Nothing they could do about that. But they could lovingly cherish His memory by anointing His sacred body.
On the way, it occurred to them that their pious plans could be thwarted: “Who will roll back the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” (Mark 16:3). Yet their faith-filled love simply refused to countenance any impossibility in that situation. Reason told them that it was futile to go further. But love told them it was not futile. Reason was not the reason for their onward trudge—faith-driven love was the reason. Love proved to be right and reason wrong. And that unshaken love led them to the locale of the world’s greatest miracle.
Another activity was paralleling that of the women, and was timed to coincide with their arrival at the tomb. It was a divine activity on the other side of that stone. Punctuating this astonishing event with a mighty earthquake, the Almighty One intervened by directing an angel of the Lord, who “descended from heaven,…came to the stone, rolled it back, and sat on it . The guards grew paralyzed with fear of him and fell down like dead men” (Matt. 28:2-4). Those awestruck women were a privileged audience—the first to hear, from that angel of the Lord, the explosive news of the new Christian Era. The Christ-Messiah, “the Author of Life [whom] God raised from the dead” (Acts 3:15) was announced as inaugurating his reign as the ever-living King of Kings!
One function of Jesus’ reign in all ages is His providence that directs the removal of “stones” (often instrumented by angels, as on the first Easter). Every hardship, adversity, difficulty, sickness or problem in our life is a stone that waits to be moved aside. But that can happen only when two forces are at work—one facing the stone and the other behind it. Facing the stone at the tomb, the women had love-charged faith. From the other side, the Lord had love-charged power. To release God’s love-charged power from “behind the stone” into our life, we must face that stone with love-charged faith. And it must not be faith in our faith, or even faith in our prayer, but, like those women’s faith, ours must be a love-inflamed faith in Jesus. The only faith that counts, says Paul, is “faith that expresses itself through love” (Gal. 5:6). (That’s a synonym for trust.) This love entails ultimately a resurrectional power for our lives as Paul implies: “The love of Christ impels us…who…died and was raised up” (2 Cor.5: 14-15).
Peter had love-filled faith, which was reciprocated by Jesus’ love-filled power. As in all miracles, that combination was what sustained Peter in his remarkable water-walking venture—that is, until his faith began to sink, and he with it! (Mt. 14:30). In our arrogance, we too may feel that our faith is deep and love-animated, but when put to the test, our faith or our love may prove to be too weak to move big “stones”—or even too weak to believe that God’s power will cause them to move. We believe he can do it (part of the virtue of faith), but we don’t often believe that he will do it (that’s the charismatic gift of faith, which cannot be “cranked up,” but must be humbly asked for {Luke 11:13}).
Scripture asserts that God wants his resurrection power to spill over into our own lives. If there’s one single passage in Scripture that could summarize a lesson we could learn from the Easter episode, related to this “stone-moving” power, perhaps it might be Paul’s magnificent prayer for the Ephesians to gain a faith-spawned insight that he says is meant for all the members of the Church. He prays that God may enlighten us to know “the immeasurable scope of hispower in us who believe. It is like the strength he showed in raising Christ from the dead” (Eph.3: 19-20). He told the Colossians that they were empowered because they “believed in the power of God who raised Christ from the dead” (Col. 2:12). To the Philippians he confided that it was his desire for himself too: “I wish to know Christ and the power flowing from his resurrection” (Phil. 3:10). That’s the power on “the other side of the stone.”
There must be an Easter lesson for us all in these pericopes, as well as in the “stone-moving” episode of the resurrection story. Life is replete with obstacles—apparently immovable “stones” that we encounter daily, even hourly. (I’m sure that very statement elicits awareness of your personal problems at this moment.) Are you convinced that these stones are “removable” only if we are touched by that divine resurrectional power, as Paul so often affirms? Stop to think about that for a moment. That scriptural truth is really awesome! It can provide for us what Peter calls “a birth unto hope which draws its life from the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 1:3).
This resurrection-spawned hope that Peter acclaims can provide even a survival incentive, as one army chaplain came to realize while visiting a hospitalized soldier. The young private had been seriously wounded on Good Friday and later lapsed into a coma, from which he emerged on Easter Sunday. “Chaplain,” he remarked, “in my ordeal the Lord has shown me that anyone can endure the afflictions of a personal Good Friday, as long as they believe there will be a personal Easter Sunday.”
If each of us could apply that same insight when our “Good Friday” troubles assail us, we would find countless occasions in our lives for the release of Jesus' resurrectional power that God's word says is available to us. Even in the face of death, the words of Jesus have a reassuring ring: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.” Then comes the challenging query: “Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26).
POWER FROM BEHIND THE STONE
The explosive event of Easter prefaced the explosive power of Pentecost. Peter's impassioned Pentecost sermon that quoted Psalm 16 which prophesied Jesus' resurrection, reaped 3000 converts in one day, and in the following days "everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles" (Acts 2:41-43). "With great power theapostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all” (4:33). Obviously, to the early Christians the power of Jesus' resurrection was not a hollow, abstract theological concept, but a mighty force that flowed into and through their very lives. To them, Jesus was not a dead celebrity, but a living Christ, present to them as he had promised to be, “always, to the very end of the age” (Matt. 28:20).
If God's word is true, then this same awesome Christic resurrectional power extant in the early Church is also available to us today. If we are to pursue this exciting opportunity, we must be prepared to accept the fact that a renewed life implies a change in the manner of living, as experienced by the first Christians. To the Corinthians Paul wrote, "Those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again" (2 Cor.5: 15). Thus patterned after the risen Lord, a “resurrected” or renewed life implies a new life; and Paul reminds the Romans that a new life can be had, but only by those who are open to the reviving Spirit of God. “Once the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, then he will, by that same Spirit, bring to your whole being new life” Rom 8: 11).
Consider the changes effected in a life renewed by that “power from behind the stone.” The changes would affect us interiorly, by empowering our virtues and prayer life, and exteriorly by empowering our influence on others, in our ministries, apostolates, charisms, works of charity, intercessions, etc.
First, interiorly, wewould experience a deeper level of hope for “Easter victories” even in this life, to follow our Calvaries; and also a deeper sense of expectancy of attaining in the next life the unseen crown behind our present crosses. Our virtue of trust would also deepen, because we would be more aware that by his resurrection, Jesus shows that he keeps his promises.
From a broader perspective, Christ's resurrection empowers us to find real purpose and meaning in life—that is, belief or faith in all that is entailed in our status as creatures. “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.” One doesn't have to look far today to find countless people who are living futile, meaningless lives; their earthly existence seems geared to have little or no relationship to a loving God, a Redeemer, or even his gift of a future life.
Imagine the passengers on a cruise ship being informed by the captain that the food and fuel is enough to last quite a while, and that games, dances and concerts will continue as usual, but that the ship will not dock at any port. When the supplies are exhausted, the ship will be scuttled. At first, after such an announcement, nothing would appear to be any different on the ship. But a sense of purpose would no longer animate the passengers—there would be no goal or reason for the journey—no destination. As the days and weeks would pass, probably the passengers, one by one, would silently slip overboard into the watery darkness. That is a picture of life devoid of purpose and meaning.
But Easter burst forth with a triumph that shattered all meaninglessness. The Lord of mankind was not dead! Hope for life after life was now restored. The disconsolate disciples now realized that the faith that they had in him was not futile or meaningless. Christ was alive, and life had a bold new meaning.
BROKERING DIVINE POWER
Second, exteriorly, we would see ourselves instrumenting God's power, chosen as “the weak things of this world to shame the strong” (1 Cor.1: 27). By the same power that raised Christ from the dead, Peter and John raised the crippled beggar to a new life of vigor and vitality—“walking, jumping and praising God” (Acts 3:6). The apostles instrumented God's power physically in the healing, but also spiritually, by leading the beggar to glorify God.
Peter and John were ordered by the highest councils in Jerusalem to proclaim no longer the teaching that Christ had risen. But that very doctrine empowered them to respond with intrepid boldness, “We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20). The Resurrection had energized them with a sense of mission—to leave all things and follow the Lord. It launched them into a life of evangelizing everyone they could contact. The “power from behind the stone” had become epiphanized in those apostles and among the early Christians as a burgeoning apostolic zeal.
In all of this we can see that the Resurrection must become personal before it can become power. That means, in the words of Paul, “believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead”( Rom.10: 9)
Facing a sealed tomb with deep faith and love on that first Easter morn must have made those pious women extraordinarily pleasing to Jesus. He blessed them with the privilege of being the first evangelizers of his new covenant—even before the apostles themselves. After that event, their faith and love must have grown to much higher levels and continued to be enriched for the rest of their lives.
It was extraordinary faith and love that drove David Livingstone to cross the great Kalahari Desert that had never been crossed by any human before in history; he just wanted to reach God’s languishing poor in a remote part of Africa. His success then gave him courage later to tramp through forests and swamps in his remarkable ministry. To each of us God presents many challenges—some big, others small—but he helps us to succeed, successively, whenever our love-fired faith triggers his love-fired resurrectional power in our lives.
Don't worry about the “stones” in your life, or how they'll be rolled away. All of us do have some faith, even if at times it appears to be half-dead. Let’s just ask the Risen Lord to “resurrect” it, so that our Easter joy will be enhanced by knowing that in our every problem, God is working with us from “the other side of the stone.”