Editor’s note: Jesus emerged from the tomb on Easter long ago, and in honor of that wonder we’re republishing seven Easter essays written over the past two decades by WORLD editor in chief Marvin Olasky.

Cover-up, communication, cliffhanger, crime (1997)

Journalists generally treat the Christendom chunk of American society as terra incognita. Many reporters, sadly, have little interest in exploration. But for those who may have a few minutes to listen, here’s a quick way to explain what Christians believe, in terms any journalist should be able to understand: cover-up, communication, cliffhanger, and crime.

The cover-up: We see all around us evidence that the world was intelligently designed. None of us has enough faith to believe that everything is the product of time-plus-chance. Nevertheless, we ignore the giant headlines in the sky that proclaim: There Is a Creator. We also ignore the deep-throated whispering in our own brain: There is a Creator. That cover-up is bigger than Watergate, Whitewater, and all the other scandals put together.

The communication: It would be strange if the Creator who gave man the ability to talk and listen and read would not communicate with his desperately needy creatures. An inquiring mind would expect God to provide a Bible of some kind, and one that would last. Forget the ancient myths of nations that died out (where are Hittite scriptures now?) and there are only three main candidate religions, all 2 millennia or more old: Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judeo-Christianity. Add Islam, and then suggest to reporters that they check out the scriptures of the Final Four for themselves.

The cliffhanger: Journalists—if God is opening their hearts—will be moved by the Old Testament’s powerful majesty. But its ending leaves many questions hanging. For example, did God set up the elaborate sacrificial system, and then let it disappear in A.D. 70, with nothing to take its place? Since God was not content to leave us twisting slowly in the wind, the Old Testament’s sequel answers that question wonderfully—for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

The crime: The New Testament story of an innocent man judicially murdered is big news. Other elements of the story: a brilliant and obviously sane man claiming to be the Son of God, and then suffering an execution even more gruesome (because more drawn-out) than partial-birth abortion. And don’t forget the most astounding news: After that man’s corpse is wrapped in a burial cloth and placed in a police-secured tomb, many reliable sources report that He rose from the dead, and that they walked, talked, and ate with Him.

Every journalist can appreciate a sensational story like that. Some may listen thoughtfully to the news that God came to earth to suffer with us and die for us. God’s grace determines which journalists do become Christians. But we can broadcast the Easter story to one and all, with confidence that it’s a story worth reporting.

Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ, and amazing love (1998)

Two famous deaths around 2,000 years ago occurred during this March-April time of year. On March 15 (the Ides of March) in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar was assassinated. In about A.D. 30, Jesus Christ was crucified on a day now remembered as Good Friday.

Julius Caesar died badly with a critical knife wound administered by his close friend. Brutus used illegitimate means, but he was right to oppose Caesar’s plan to make himself dictator, kaiser, czar. Mark Anthony, according to Shakespeare’s drama, was a highly successful spin merchant who turned a crowd into a mob bent on revenging Caesar’s death, but the J.C. he eulogized was not a martyr to any cause greater than his own ambition.

Jesus Christ, on the other hand, died well. Not only did He live in perfect righteousness and die in perfect humility, but on Easter we will once again celebrate the way His death led to new life as He rose from the grave. The wonderful hymn “And Can It Be” has it right: “And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior’s blood? Died he for me, who caused his pain? For me, who him to death pursued? Amazing love! How can it be that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?”

Christ’s death was the ultimate in perfection—but we should remember that His last hours on this earth, before the Resurrection, were the ultimate in pain. Others who died well also died painfully. In Chapter 7 of Acts, Stephen, “full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” Then he was stoned, and as the big rocks hit him his final words were, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

Martyrdom is one form of dying well, although not peacefully. We need to be willing to follow in Christ’s, and Stephen’s, steps—but our prayer can still be that we might die at home after a long life, as Genesis patriarchs did. Abraham “breathed his last and died at a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people.” Isaac “breathed his last and died and was gathered to his people, old and full of days.”

Ideally, we can even die at home surrounded by our children, having given them our faithful and kind last words. It’s worth noting, however, that the ideal familial death depicted in some 19th-century popular novels was biblically rare. Biblical writers were honest, not smarmy, and they showed how many families of saints of old were what today we might call dysfunctional. Jacob had tough but true things to say about his sinful sons, in their presence. Three of David’s oldest sons were not around for his death because they had majored in rape, murder, and dad-despising rebellion.

Other good deaths were marked not so much by closeness to family as closeness to God. When Moses was 120 years old, God would not let him enter the Promised Land because at one point “you did not treat me as holy in the midst of the people of Israel.” But God did show him the entire land from a mountaintop, and then the Lord Himself buried Moses. That scene is tender. Joshua lived to 110, and he had the pleasure of giving a farewell address to the people he had led into Israel and hearing them three times affirm, “We will serve the LORD.”

To die, for Christ’s sake, surrounded by God-hating enemies, or to die, through Christ’s kindness, amid loving family members—both can be good deaths. The bad kind of death is Julius Caesar’s, and there are many examples in Scripture of despairing, Ides of March deaths: See Judas, hanging and disemboweling himself, or Saul, turning to a witch and then, grievously wounded, with his three sons dead in the battle, pleading for his armor-bearer to kill him. The bad deaths go from A to Z, from Abimelech and Absalom to Zimri. But the examples of dying well are those I come back to as Easter approaches.

A popular saying of a culture that veers away from God is, “Living well is the best revenge.” No, dying well is the best lesson of God’s grace. Blessed indeed are those who can say, as death approaches, words of the fifth verse of “And Can It Be”: “No condemnation now I dread; Jesus, and all in him, is mine! Alive in him, my living Head, and clothed in righteousness divine, bold I approach th’eternal throne, and claim the crown, through Christ my own.”

Ode to basketball, baseball, and Easter grace unearned (2002)

This year brings a true harmonic convergence: Easter, the NCAA basketball championship game, and the opening of the major league baseball season, all coming the last day of March or the first day of April. Let’s discuss those three holidays in ascending order of significance.

The NCAA men’s roundball tournament is often full of improbable upsets early on and apparent inevitability toward the end, as the Roman legions of Duke, Kansas, or another powerhouse grind down opponents. After the last game comes the television playing of basketball’s signature tune, “One Shining Moment.” We can muse on teams achieving transient glory, then disappearing, and one more year of life gone. “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field,” Isaiah tells us in his 40th chapter.

Ah, but the beginning of the major league baseball season beckons. I first met Boston’s Fenway Park, an old urban ballpark with cement all around, when I was 10 years old, in 1960. Coming out of an entryway tunnel to overlook the field, I was dazzled by bright sunlight on an enormous patch of green. To continue in Isaiah, “The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the LORD blows on it”—but it is beautiful while it lasts.

The third of our converging holidays, one that really is a holy day, commemorates what happened nearly 2,000 years ago, after a man who had said He was permanent was proven on a Friday not to be—proven, that is, to the satisfaction of a mob that jeered Him for His purported overreach. But the mob was wrong. Astounded eyewitnesses 2,000 years ago learned that this man, Jesus Christ, is permanent, the firstborn of many to be resurrected. Only if we follow Him are we not grass.

Bridging Easter and Passover calls for grace and patience (2007)

At Passover/Easter I think a lot about Christ’s sacrifice but also the state of Jewish-Christian relations. That’s a subject near and dear to me since I’m a Jewish Christian—and it’s a particularly good topic for discussion this year because a good new book examines aspects of it.

The Christian and the Pharisee (FaithWords, 2006) features a thoughtful exchange of letters between evangelical pastor R.T. Kendall and Jewish rabbi David Rosen. Note: “Pharisee” is an honorable descriptive in Judaism, and Rosen ably defends the Pharisee-led Judaism that developed around the time of Jesus and has been the Orthodox standard for 2,000 years.

Kendall is particularly good at pointing out the differences between relying on faith and on works. For example, he notes that “since the covenant with Abraham—which was ratified by his faith—was in operation when the Law was given, this means that belief is prior to behavior.” He then summarizes how this leads to a difference between Rosen and himself: “You say a person is a sinner because he sins; I say he sins because he was already a sinner … his heart was prone to sin from birth.”

Rosen’s responses are so irenic that Kendall asks him why he does not become a Christian. Rosen graciously turns down the invitation to join hundreds of brilliant rabbis who have converted over the years, but in doing so praises scholars like Rabbi Moses Rivkes, who “in the seventeenth century affirmed the unique relationship between Christianity and Judaism,” and Rabbi Jacob Emden a little later, who called Christianity “a church for the sake of heaven, of lasting validity.”

Rosen writes, “I often echo the words of the late brilliant Orthodox Jewish scholar David Flusser who declared that when the Messiah arrives (tomorrow, we pray!), he will approach him with his Christian friends and say, ‘Excuse me, sir, have you been here before?’ And if he responds affirmatively we will know that Christians were right all along!”

I pray that others among the people I was born into would at least echo those words of uncertainty, instead of calling down curses on those who come to think independently. Given the high incidence of atheism among ethnic Jews, shouldn’t there be rejoicing rather than sadness when one turns from a God-hater to a Bible-reader, even if that reading includes not only the Hebrew Scriptures but the New Testament?

We can be certain that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Paul will be merciful. Will we be as well? Let’s pray that more Jews will be like Rabbi Rosen and that many through God’s grace will cross over. Let’s also pray that all who have already received the blessing of grace through Christ will be kind and patient on the model of Pastor Kendall.

Easter battle: Auditorium vs. glass cube (2010)

Culture wars are not new. New York City’s Fifth Avenue had an in-your-face one in the 1870s. Another commenced in the 1930s. A third, now underway, was in evidence on Easter this year.

In the mid-19th century, New York’s leading abortionist, Madame Restell, built a five-story mansion at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street. She relished her grand hall lined with marble and mirrors, immense dining rooms and parlors furnished in bronze and gold, numerous guest bedrooms and servants’ quarters, and a billiards room and dancing hall complete with piano.

Meanwhile, 2 million immigrants from Ireland were flowing into America from 1845 to 1860, mostly through New York. Many became upwardly mobile, but perhaps 50,000 Irish prostitutes worked the streets and sometimes had abortions. As babies died, priests urged life, and one block south of Restell’s home, the neo-Gothic cathedral known as St. Patrick’s (seating capacity: 2,200) rose.

In 1878, Madame Restell committed suicide. In 1879, St. Patrick’s held its first official service. The cathedral dominated its stretch of midtown Manhattan until the 1930s, which is when John D. Rockefeller Jr. undertook the largest private building project in modern times: 14 buildings (8 million square feet!) spread over 22 acres directly across Fifth Avenue from St. Pat’s.

Ever since then, the tallest building, 70 floors high, has cast an afternoon shadow over the cathedral. Rockefeller Center has housed media giants like NBC and Time-Life, industrial giants like General Electric and Exxon, and financial giants like Bank of America and Lehman Brothers.

At ground level the face-off has also been apparent: A 2-ton statue of Atlas, the god in Greek mythology who carries the heavens upon his shoulders, faces the doors of St. Patrick’s. What holds up the world—the economic and technological power housed in the skyscraper, or the faith of the cross?

Most people don’t contemplate such questions, and here’s where Fifth Avenue itself comes in. Through much of the 20th century, the Avenue every Easter was where the well-to-do strolled in fashionable clothes and elaborate bonnets. The informal parades garnered criticism—Was Easter extravagance trumping frugality?—but Irving Berlin included a song, “Easter Parade,” in a Broadway revue, and Bing Crosby crooned it into a standard.

Just before Easter noon on the Avenue this year, Indians boom-boxed their country’s undulating music and Andeans played their pipes. But in the neutral zone between Atlas and St. Patrick’s, the dominant music was still a recording of Bing: “I could write a sonnet about your Easter bonnet, and of the girl I’m taking to the Easter Parade.”

And yet, in the 21st century, much has changed. This Easter the mixture of refinement and ostentation that defined earlier parades was gone. Many women wore flowery hats, but men on display were less Hello, Dolly! and more Salvador Dali dada: They wore 3-foot-high apple blossom branches, or tuxedo coats with shorts, or multi-­colored bushy beards accompanied by white dresses.

I wondered about the absence of the young: On a perfect-weathered day, sunny and 70, why were 90 percent or more of the strollers over 40? Where were the twentysomethings who still flock to Manhattan with the “Empire State of Mind”—There’s nothing you can’t do—limned by Alicia Keys?

I had seen some of them already on Easter morning, at Redeemer’s packed first church service in the Hunter College auditorium (seating capacity: 2,079). The young filled two more services there, along with three at smaller venues on Manhattan’s west side. But I saw many other twentysomethings lined up to enter a glass cube: the above-ground part of Apple’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th.

Signs advertised “a magical and revolutionary product.” This was the weekend iPads went on sale, and I couldn’t make out the soft rock background music because the buzz—a thousand young people offering excited worship—was so loud. Will the Easter battle for the future feature not the cathedral and the statue, but the auditorium and the glass cube?

Maybe, but here’s an O. Henry twist to this column: Will those latter two form an alliance against the Kaabah, an ancient granite cube in Mecca that is the center of the Muslim world? The cathedral and the skyscraper won World War II. What can the auditorium and the glass cube do?

So great a brightness (2011)

Easter/Passover is when books and articles about Christian-Jewish dialogue emerge, so it’s a good time to recommend Jean-Claude Schmitt’s The Conversion of Herman the Jew (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), a scholarly examination of whether some Jews voluntarily became Christians in medieval times.

Some background: A 12th-century autobiography known as the Opusculum and written by a German Jew known as “Herman,” who later became an ordained priest, has become the subject of academic debate. Israeli professor Avrom Saltman calls it “a work of fiction,” but German professor Friedrich Lotter is refuting Saltman’s argument and saying Saltman is biased because he refuses to admit that Jews could convert voluntarily.

Jean-Claude Schmitt does not come to a clear conclusion but lets us read for ourselves the whole text. The critical question, as Schmitt notes, is whether some Jews in medieval times “abandoned the faith of their ancestors consciously and without the usual physical threat.” My sense is, of course, to say they could not willingly convert defames the Holy Spirit.

The highlight in the converted Herman’s autobiography is when, after pages of intellectual arguments, he notes how “so great a brightness shone suddenly in my heart that it entirely chased away the shadows of all former doubt and ignorance.” Yes, that’s how it works, then and now, through God’s grace to both Greeks and Jews.

Not a tucked-in-tight religion (2011)

“Could you remind me how the Trinity works? And could you explain to me again this idea of grace?” One diligent student had no problem grasping Islam. She had no problem understanding religions based on a concept of exchange—do something for a god and he’ll do something for you. But she was legitimately confused about Christianity: “The Quran is simple. Why is Christianity complicated?”

April is not the cruelest month when it includes Easter. It’s great to read the Bible on mornings that are becoming warmer. I remember good evenings putting my children to bed with Sylvia Plath’s The Bed Book, which praises many fanciful kinds of sleeping areas but condemns one: the “white little / Tucked-in-tight little / Nighty-night little / Turn-out-the-light little / Bed.”

We could assess religions the same way: Tucked-in-tight religions are too symmetrical to be true. Take the smooth explanations at the website everymuslim.com. We’re told that “Almighty Allah, when depriving a person of a certain ability or gift, compensates him for it, by bestowing upon him/her another gift.” For example, “People who are deprived of sight have very sensitive ears.”

So it all makes sense: No sight, no sweat, Allah compensates. Hinduism’s doctrine of karma is also clear: If you’re blind in this life, it may be because you broke someone’s glasses or didn’t give money to a sightless beggar in the last one.

Many Jews 2,000 years ago desired such clarity. Some asked Jesus to choose between two logical possibilities: Was a man blind because he sinned or because his parents sinned? But in Chapter 9 of the Gospel according to John, Jesus explains, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

How are those works displayed? Maybe a miracle gives sight to the blind man. Maybe a miracle occurs in other people, as they abandon natural selfishness and sacrifice to help a person in need. Sometimes we’re stuck with mystery. Dorothy Sayers called Christianity the only religion that gives value to suffering—whether physical or spiritual—by affirming its reality and the opportunity to wrench some good out of it.

It would be great to understand mystery, but 19th-century pastor Charles Spurgeon put it rightly: “Providence is wonderfully intricate. Ah! You want always to see through Providence, do you not? You never will, I assure you. You have not eyes good enough. You want to see what good that affliction was to you; you must believe it. You want to see how it can bring good to the soul; you may be enabled in a little time, but you cannot see it now; you must believe it.”

Spurgeon concluded that we should “honor God by trusting him.” But why? We might say, “Because He’s God,” and that’s true—but Christianity does better than that. Christianity tells us that God saw our suffering and suffered with us and for us. Christianity tells us what man-made religions like Islam or Hinduism do not: That at a specific historical moment God experienced intimately torture, abandonment, overwhelming loss, and unjust death.

We’re sometimes told the Bible is our instruction manual for Planet Earth—but doesn’t that make it seem like the Quran? If you’re looking for a tucked-in-tight religion, Islam will do. But if you want more than a series of statements and more than a book of rules about what we should and should not do, then read the Bible and understand it as a story of what God did for us. Christ is risen. He is risen, indeed.