Show Notes
In this Easter episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland celebrates the resurrection of Jesus and reflects on why Easter stands at the very center of the Christian faith. While many churches may not follow the traditional rhythms of the Christian calendar, nearly all Christians celebrate Easter, and for good reason. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then the entire Christian story collapses. The resurrection is the lynchpin of our faith and the event that explains why Christianity exists at all.
Drawing on insights from N. T. Wright, Derek explores the historical shock of the resurrection in the first-century Jewish world. In the time of Jesus, people believed resurrection would happen at the end of history not in the middle of it. That is why the empty tomb and the appearances of the risen Jesus stunned even his closest followers. As the apostle Paul insists in 1 Corinthians 15, if Christ has not been raised, then Christian preaching and faith are meaningless.
The resurrection also reshapes Christian hope. Easter is not simply about life after death. It is about God’s promise of new creation. Just as God raised Jesus from the dead, God will one day raise his people and renew the whole world. The Christian hope is not escape from creation but the restoration of creation. Because resurrection is our future, what we do in the present matters. Our bodies matter. God’s creation matters. Easter proclaims that death has been defeated and that one day God will make all things new.
Books Mentioned
- The Resurrection of the Son of God — N. T. Wright
- Surprised by Hope — N. T. Wright
Scriptures Mentioned
- John 11:23–24
- 1 Corinthians 15:12–14
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Transcript
Welcome back.
Welcome to another episode of Peaceable and Kind.
I am your host, Derek Vreeland, and we have made it to Easter.
The Lenten fast is over, and it’s time to celebrate.
So on this episode
I want to talk about the resurrection, celebrate a little bit, do a little theology, but not like the deep dive we had been doing during the season of Lent.
But I want us to celebrate because Christ has risen from the dead and it is time to celebrate.
Before I get started, if you haven’t subscribed already, please do so.
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I find the topics discussed engaging, which keeps me listening.
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And we are in the first week of the Easter season.
Last Sunday was Easter Sunday.
Hope you had
a wonderful time of worship.
Hopefully you’re gathering with family, with friends.
I know some churches do a sunrise service.
Which I’m all here for.
We’ve talked about doing one at our church.
We’ve never done that.
But I say get up early while the sun’s coming up and
Worship Jesus in the resurrection.
In our church, we start Easter Sunday morning, not at sunrise
But about an hour and a half before church starts with pancakes, because nothing says celebration like simple carbohydrates.
And uh so we have a wonderful pancake breakfast and we do it in our foyer.
Uh so people when they walk in, it it smells like pancakes and syrup.
And it it it’s a it’s a wonderful celebration.
It’s really fun.
Sometimes the kids get messy, but you know what?
It’s Easter.
It’s gonna happen.
But I love that people get to church early and they’re talking and they’re hanging out, then they get in the sanctuary a little bit early, and because they’re carved up, man, when we started worship Sunday morning,
It was popping.
The place was jumping.
And no, I’m not talking about a club.
I’m talking about church on Easter Sunday morning
So during the season of Lent, we’re drawing back a little bit.
You know, Lent was all about focusing on crucifixion and death and sorrow and repentance.
And I love that our worship team at church during the season of Lent, they just kind of moved in a little bit.
The band was a little stripped down.
um our drummers.
They didn’t even have sticks.
They they fasted drumsticks uh for Lent.
They just had brushes.
So everything is a little
little subdued.
Oh man, but Easter Sunday morning it’s a full band, the lights are up, and it’s so celibatory.
I appreciate
The Christian Church in all of its many expressions and traditions.
I’ve spoken on many podcasts about the value of
benedictine spirituality and chanting the Psalms and all the various forms of contemplative prayer, which is
which is silent prayer.
I’ve talked about the Orthodox tradition of praying the Jesus prayer, but there’s something about the Pentecostal charismatic
classic evangelical tradition of just putting energy and life and drums and electric guitars into worship.
And I’m here for all of it.
I want to pray the Jesus prayer.
I want to sit in contemplative silence.
And then I want rock and roll on Sunday morning.
I won’t lie to you.
I enjoy contemporary worship music.
Um, it’s been a part of my Christian journey from the beginning.
And there’s just nothing, nothing.
like worship on Easter Sunday morning.
So I hope you had a great time of worship and then maybe some gatherings after.
You know, there’s traditional Easter lunches.
Our tradition as a family is rather unique.
What we do on Easter Sunday, and it’s something we’ve done the last, I guess about fifteen years.
We do a weenie roast over a fire pit outside, which sounds a little redneck, I know.
It’s not a fancy dinner at all.
Everybody gets out of their Easter clothes.
They get on comfy clothes.
Uh I built a a fire in our our outdoor fire pit.
And we got music plan and people load up their hot dog sticks with hot dogs.
And we have a wee roast.
We roast hot dogs over the fire and
You know, it’s simple and it’s kind of stripped down, but it’s just a lot of joy and fun.
And there’s something about gathering around a fire pit.
roasting hot dogs together, you know, when you’re standing around the fire.
People are facing one another and they’re talking and the kids are playing and
It is a it’s a great tradition.
It it comes from my wife’s family.
When she was a little girl, they would go out to her great-grandparents’ farm.
And they would have someone in the family would have built a bonfire the day before.
And the family was spread out through northwest Missouri but and would go to different churches.
And so after church
They would bring their coolers with their hot dogs and potato salad and whatever kind of iced down drinks and and lawn chairs and they go out to the farms where the bonfire was.
And uh they would have a they called it the weenie roast, right?
They would roast hot dogs at the bonfire.
And when we moved back to uh Missouri
in twenty eleven, I told Jenny, let’s don’t do big Easter lunches anymore.
Let’s do the Weenie Roast like you used to do as a as a little girl.
And and it’s a tradition that I value so much.
Um, because for me, our little fire pit hot dog roasting celebration really adds to the joy.
of the Easter season.
Of course, we roast marshmallows, make s’mores.
We’ve learned the secret of roasting
Those marshmallow peeps, you know about those marshmallow peeps, right?
You see them in the grocery store.
Everyone says they’re gross, but someone’s buying those peeps because they’re everywhere.
Now, I made a joke years ago about liking peeps, because apparently everyone else hates them.
I don’t think everyone hates them.
I think people don’t want to admit.
I don’t I think grown adults
do not want to admit that they like that sugary marshmallow goodness.
Well, I made a joke in church about liking peeps.
And for many Easters after, people kept bringing me boxes and boxes of peeps.
And finally I had to say, guys, I don’t love peeps that much.
I mean, I’ll eat one or two and then I’m like done.
I hated to tell people because they’re giving me boxes of these things that I ended up throwing a lot of them away.
Now you can put your peeps uh in the freezer.
And if you eat ‘em frozen, I think they’re kind of semi-frozen.
I think that’s good.
Or roasting them because when you roast them over the fire, what happens is that sugar on the outside kind of hardens a little bit
And then it gets gooey on the inside.
Uh so maybe like peeps, maybe not, but do hope that you find some way.
to enter into the joy of the Easter season.
Because Easter tide or the Easter season
um is seven weeks.
It’s not just one day.
People think Easter is a Sunday, and then we’re done with that.
In fact, every Sunday is a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.
But Easter is marked by a seven-week celebration, which is longer than the season of Lent.
the fast is not as long as the feast.
So Lent is a time for fasting, giving up solid food, a meal, giving up something, fasting something like chocolate or
a glass of wine, whatever you find pleasurable, fasting that during the season of Lent.
But Easter’s a time to rejoice.
And with rejoicing comes feasting.
Don’t feast too much, uh, but find something uh that helps you celebrate for not just one day, but for seven weeks.
I was talking to a friend recently.
He leads a nonprofit ministry and worships in a church that doesn’t really pay attention to the church calendar.
They don’t really mark
the seasons of the liturgical calendar.
And he said, I’m I’m really learning about this.
And he was appreciating the work that I do.
I spent a lot of time
talking about the value of the Christian calendar.
He says, I’m learning these things, but it’s still new.
He said, I just I didn’t grow up as a kid uh in a church that that marked any of these seasons.
And I said, I bet um that you practiced Christmas and Easter.
Because he was saying, you know, in our church we were a Bible church.
we didn’t practice all these seasons ‘cause they’re not in the Bible.
There’s no Lent or Advent in the Bible.
And so I said, I bet you practiced Christmas and Easter.
He said, Well, yeah, there was those.
I said, Well, Christmas and Easter is not in the Bible.
Where do you think that came from?
The same ancient Christians that canonized and preserved the scriptures for us
It’s the same church that gave us these traditions of marking time around the story of Jesus.
And so Christmas and Easter is not in the Bible.
Christmas and Easter are so important on the Christian calendar because they mark the incarnation of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus
These holidays are so important that we have seasons to prepare for them.
Advent prepares us for Christmas.
Lent prepares us for Easter
And so I encouraged him and I encourage all Christians, whether you belong to a tradition
or go to a church that observes the seasons of the church calendar to enter into it.
It’s really been important for me and my spiritual formation as well as my family and my church.
And of all of the seasons and all of the holidays, there really isn’t a bigger one than Easter.
I know sometimes that Christmas feels a little bit bigger than Easter.
And Christmas is as important as Easter, but Easter has a joy that is really, really hard to describe.
And it’s important
Because Easter is celebrating the resurrection of Jesus.
And if Jesus did not rise from the dead
then nothing else in the entire Christian faith really matters.
I mean, there are people that want to cut away all the the the miracles of the Christian faith and just hone in on the moral teachings of Jesus.
But I would argue that Jesus’ moral teaching only makes sense in the context of the story of redemption that the Scripture is telling.
You you can’t separate the miracles, the miracle of creation, the miracle of Jesus birth.
The miracle of Jesus’ resurrection.
You can’t remove the miracles from the moral teachings of Jesus.
They really do belong together.
And as I think about the Easter season, not just in terms of celebration with weenie roasts and peeps and chocolate bunnies, but when I think about it theologically,
I go back year after year to N.
T.
Wright’s important book, The Resurrection of the Son of God.
Now N.T. Wright or Tom Wright, as you know, has been perhaps the most important
uh theological voice in my life.
I’ve called Tom my theological mentor for years.
Uh we have corresponded by email.
I had the opportunity uh to meet him once.
Uh but we we’ve emailed over the years and uh I’ve thanked him again and again for his influence on how I read scripture and think about the Christian life.
But I read his book
The Resurrection of the Son of God back in 2009.
It was a 2002 release, so the book’s 24 years old.
And it’s like a seven, eight hundred page theological book.
Uh, Relax.
I’m not gonna walk you through that.
Uh we walk through Fleming Rutledge’s uh The Crucifixion on six or seven episodes.
I’m not walking through Tom’s big book on resurrection.
Uh but my thoughts always go back to what I learned from him uh in that book.
Um there’s a funny story, it’s not in the book, but I’ve heard Tom in interviews
Um mention this funny encounter he had with a taxi cab driver
And I was looking up to find all the details of the story.
And it’s actually uh from a sermon he preached in 2010.
Um, he gets into a cab and well, I’ll just read to you what he said in his sermon
Tom gets in this cab, and then he writes, The taxi driver looked back at me in his mirror.
His face was a mixture of amusement and sympathy.
We were stuck in traffic, and he asked me, as they do, what I did for a living.
Ah, he said, you Church of England people
having told me he was a Roman Catholic himself, you’re still having all that trouble about women bishops, aren’t you?
I had to admit that that was indeed the case.
And then the taxicab driver says
The way I look at it is this.
If God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, all the rest is basically rock and roll.
And I have heard Tom uh tell that story and it really cracks me up because not only does it
touch back to my love for rock music and the influence of contemporary uh worship music
But it’s true, like we can argue about all sorts of doctrines.
For example, should women be bishops and pastors?
Can women speak in church?
By the way, yes, they should be pastors and bishops, and yes, they should speak of the church.
That’s another conversation for a different day.
Uh but we have all these debates in the church, but it really does boil down to some of the basics.
And that is, if if if Jesus rose from the dead, everything else is just rock and roll.
Like we’ll figure out the rest, but this is what is foundational.
And so important.
I’ve said over the years, and I I wrote about this a bit in the Resurrection Bible study, that the resurrection of Jesus
is the linchpin of our faith.
It’s what holds everything together
In the resurrection of the Son of God, Tom Wright says that the question of Jesus’ resurrection lies at the heart of Christian faith.
I like to think of it as a linchpin.
You know, linchpin is what will hold a a a trailer uh onto a vehicle of some sort, if it’s not like a you know a a hitch or like a ball.
A linchpin
will will go in like when I had a riding lawnmower, I had a pole behind trailer, and it was held to that riding lawnmower by a metal pin.
You pull the pin out and the trailer falls off.
If we remove the resurrection of Jesus, if Jesus did not rise from the dead literally, then everything else falls apart in our faith.
If the resurrection is not true, then the Christian gospel is not true.
I mean, everything hinges
On whether or not Jesus rose from the dead or not.
It’s not a secondary issue.
It’s a central historical question.
That has to be answered because without it, there is no Christian faith.
Hey friends, I want to pause this episode for just a moment to let you know that Resurrection 8 Lessons on
How God Restores Us.
The third and final book in the God in the Neighborhood Bible study series is out now.
Go to the show notes for ordering information.
And one of the things that I love about the work of Tom Wright is he wants to bridge together history and theology.
In other words, he doesn’t want Christian theology to exist in the abstract
But the story of redemption told in Scripture is one that is grounded in history, in geography.
in places with real people who lived really in history.
And in his book, Tom says that everybody knew
that what was normally meant by resurrection had not happened yet.
So during the era we call Second Temple Judaism, the time of Jesus, the first century
In the Roman world, there were lots of stories of ghosts that would come back
you know, from the dead and would appear to people.
But there was nothing in the Roman world like a dead person coming back to life in a real human form.
and talking to people.
And first century Jewish people would have been aware of the Roman ghost stories.
And of course, there was news of Jesus raising people from the dead.
Think about the raising of Lazarus in John chapter 11.
But still the understanding of physical bodily resurrection was understood to be a future event.
This had not happened yet.
And so, speaking of the story of the raising of Lazarus in John 11, Martha communicates what most first-century Jewish people believed about resurrection.
Now, not all of them believe the Sadducees, that was a group of first-century Jews that did not believe in a physical literal resurrection.
But when Jesus arrives at Bethany before he commands Lazarus to come forth out of the grave,
Jesus is talking to Martha when he first arrives in town, and Jesus says to Martha about her dead brother, You know your brother will rise again.
And then in John 11, 24, Martha responds, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.
By the time of the first century, most Jewish people, set aside the Sadducees, believed that at the end of the age
There would be a a great bodily resurrection.
So it was a future event
And they had very little imagination for a resurrection happening now.
That’s why the raising of Lazarus was such an awe
inspiring miracle.
It’s also why the disciples did not understand Jesus
When he said, I’m going to be handed over to the elders, I have to go to Jerusalem, I’ll be handed over, I’m going to be killed, and on the third day I will rise again.
For the disciples, in their mind, they are thinking like Martha.
Yeah, you’ll rise again on the last day, but what’s this third day?
It must be some metaphor.
They just didn’t understand it
Because in the Roman and Jewish world there was little understanding of present-day resurrection, a dead person coming back alive, fully embodied
Now, the Apostle Paul, who was the pioneer missionary who took the gospel
Initially outside of Jerusalem to the Gentile world, preached and proclaimed Christ crucified and Christ resurrected
And for the Apostle Paul, the resurrection was a literal historical physical event.
You can see this in First Corinthians fifteen.
And it’s important to understand Paul, who gave
direction and shape towards the early Christian movement and what we now call Christian theology.
And there are those modern skeptics.
Who would say, well, Jesus and the disciples, they never really believed that Jesus rose from the dead, that this was somehow just a metaphor.
But in the earliest forms of the Christian faith, as we see in 1 Corinthians 15, they preached Christ resurrected as a historical event.
For example, listen to what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15.
This is verses 12, 13, and 14.
Paul writes.
Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?
But if there’s no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.
And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain
It is the resurrection of Jesus as a historical event that gives substance to the Christian faith.
And, and Tom does a great job explaining this in his book, the resurrection of Jesus answers the question: why did Christianity spread in the ancient world?
In his book, Tom frames the rise of the early Christian movement as a historical phenomenon
That requires explanation.
I mean, within the first 300 years of the early church, it had become 10% of the Roman Empire.
And so this raises a an historical question.
Historians have to ask, what caused
Christianity to spread and grow.
Because in one sense it it’s a pretty silly religion.
I mean, from an ancient perspective
A religion of a crucified God who was a man who taught people to love and not to fight, to take care
of of the least of these who valued humility over ambition and self assertedness
It just doesn’t make sense for such a religion to flourish in the ancient Roman world when it was anti-imperial.
In the Roman Empire, they were proclaiming Caesar as the divine son of God.
Caesar was Lord and Savior.
And here come these Christians not playing Rome’s game, but declaring not the Caesar, but Jesus is the Son of God, the Lord and Savior.
So why did early Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean world?
Well, the earliest Christians said, because Jesus rose from the dead.
If if the disciples wanted to create a religion that they thought would bring them profit or benefit,
in society, they would have come up with something totally different than Christianity.
Paul says that the Christian message, the gospel,
is a stumbling block to the Jews.
It is foolishness to the Greeks.
It was a stumbling block because a crucified Messiah is a failed Messiah.
So for Jewish people
it it makes no sense.
And it’s it’s foolishness from a Greek perspective
And so we believe that the spread of the early Christian movement was consistent with the message they preached.
That Christ had died, that Christ is risen, and that Christ will come again
And then finally, as I reflect on the resurrection and why it brings me such joy
Is that Resurrection has given me a refocused hope.
Now I want to talk about a different book from Tom Wright.
One of the first books I read from him, I think it was maybe the second, no, it would be the third.
The third NT-Wright book that I read was Surprised by Hope.
It’s a book that is on my top five, probably, of most influential books.
Surprised by Hope by N.
T.
Wright.
And in there, Tom has a little line that he has then repeated many different times in lectures and sermons, but in Surprised by Hope, he writes.
The early Christians believed that God was going to do for the whole cosmos what he had done for Jesus at Easter.
Now he said it in lectures and sermons a little bit better, uh at least uh rhetorically, at least the way it hits me.
Uh but I’ve heard him say that what God did for Jesus on Easter
He plans to do for the whole world.
The word cosmos is a Greek word for world.
So the resurrection of Jesus, which we believe is the linchpin, the heart of Christian faith.
is also a sign.
It’s also a signpost.
It’s a prophecy of what God plans to do with the whole world
Because in raising Jesus from the dead, God’s saying, This is what I want to do with all humanity.
I think God wants to raise me from the dead, wants to raise you from the dead
And I mean that both in its metaphorical and literal sense.
That where you have died, where dreams have died, where you’ve experienced death, God wants there to be resurrection.
And I believe it in its literal sense that there is coming a future day where those who have died
in faith will rise in in new resurrected bodies.
And this is our ultimate hope.
Our future hope as Christians is not just heaven, even though the hope of heaven is good, but heaven is only temporary.
that what is coming is a resurrection or a recreation of the heavens and the earth
God wants to remake our physical bodies and God wants to remake the heavens and the earth.
And that’s our future home.
Our future home is not heaven.
Heaven is the temporary place we hang out with Jesus until that day comes when God restores all things, makes everything beautiful.
where all sad things become untrue, to quote Tolkien.
And this is a time where God will dwell with God’s people forever
And this is our our future hope.
And it’s it’s embodied.
It’s a hope for this world, not just hope for a heaven somewhere far away.
So, if our future hope is this recreation, this new creation, uh, with resurrected bodies and a new heaven and earth, then
What we do in our body now matters.
I mean, if you believe our future hope is, well, we go to heaven while God destroys the earth with fire and there’s no more earth and we just live as
spirit babies with little wings and playing harps, sitting on clouds, and i if that’s your view, then who cares what happens in our bodies now?
But if you believe that all of this is going to be recreated, then what we do in our bodies now it matters.
What we do with the earth
matters, which is why I think that we should care for the environment around us, streams and trees and farmland and green spaces
Preserving this is a part of living as resurrected people because we join in the resurrection of Jesus as pointing
towards this future hope.
So if you plant a tree or you plant a garden, you plant flowers
This is a little sign of our future hope that God’s going to restore everything and make everything beautiful.
So my hope has been refocused from just dying going to heaven.
But heaven coming to earth.
My hope is that we will experience bodily resurrection just like Jesus did
And I’ve said recently that crucifixion and resurrection are paradigms for spiritual formation.
That our spiritual pilgrimage as followers of Jesus is an ongoing cycle of crucifixion and resurrection.
In other words, we have to die to some things so that new things can be born in us.
We deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow.
Jesus.
That denying self and taking up cross speaks of crucifixion.
And then that following Jesus speaks of
New life and new things.
So I hope for you during the season of Easter that new and beautiful things are being produced in your life.
By the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead.
Well, that’s all I have for this episode.
Thank you for joining me.
Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.