He Came Back...Continued from page 1

The resurrected Christ goes back to, appears before, the very same rag tag group of people who so disappointed Him, misunderstood Him, forsook Him and fled into the darkness. He returns to His betrayers. He returns to us.

It would have been news enough that Christ had died, but the good news was that He died for us.

It would have been news enough that Christ rose from the dead, but the good news was that He rose for us.

That first Easter, nobody actually saw Jesus rise from the dead. They saw Him afterwards. They didn’t appear to Him; He appeared to them. Us. In the Bible, the “proof” of the resurrection is not the absence of Jesus’ body from the tomb; it’s the presence of Jesus to His followers. The message of the resurrection is not first, “Though we die, we shall one day return to life.” It is, “Though we were dead, Jesus returned to us.”

If it was difficult to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; it must have been almost impossible to believe that He was raised and returned to us. The result of Easter, the product of the Resurrection of Christ is the church -- a community of people with nothing more to convene us than that the risen Christ came back to us. That’s our only claim, our only hope.

Community is a choice that we make, a choice to serve, to love, a choice to put up with one another. Easter is a reminder that the Christian community, the church, is a choice that the risen Christ has made to come back to us.

I go to churches where they have a “Seeker Service” on Sunday mornings. Sometimes they have a “Seeker Service” on Saturday night. What’s a Seeker Service? It’s worship trimmed to the limitations of those who don’t know much about church, where the music is all singable, and the ideas are understandable. It’s designed for people who are “seeking” something better in their lives.

Well, that’s fine. The church should reach out to people who are seeking something better in their lives. Trouble is, that’s not the way the Bible depicts us. Scripture is not a story about how we kept seeking God. It’s a story about how God keeps -- despite us -- seeking us!

On Easter, and in the days afterward, when the risen Christ showed up among us while we were at work out in Galilee -- when He “appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, then to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all . . . he appeared also” to the great persecutor and murderer of the church named Paul -- the risen Christ was only doing what the crucified Jesus always did: He came back to us.

“Show us what God looks like,” we demanded of Jesus. God? God is the shepherd who doesn’t just sit back and wait for the lost sheep to head back home. God goes out, risks everything, beats the bushes night and day, and finds that lost sheep!