Catapult vs. Climax

As a church leader, sometimes you don’t know what to do after Easter. The whole first quarter of the year builds to that one week. Direction for sermons is basically already laid out for you through the events of Passion Week: praise on Palm Sunday, crucifixion on Good Friday, and resurrection on Easter Sunday. Not only that, but you put forth of a lot of administrative effort to pull together the activities surrounding Easter: egg hunts, picnics, Passion plays, etc. Once this all reaches its peak on Easter, you can get the feeling, “That was great. Now what?”

On the Monday after Easter, I was asking myself this question and sensed the Holy Spirit answering me with this phrase: “infallible proofs.” That phrase didn’t pop out of thin air, though. It comes from Luke’s introduction to the book of Acts.

Luke begins this crucial book in the New Testament by describing the forty day period between the resurrection of Jesus and the ascension of Jesus. He writes that Jesus “presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during forty days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:3 emphasis added). The living Jesus would just show up, surprising the disciples and confirming the reality of His resurrection during that forty day interval. Can you imagine how exciting that must of been for the disciples!?

On that Monday-after-Easter, I continued to meditate on their experience and Luke’s introduction. It seemed cleared to me what the Holy Spirit was saying: After Easter, God wants to manifest the living Jesus with infallible proofs.

This idea challenges my internal view of Easter. As I described earlier, Easter seems like a climax. You build everything to the point of declaring, “Jesus is alive,” then you move on to something else. However, in Acts, Easter is not a climax. It is a catapult. The tension of the Gospels does not build to the resurrection and then lose its steam. The tension builds to resurrection and then catapults the church forward with greater force than ever.

This is evident in the way Luke describes his Gospel: “The former account I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach . . .” (Acts 1:1 emphasis added). Luke describes his Gospel as a beginning–not an ending. The Gospel according to Luke was the introduction to the ministry of Jesus continued through the church in Acts and throughout history.

Therefore, what do we do after Easter? We anticipate the living Jesus showing up in surprising ways. We anticipate life-transforming moments in His presence and miracles in our midst. “Jesus is alive” is not just a sermon for Easter Sunday. It’s a reality, a lifestyle into which Easter catapults you.