“I am the resurrection.”

What do you think of when you read or hear the words “wrecking ball”?  Damage, demolition and obliteration.  One thing that wrecking balls are not is subtle.  To be subtle is to be gently shrewd, calculating, or even restrained. Interesting that while we find so many ways the Lord is described in the Bible, we never read that he is subtle or a wrecking ball.  But for many people he was a wrecking ball, yet he still possessed a masterful subtlety that frequently caught people off guard.

A couple of examples will show his deftness at this apparent contradiction.  John 11 records the illness of Lazarus, brother to Mary and Martha.  After receiving word of his illness, Jesus lingers two more days (v. 6) before going to Bethany where the family lived.  By the time Jesus arrived, Lazarus had indeed died and was already buried.  The decomposition process was underway (v. 39), Lazarus having been in the tomb for four days.  Not good.  Upon his arrival, Jesus speaks to Martha: “Your brother will rise again” (v. 23).  Martha: “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”  Jesus: “I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this?” (v. 25).  There’s the subtle wrecking ball.  Sure, Martha can believe in an end-time resurrection with all the faithful.  But here?  Now?  You’re not serious, Lord, are you?  See how this wrecking ball works, destroying small faith, stretching our theology, annihilating misconceptions of what God wants to do.  “Yes, Lord,” Martha says, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who has come into the world.”  Way to go, girl!  Your faith will soon be rewarded in a mega-way.

Or how about those two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24?  It was Easter/Resurrection Sunday, around mid-afternoon as Cleopas and probably his wife Mary set out for the 7-mile walk.  The excitement was gone, their hope dashed into a million pieces, like every other generation that had pined away for the Messiah to come.  They were not only sad and downcast; they were brokenhearted and overwhelmingly grief-stricken.  After all, they were Jews, right?  And didn’t Jews have the covenants, the Law and the promises of God?  Yes, yes and yes.  And the patriarchs? And adoption as the only people of God that he would communicate with?  And the Tabernacle and the Temple? All true.  And the prophets?  And the coming kingdom to be ruled by the Messiah?  Even the Psalter had songs of what it would be like.

And Jesus had been so credible.  Look at what he’d done: control nature, feed the poor, heal the sick, cure the demonized, even pay taxes with money from a fish!  I mean, it can’t get better than that, can it?  Even the Temple guards said of his teaching, “No man spoke like this man!”  We were so excited we wanted to make him our king right away (John 6:15).  And then when he came into Jerusalem on the donkey, we all cried “Hosanna!” meaning “save us.”  Mostly we wanted salvation from the Romans and finally turn the tables on our sorry history of being revolving servants of the Babylonians, Persians, Syrians and now Romans, by far the worst.  And it has been such a long time we’ve been waiting, Lord.

What Cleopas and Mary didn’t realize was that they, being Jews, along with the others, were part of God’s object lesson for the world.  The Jews were under the domination of Gentiles, a picture of sin’s domination over the Gentile’s.  This was an infinitely bigger foe than the “mighty” Roman Empire.  The solution required something much bigger, more drastic.  Sin requires death, and although Jesus could die for the sins of the world, he couldn’t stay dead.  That was simply impossible, inconceivable to the living God.  Not so with man.  For man, death was the end.  Thus the incredible pain and misery on the faces of the two on the road.  To them, their man had failed disastrously.  In reality, Jesus died fighting a bigger enemy. He went to the place of pain, guilt, shame and fear to suffer and conquer them all by capitulating.  In “losing,” then, he won; in “dying” he lives; in “succumbing” he succeeds.  The puny expectations of this couple exploded by the subtly of the wrecking ball.  This is how he explained to them the Scriptures “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets” (v. 27).  The left their “hearts burning within” them (v. 32). The resurrection kills small faith and sets its own standard.  It always has.  That’s God’s way.  It still is.

The resurrection turns any routine story into God’s story.  Resurrection turns the world upside down, or possibly right side up, for once.  So … when was the last time your heart burned within you?