Saturday
Saturday
A Dead Christ?
But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.
Acts 2:24
The burial of Jesus is part of the gospel, as we saw yesterday, because it affirms both the reality of his death and the bodily nature of his resurrection. We must therefore hold fast to these truths. At the same time, we must also insist that the Christ we worship is not the dead and buried Christ but the Christ who is resurrected and alive. Yet even some professing Christians seem to believe in a Jesus who is more dead than alive.
As an illustration of this, I allude to the thesis developed by Dr. John Mackay in his famous book entitled The Other Spanish Christ. Mackay spent twenty years as a missionary in Peru and later became a distinguished president of Princeton Theological Seminary. In his book he retold the terrible story of the Spanish conquistadors who vanquished and colonized Latin America’s native people by brute force at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The picture of Jesus that Spanish Catholicism introduced into the continent was a figure of tragedy. Of one particular picture, Mackay wrote, “He is dead for ever…. This Christ … does not rise again.”
It is surely very striking that about fifty years after John Mackay was in Peru, the late Henri Nouwen visited it. Both men—the Presbyterian missionary and the Roman Catholic priest—came to the same conclusion. Nouwen wrote in his diary about Peruvian Catholicism:
Nowhere did I see a sign of the resurrection, nowhere was I reminded of the truth that Christ overcame sin and death, and rose victorious from the grave. All was Good Friday. Easter was absent…. The nearly exclusive emphasis on the tortured body of Christ strikes me as a perversion of the Good News into a morbid story that intimidates … people, but does not liberate them.1
John Mackay and Henri Nouwen were surely right. The good news is that Christ crucified is now risen. Hallelujah!
For further reading: Acts 2:22–32