Easter From the Back Side: A Different Look at the Story of Christ's Resurrection - Softcover

Kalas, J. Ellsworth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0687490790 ISBN 13: 9780687490790

Verlag: Abingdon Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Popular and beloved author J. Ellsworth Kalas presents new insight into the biblical Easter story. The author looks beyond the traditional Gospel scriptures to connect the story of Christ’s resurrection with other stories and scriptures throughout the Bible, including both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Kalas’s creative approach both clarifies basic teachings and introduces new possibilities of meaning, even for those who are most familiar with the Easter story. Enriched with contemporary illustrations and personal experiences, this volume will provide new perspectives on Easter.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J. Ellsworth Kalas (1923-2015) was the author of over 35 books, including the popular Back Side series, A Faith of Her Own: Women of the Old Testament, Strong Was Her Faith: Women of the New Testament, I Bought a House on Gratitude Street, and the Christian Believer study, and was a presenter on DISCIPLE videos. He was part of the faculty of Asbury Theological Seminary since 1993, formerly serving as president and then as senior professor of homiletics. He was a United Methodist pastor for 38 years and also served five years in evangelism with the World Methodist Council.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Easter from the Back Side

By J. Ellsworth Kalas

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2008 The United Methodist Publishing House
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-687-49079-0

Chapter One

Why We Need Easter

GENESIS 3:1-7, 22-24: Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, 'You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.'" But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves....

Then the Lord God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"—therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.

Easter is an answer. It is such a dramatic, earthshaking answer that for nearly twenty centuries, artists of every kind and quality have been trying to portray its significance. It has been celebrated in music, from country-western and bluegrass to symphonies, and in graphic art that ranges from children's crayon work posted on the refrigerator to hangings in most of the art museums of the Western world. Poets and playwrights have celebrated Easter's answer in untold thousands of documents—and of course, no one can begin to estimate the number of sermons preached on this theme over these passing centuries.

So, what's the question? If Easter is such a monumental answer, what's the question?

To answer that question, I'll have to take us all the way back to the beginning. I mean, really the beginning. I'll have to take us back to a kind of mythical place. Not mythical in the sense of being untrue, but mythical in the truest sense—that is, something so true that it's difficult to tell the story without entering areas of mystery and wonder, where ordinary language fails us.

The Bible tells us that once our world was like a garden, fresh from the hands of a loving Creator. Everything about it was ideal. In fact, it was so good that God, the ultimate critic, smiled and pronounced it very good. For example, you didn't have to worry about the need for herbicides, because nothing could be classified as a weed; everything grew where it belonged, without crowding out other expressions of beauty, usefulness, and singularity. The animals were not afraid of the humans, and the humans were not afraid of the animals. The relationship was so good that the humans served in loco parentis (Latin for "in the place of a parent") to the animals. Nor did the animals prey on one another. It was all just one big, happy family—the kind of family all of us wish our families could be, except that this family included all the inhabitants of the planet. And when you wanted to have a picnic, you didn't have to worry about rain, because the water simply rose up from the earth, like a wonderful underground irrigation system.

But, as you must have guessed by now, something went wrong. I mean, big-time wrong. And the problem came not through the weeds or some malfunction of the watering system and not through a controversy among the animals, but by way of the chief executive of the planet, the creature made in the image of the Creator and therefore the one responsible for oversight of the whole operation. Of course this figures, because if the problem had been with the animals or the plants or the watering system, the person in charge could have taken care of it. But when the problem was with the person in charge—well, you can see for yourself what a mess it was.

Here's how it happened. I should warn you in advance that it's a strange story, so you may have difficulty handling it. I should also warn you that the strangest part of the story is not that you can't imagine it, but that you've seen it so many times that it doesn't get to you the way it should. Not only have you seen this story, you've sometimes been an actor in it. Lots of times, in fact. This means that you should grasp the story quite easily, but instead, most of the time you miss it. That's part of what makes the story so strange.

It was like this. One day, in the midst of all this perfection, someone suggested to Adam and Eve (the roots of our family tree and the ones originally trusted with the care of the perfect place) that perhaps things weren't really as good as the Creator had told them. In a way, this visitor (a serpent, though he didn't slither about at the time) was suggesting that perfection could be improved upon; to do violence to language, that perfection could be made "more perfect."

I hate to tell you this, but Adam and Eve believed the serpent. (I repeat, he didn't slither in those days; he was really quite handsome and able to sell almost anything, else our ancestors wouldn't have bought his grammatical misstatement.) In doing so, they misused their unique human gift, the power of choice.

And worse still, as far as you and I are concerned, they let loose on our planet the deadly plague that theologians and philosophers and street-corner preachers call sin. And between you and me, probably our human race wouldn't have been especially upset about the plague, except for what it brought with it—that is, the consequences of sin. Unless our thinking has been changed by a quite decisive meeting with God, most of us seem to get rather comfortable with sin. Not with the sins of other people, mind you; other people's sins are almost always obnoxious. But as for our own sins, we learn to live with them, and we eventually come to feel that other people should be able to live with them, too. So we say, after engaging in one of our pet sins, "I'm just that way, you know. I've always had a rather sharp tongue. The people who know me best take it for granted." As my late, dear friend Bud Rhyand used to say, "Every person thinks his own fleas are gazelles."

So sin doesn't necessarily upset us too much, except as other people express it, and except when the sin gets so out of hand that it destroys our health, our career, our family, or our self-respect. Or (and this is a severe mercy) when our consciences become so sensitive that we see sin the way God sees it, as an illness so abhorrent and so contrary to the nature of what was meant to be a perfect universe that the consequences are just what one should expect from something so ultimately evil.

The most obvious of these consequences is death. God had warned Adam about this: "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die" (Genesis 2:16-17). It is a touch of ironic realism that the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Abingdon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0687490790
• ISBN 13: 9780687490790
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 91
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar