Easter is a Matter of Life and Death

Photo by JF Martin on Unsplash

Let me throw some concepts at you real quick: Hot and cold, tall and short, north and south. Football teams in Gainesville, FL and winning.

What do all of these concepts have in common? They’re all polar opposites. They are words or ideas that are so diametrically opposed to one another that they are the very definitions of an antithesis.

Especially that football example. I mean…yikes.

When it comes to Easter, however, we are going to be talking about what is perhaps the single best example of an opposing pair: Life and death.

Before we get into it, I want us to stop for a second and think about the whole whirlwind of events surrounding Easter. Traditionally, people start celebrating Easter a week in advance by looking at Palm Sunday. I’ve written at length about Palm Sunday before, but I’m sure you remember it as the day when people waved palm fronds at Jesus as He triumphantly entered Jerusalem.

Palm Sunday kicks off what we often refer to as “Holy Week,” which then ramps up a bit with Maundy Thursday, the celebration of Jesus at the Last Supper. Maundy Thursday leads into Good Friday which leads into Easter Sunday.

So there was a whole cavalcade of crazy happenings around Jesus in Jerusalem that week. On Sunday, He was hailed as the conquering Messiah who would save the people from Roman rule. Thursday night, He celebrates Passover with His followers before, later that very night, He is arrested, accused, and beaten.

Early on Friday morning, Jesus is run through a laughably unjust trial as He is paraded in front of the religious leaders, Herod, and Pontius Pilate. When the grave miscarriage of justice is over with, Jesus is whipped and disfigured, all before being handed a massive wooden beam and told to carry it up a hill to HIs own death.

Imagine being one of the followers of Jesus in this moment, watching the man you’ve come to believe to be the salvation of the world dying on a cross. You knew He was the messiah. When you were in His presence, you could sense the love and power that emanated from Him in every word He spoke.

And now He’s just dead.

Sure, you’ve seen Jesus raise people from the dead before. And that was pretty crazy. But how can someone raise themself from the dead? It can’t be done! This is it!

On Friday afternoon, the sky goes dark and the earth shakes. Jesus gives up His spirit. The temple veil is torn and dead people start getting up and walking around in town. Lots of crazy things happened.

Roman officials even claim that the man they watched die was probably telling the truth about Himself.

Then comes Saturday, where nothing much happens. I can imagine that the Disciples and the other followers of Jesus are easily experiencing their darkest day right about now. We’ve all lost loved ones, we’ve all experienced some pretty harrowing times. We know what it means to despair.

And despair is certainly the only word that can even come close to explaining their emotions that Saturday.

But, as preachers are often known for saying, Sunday’s coming.

But very early on Sunday morning the women went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. They found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance.  So they went in, but they didn’t find the body of the Lord Jesus.  As they stood there puzzled, two men suddenly appeared to them, clothed in dazzling robes.

The women were terrified and bowed with their faces to the ground. Then the men asked, “Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive?  He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead! Remember what he told you back in Galilee,  that the Son of Man must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and that he would rise again on the third day.”

Then they remembered that he had said this.  So they rushed back from the tomb to tell his eleven disciples—and everyone else—what had happened.  It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and several other women who told the apostles what had happened.  But the story sounded like nonsense to the men, so they didn’t believe it.  However, Peter jumped up and ran to the tomb to look. Stooping, he peered in and saw the empty linen wrappings; then he went home again, wondering what had happened.
Luke 24:1-12 (NLT)

Like I said a moment ago. What a whirlwind! After everything that’s happened, now there are women running around screaming that Jesus has been risen from the dead.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Jesus honored some of the women who followed Him in this way, but that’s another story for another day.

“You said Billy’s not dead? Shoot! I owe that guy money!” (Photo by Bobby Mc Leod on Unsplash)

Now I would grant you that there isn’t an easy way to hear that someone you thought was dead is actually alive again. A few months ago, I wrote about a friend of mine whose death I learned about a few years after the fact. That was a gutting moment. Now I imagine the exact opposite thing happening, thinking someone was dead but finding out they aren’t.

Again, there’s no easy way to learn this information, but I think going to their tomb and finding it empty is certainly one of the more shocking ways to find out that, as Mark Twain supposedly said, the rumors of their demise were greatly exaggerated.

The part of this passage that has always stood out to me the most, though, is what the angels say in v. 5. “Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive? He isn’t here!”

Imagine that you have plans to meet a friend for lunch one day and you run to the cemetery to meet them. You just start walking around shouting, “Joe! Hey, Joe! You here?” Maybe start tapping a few headstones and asking if anyone has seen Joe.

That would be weird, right? Unless your friend is a groundskeeper at a cemetery, then why would you go looking for them there?

It makes no sense. Kinda like looking for Men’s Final Four banners in Knoxville. (This may be the last day I ever get to make that joke, so I’m gonna take advantage of that.)

What the angels are saying here in this moment is nothing short of miraculous! Jesus has been categorically shifted from death to life. We are used to movement from life to death. That’s natural. What’s really not natural is moving the opposite direction. God is reminding us here that He is in control of everything, even the seemingly immutable laws of reality that bend to His very will.

But there’s something else that we need to think about here.

The angels ask the question one way, but I want to twist it around a little bit.

Why do you seek life among the dead?

As followers of Christ, we have been given life. We have spiritual life. We have been categorically shifted from death to life.

My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Galatians 2:20 (NLT)

The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life.
John 10:10 (NLT)

Jesus came so that we might have life. These passages are just two examples from the New Testament where we see talk of life and death in direct contrast to one another. There are plenty more to choose from.

So why do we seek life in the things of death that are better left alone? We have hope in Christ, we have life in Christ. We are dead to those things.

You say, “I am allowed to do anything”—but not everything is good for you. And even though “I am allowed to do anything,” I must not become a slave to anything.  You say, “Food was made for the stomach, and the stomach for food.” (This is true, though someday God will do away with both of them.) But you can’t say that our bodies were made for sexual immorality. They were made for the Lord, and the Lord cares about our bodies.  And God will raise us from the dead by his power, just as he raised our Lord from the dead.

Don’t you realize that your bodies are actually parts of Christ? Should a man take his body, which is part of Christ, and join it to a prostitute? Never!  And don’t you realize that if a man joins himself to a prostitute, he becomes one body with her? For the Scriptures say, “The two are united into one.”  But the person who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him.

Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body.  Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body.
1 Corinthians 6:12-20 (NLT)

Now I’m not necessarily focusing on sexual sin here, but obviously the message in this passage still rings true. Especially the words at the end, reminding us that God bought us with a high price. The price that God paid for us was the death of Jesus Christ.

Imagine this for a second. Jesus is resurrected. He has died and come back to life. And He just…keeps sleeping in the tomb. That’s it.

He doesn’t go anywhere. He doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t appear to the Disciples or talk to people. He just lays around.

It’s a silly image, but I fear that many of us treat the life we’ve been given in Christ the same way. We have been raised to spiritual life so that we can live abundantly as Jesus said in John 10:10. And yet…we don’t.

“I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with God, then there was no need for Christ to die.”

— Galatians 2:21 (NLT)

I want to throw one more passage out there, and we’ve already come very close to referencing it. I posted Galatians 2:20 earlier, but the very next verse has an incredible message, too. Shocking, I know.

In Galatians 2:20, Paul talks about living an earthly life by the power of God because He has raised us to life. In Galatians 2:21, we are reminded that the grace of God is powerful and meaningful.

I know these passages are from two very different parts of scripture, but I want us to put them together for a second.

“God has bought you with a high price, so do not treat the grace of God as meaningless.”

I don’t play around with the Bible lightly, so believe me when I say that I think these two ideas go together very well. We have been bought with a high price. Jesus endured torture and brutal execution on the cross so that we could have life, so we cannot treat the grace of God as meaningless.

Earlier, I mentioned that this week is called Holy Week. There are a lot of different ideas and concepts that people have when they think of Holy Week, but the thing that always comes to my mind is pressure.

Pressure to be holy all week.

Of all weeks in the year, I am especially cognizant of my sin during Holy Week. Big sins, little sins, they all stand out a little bit harsher in my mind this week. The reality is that we can’t live perfect, holy lives. It’s not possible. Again, that’s why the grace of God matters.

But are we going to make a habit of living in the cemetery? Are we going to keep seeking life among the dead? Or are we going to get up out of the tomb and live in the power of Christ?

There’s a reason we sing so much about the cross. (Photo by il vano on Unsplash)

If you are a follower of Christ, let this be your encouragement as we go into Easter. Do not treat the grace of God as meaningless, because He has bought you with a high price. It is our responsibility to worship the Father and to share the powerful Gospel message of Jesus Christ, His death, and His resurrection that brings hope to the world.

If you are not a follower of Christ, then let this be your encouragement as we go into Easter. You don’t have to stay in the tomb, either. If you feel like you’ve been living an empty life, like you’ve been living a bland existence, then you can embrace the life that Jesus Christ wants to give you.

If you feel like nobody loves you, just remember that God paid a high price for you, so you can experience the powerful grace of Jesus Christ. That’s the message of Easter. And it really is a matter of life and death.

Even More Meaningless Games

(Photo Used With Permission)

It seems a bit too early in college football’s talking season to get this deep into such a fundamental debate, but recent events have forced my hand!

Yep. That’s right. I had no choice but to respond. There was no way I could sit on my hands and let this tragedy befall our beloved sport without offering my sincerest opinions on the matter. It was entirely unavoidable.

Starting with the 2024-25 college football season, the sport’s ultimate title will be decided with a 12-team playoff. For now.

(Shouldn’t it be a red flag that we’re already doing away with the new system before playing a single season under it?)

Expansion is utterly inevitable, I fear, as the creeping bloat of tournaments in recent years has come to show. Every professional league is adding more and more playoff spots, including the NBA where half the teams already make the playoffs at the end of the season.

Before we get into the crux of the argument, let’s set aside any illusions we might have. The real reason these championships are expanding is because it provides an added opportunity for the stakeholders to increase the size of their steaks. Or something.

The 2023 NFL playoffs averaged 38.5 million viewers per game in the leadup to the Super Bowl, and then had a staggering 120.4 million viewers for the famously unnamable event.

The most recent NBA playoffs, concluding in June 2023, piled up more than 5.4 million viewers per game. While those numbers may seem tame in comparison to the astronomical number of people watching the NFL playoffs, those numbers represent a five-year high for the Association. It’s also worth remembering that the NBA features seven-game series at (almost) every level of their postseason.

Because we really need seven games to watch a team with a losing record after 81 games get boat raced by probably one of the best basketball teams in the world.

Getting back to the matter at hand, the seven games that made up the 2023-24 College Football Playoff and the New Years Six drew approximately 15.1 million viewers per game, with a total of about 25 million for the National Championship Game alone.

If you’re pulling numbers like these, why wouldn’t you want to have even more games? Why not give yourself a few extra chances to sell those ads?

Sports are big business, and thus all the decisions being made have to follow what’s best for business.

In the short term, this approach may work. You may see television deals worth millions (billions) of dollars bringing heretofore unseen revenue into the coffers of the league offices. And the fat cats will keep getting fatter and meowing even louder.

But that doesn’t mean that these decisions are always best for the long-term health of the product…er…the sport.

I failed to mention the World Series above, and there’s a good reason for that.

Okay, so the reason is that I just skipped baseball because I only wanted three examples, but it fits the narrative now, so here we go.

Major League Baseball has been struggling to keep its viewership over the last few years, amid cheating scandals and Covid seasons and the apparently terrible attention span of those blasted Gen-Zers.

“We have a TV, but…we’re actually Mariners fans.” (Photo by Vivian Arcidiacono on Unsplash)

The 2023 World Series, which happened to be won by the “small market upstart” Texas Rangers, represented the fifth straight year of declining World Series viewership with just under 10 million viewers on average.

Executives blame the small-market teams in the Fall Classic, because everyone knows that Texans both hate baseball and that the 30 million people who live there don’t have TV.

Or it could be that the new playoff format punishes high-achieving teams and dilutes the playoff field right off the bat - pun not intended. Who wants to watch that?

The same thing tends to be true with March Madness after the first weekend. People love to see the Cinderella upsets early on, but then after a while, they prefer to see the best teams competing for the championship.

(Full disclosure, March Madness is one of those areas where the data “suggests” something without showing it conclusively. The numbers year-to-year aren’t enormously different in most cases, but there is certainly a trend.)

But maybe it doesn’t matter, right? Maybe it’ll all be fine because, after all, there will be even more meaningful games late in the college football season, right?

When there were just two teams that could play for the national championship at the end of the year, I guess the only games that mattered were the ones those teams played in. Or perhaps if a favorite lost late in the year, then that game mattered because it narrowed the field.

So basically, you had to be an undefeated team from a top-tier conference in order for your games to matter. Because undefeated teams from top-tier conferences are bulletproof.

That means that 99% of the college football games ever played have been utterly meaningless. Sorry. That’s the rule.

By that measure, USC’s 42-10 lopsided win at BYU on Sep. 18, 2004 means infinitely more than Tennessee’s riveting 30-28 victory over 11th-ranked Florida on the same day because USC won the national championship and neither Tennessee nor Florida were really in the running by the end of the season. Sorry, Vols. I don’t make the rules. I just lampoon them in very specific ways that prove my point.

Once the field expanded to four participants, however, the playoff meant more games were meaningful! Heck. There could be as many as eight teams in the hunt for the championship going into the final weekend of the season, right? That’s good television!

You know something? I take umbrage with this notion for many, many reasons.

For starters, every game matters. It matters to the fans. It matters to the players. It matters to the alumni who stake their personal pride and emotional well-being on the outcome of a contest between the world’s most freakishly athletic teenagers and young adults.

The games all matter. To claim otherwise is to devalue the sport you claim to love.

I think about all of the “meaningless” games I’ve been to over the years and I loved every single one of them. There’s no denying that Georgia is on top of the world in college football right now, no matter what those Michiga-losers would have you believe. And these games with playoff implications are exciting.

But I have also lived and died by Georgia football for more than two decades, and we were “out of the hunt” halfway through many of those seasons.

I think about the annual rivalry game against Tech. Are you telling me that nearly all of those hundred some odd contests were entirely in vain?

I will use this photo from the 2013 double-OT win over Tech every single time I get a chance to. (Photo by Larry Wynn)

The 2010 edition of “Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate” was messy and sloppy and full of ugly football. And you know what? Sending Tech home with a loss in that game was just as satisfying at 6-6 as it was in 2022 to go 12-0.

So it bothers me when people say that those games are “meaningless” because every snap of college football is dripping in tradition and meaning.

There are precious few games that I would really call “meaningless” in the history of college football. One of the easiest choices for a truly meaningless game is the 2017 Iron Bowl where Auburn defeated the top-ranked CFP team for the second time in the same season, upending Alabama 26-14.

That victory gave Auburn a spot in the SEC Championship with a potential CFP berth on the line if they could just beat Georgia for a second time in the same season.

Unfortunately, they could not. Both Georgia and Alabama would make the CFP that season and would ultimately meet in the Championship Game.

I can’t recall the outcome of that one, for some reason. Oh well. I’m sure it isn’t important. Probably just another meaningless game.

Before the CFP, Bama’s loss in the Iron Bowl would have gone down as one of the most crushing defeats in that series’ history. A previously undefeated Crimson Tide would have missed out on the conference championship game and any chance at the National Championship, and Auburn could have gloated about that forever.

Instead, the loss might have actually helped Bama, giving them a backdoor into the CFP and one less game to worry about wear and tear. And what can Auburn really gloat about when their archrival still won the title that season? (Oh. Right. That’s what happened.)

That is the definition of a meaningless game, where a loss didn’t matter at all. And it was only possible because of a playoff.

That’s not to say these kinds of allegedly meaningless games never happened before. Oklahoma once lost their conference championship game 35-7 against Kansas State and still went on to play in the BCS National Championship Game against LSU.

With a 12-team playoff starting soon, and the inevitable bloat of further expansion, you’re only going to see even more games where the outcome just doesn’t matter for one or more teams.

How do you feel about an undefeated Georgia resting starters in a rivalry game against Georgia Tech, knowing that a loss “doesn’t matter” when winning the SEC Championship Game would likely provide a first-round bye either way?

You may not be a Georgia fan, but let’s not pretend that we are the only program that could possibly see such an event in our near future.

We’ve been seeing this sort of thing going on in the NFL and other leagues for years. A team might have already locked down the first-round bye and will rest most of their starters. The game might matter if the opponent is on the verge of a playoff spot or could pick up a better seed, but there’s a very real chance that the game will have no bearing on the playoff picture.

And this kind of thing happens just about every season.

PICTURED: A royalty-free image of a man who’s final regular-season football game was a very meaningful loss to the Atlanta Falcons. (Photo by Cian Leach on Unsplash)

With an ever expanding playoff in college football, it is only a matter of time before we see this exact brand of “meaningless” game in a sport that once required excellence week in and week out.

We’ve already seen the SEC play around with decades-old schedules and rivalries in order to maximize entertainment value with late-season division games. On Georgia’s schedule, Tennessee replaced Auburn as the next-to-last SEC game of the year. Georgia and Auburn have been playing that same spot on the calendar for almost as long as the “Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry” has been in existence, but the SEC wanted a division game at the end to spice things up.

It worked like a charm in 2022, with the first ever #1 vs. #1 game going Georgia’s way in Sanford Stadium, but an expanded playoff would potentially make the move…say it with me…meaningless.

While conference games are less likely to suffer from the same fate, it is still entirely possible that a late-November SEC game will happen after one team or another has already locked up their spot in the conference title game. And with the end of divisions, it is even more likely that a late-November SEC game will have no bearing on who plays in the conference championship.

For years, people have been arguing that we need a playoff to save the sport of college football from an onslaught of meaningless games. All we’re doing is creating a miniaturized version of the NFL with four times as many teams.

College football has always thrived on being a wholly different product with more passionate fanbases, deeper regional ties, and an entirely different type of season than the NFL. What’s going to happen when the casual fan sees that the college game is no longer a separate thing from the NFL and decides to just watch the pros play?

The chase for the almighty dollar will, more often than not, lead to irreparable harm.

And what’s more, the higher the dollars, the tighter the margins. It won’t take much for the whole house of cards to come crashing down. The first hint of downturn in the sport’s popularity could spell doom for the broadcasters and everyone else who stands to lose from college football’s cash cow status.

Maybe college football’s collapse will happen quickly enough that we can actually save it.

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NOTE: The photo of Javon Bullard is from one of my media contacts. I know it sounds made up, but I have been told I can use their photos so long as I don’t credit them or their media outlet. I know. Just trust me.