Makings Of A Better ‘Super Sunday’
Today, Easter Sunday, more people will be in church than watched the Super Bowl football game. According to the Princeton Religion Research Center’s latest figures, about 170 million Americans now attend church on Easter. According to the Nielsen ratings, 128.9 million watched the last Super Bowl on the Fox network.
Unlike Christmas, the merchandisers have not yet succeeded in eclipsing Easter. Santa Claus, the semi-god of a materialistic, self-centered age, diverts attention from the borrowed manger and the One who was placed in it. The Easter Bunny has not had the same impact on history’s most significant event. That’s because it is more difficult to overlook a grown man who has been dead for three days and returns to life than it is to ignore a baby.
Easter represents a seminal event in which there are only two choices. It is either the truth or it is a lie. There is no third choice on this one. Unfortunately, those who don’t believe in Easter’s central message require more “proof” than the words of those who testify to the event. Those witnesses saw Him die and be buried. Those same witnesses later saw Him alive.
The implications are astounding and compelling. If it is true, it changes everything, from the way we run our national life to the way we order our personal lives. If it is not true, nothing matters because, as the late Carl Sagan believed, we then cease to exist.
Rev. Bill Hybels, one of President Bill Clinton’s pastor-friends, says our demands for absolute proof about things relating to God, such as the resurrection, are unreasonable. In his new book, “The God You’re Looking For,” Hybels writes, “Even in a trial that could speak life or death to the defendant, there isn’t a single judge in this country who would ask a jury for absolute certainty. Our forefathers decided that to expect enough evidence in a trial to convince all the jurors beyond any doubt is as unreasonable as it is unrealistic. Life just doesn’t work that way.”
There seems to be a stirring in the land. When Newsweek magazine does a credible (for it) cover story on prayer and treats the subject as something other than the equivalent of witchcraft, when ABC News hires a full-time religion correspondent, when CBS’ “Touched By An Angel” consistently finishes in the top 10 and often in the top five television programs, and when God is featured on the cover of TV Guide, it suggests that the trends of doubt, cynicism and unbelief may have run their course.
Perhaps it is because everything has been tried by all political and social persuasions and nothing works. So, increasing numbers of Americans are beginning to re-examine what seemed to work for many in previous generations.
Former Watergate figure Charles Colson tells a story about why that scandal proves the resurrection. He notes that it took only 10 days after John Dean told Richard Nixon there was a “cancer growing on your presidency” before the first of the conspirators began copping pleas with the special prosecutor.
Colson recalls that he and his colleagues were men of power who could order people around and get military planes to fly them anywhere. Yet, they could not hold a conspiracy together for more than a few days.
He then recalls Jesus’ disciples. These were men with no power. They were attacked by religious and political leaders in an occupied land. They had no money or political influence. Yet every one went to his death, all but one a martyr’s death, without recanting his testimony that Jesus was who he claimed to be. Human nature, says Colson, should have forced at least one to recant if he thought he was dying for a lie. Unless, of course, all of the events of those days were true.
Considering Easter and its central message puts politics, material things and the rest of what occupies most of our time in greater perspective, because, if it is true, it should get us more excited than a Super Bowl game. If the real Easter story is true, then Easter is the real Super Sunday.
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