The life of the mind is a complex thing.
“What are you thinking about?” my wife often asks me, catching me in a self-induced trance.
The life of the mind can have you sitting across from someone physically but worlds apart in reality.
Your thoughts can make you feel isolated in a crowded room. Troubling thoughts can crowd your mind when you are alone.
The life of the mind can make you feel like you are living in a villa by the beach, or as if someone is torturing you in prison (Prov. 13:12, 14:30, 15:13).
Guilt, fear, anxiety, shame, grief, and deception prey on unguarded thoughts like hyenas circling an abandoned carcass.
All this is true, in the normal course of life, in the natural state of the mind.
When physical complications further weaken our minds, the darkness is deeper, the sorrow is stronger, and hope feels further away.
The Life of the Mind Before Easter
What was the life of the mind like for the disciples the night before Easter?
How do you grieve the death of the person who raised Lazarus from the dead? How do you cope with the shattered expectations of a Messiah, crucified in disgrace? What do you do when you fear for your life, with no miracle worker to save you? How do you forgive yourself for breaking your promises of loyalty until death?
Where do you go with no one left to lead you?
The life of the mind is most complex when it is full of unanswered or even unanswerable questions.
Imagine the heavy hearts that walked to the tomb on the first day of the week, clinging to some sense of normalcy by taking the spices they prepared to the tomb, asking one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” (Mark. 16:2)
Then an angel announced what Christians all over the world will speak to each other today: “He is risen” (Mark 16:6).
What could the resurrection of Jesus Christ do for the life of the mind today?
Easter Cures Materialistic Myopia
In the reality of quick commerce, impulse buying, and emotional spending, too many of us are trying to buy our pain away.
As we focus on tiny thumbnails on small screens, our world becomes smaller and our horizon for the future shrinks to the next 10-minute delivery.
The resurrection broadens our horizons and stretches our imagination to the length and breadth of eternity.
It trains our hearts to find satisfaction in his love; not in the love of material things. It teaches our hearts to prize delayed gratification and makes us want to want everything differently (Col. 3:1-2, Matt. 6:19-20, 1 Pet. 1:3-4).
It Heals Learned Helplessness
When people get stuck in cycles of temptation, sin, guilt, shame, suffering, or injustice, it can lead them to internalise a private narrative of powerlessness, “Nothing will ever change.”
“He is risen” announces that the one thing we thought could never change has changed completely, forever.
Resilient happiness comes from the presence of the risen Christ within and stands firm under pressure from without.
The tomb is buried. The grave is dead. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.
If God’s power can raise Jesus from the dead, it can raise you from the pit of despair. It can move you to call on his name, ask for help from his people, persevere in trials with hope, and learn to trust and obey his Word (2 Cor. 3:17-18, Rom. 12:1-2).
It Knits Again, Torn Spirits
The sting of death is no small thing. It can tear your heart apart. It can leave you wondering if your soul can truly be whole again, on this side of eternity?
But the resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s power at work in human history. It is no sentimental balm for the soul, wishful thinking for the fearful, or merely a self-soothing song for troubled spirits.
If Christ is risen, death is reduced to a short nap, and Easter means one day we will all wake up, as if from a bad dream (Matt. 9:24).
God’s grace can teach us to speak to ourselves in the language of his Word and strengthen us to quieten ourselves to hear the testimony of his Spirit to our hearts that we are children of God (Rom. 8:16).
It Reframes Happiness
In his book Everything is Never Enough, Bobby Jameson speaks of resilient happiness.
Such happiness is more than happiness; it is not happiness out of happenstance, or the hope of comfort by the satisfaction of change in circumstance.
Resilient happiness comes from the presence of the risen Christ within and stands firm under pressure from without.
Unlike the goodness we seek from achieving our goals, this is the sort of happiness that follows us all the days of our lives as we dwell in the presence of the risen Christ (Ps. 23:6).
It Washes the Unwashable Stain
Guilt is not a feeling. Plenty of people may not feel guilty, but they stand under guilt. Others feel guilty all the time, though they have been cleared of it.
Guilt is the standing judgment over the human condition.
Such language of standing judgment feels archaic. Yet we live in the age of erratic unsound judgments based on appearance, found on social media, where every day, new sins are named, guilt is conferred, and cold judgment is passed, with no mercy to be found.
In these days of evil, our strength for today comes from confidence in tomorrow.
In Christ, God’s judgment is satisfied by his mercy.
The angel’s announcement, “He is risen” follows the victorious announcement of Christ on the cross, “It is finished.”
As many have said, “If the cross is the payment for our sin, the resurrection is the receipt.”
It is the proof of the redemption of his people, which cancels the record of the debt that stood against us with its legal demands (Col. 2:13-15).
It Ignites the Imagination
Anxiety is a misuse of God’s gift of imagination. It feeds on lies, makes bold claims of false prophecies, and destabilises all that is good and holy.
The first time the women at the tomb heard the words, “He is risen,” it was God’s summons to all human beings to a new imagination.
The old has gone. The new has come.
In these days of evil, our strength for today comes from confidence in tomorrow (Eph. 5:15-16). We live on borrowed hope from eternity to come, guaranteed against the riches of the resurrection of Jesus Christ in history gone by (2 Cor. 4:16-18).
There is not a day that goes by that I do not think of the new creation. Every troubling day, my comfort is this: I am nearer to seeing Jesus today than I was yesterday.
Christ is the firstfruits of the resurrection. He is a preview of all that is to come. The resurrection of Christ is God’s promise that what happened to Jesus will happen to all who are in Jesus (1 Cor. 15:23, Rev. 21:1-4).
