Top 6 Mistakes to Avoid when Preaching on Easter

“Twicers” show up (those who attend church on Christmas and Easter) along with regular congregants. Relatives and neighbours might come along. People new to town might visit. Here are the main mistakes to avoid in addressing one of your most diverse audiences of the year.

We’ll go right to content in this post. There is lots to say about how to make the service seeker-friendly while also ministering to the deep needs of the most serious believers, and lots to say about good speaking style: tone of voice, pitch of humour, types of anecdotes, references to current events, and the like.

Those important aspects of preaching need to take second place, however, to the message you have to deliver. So let’s look at Good Friday and then Easter Sunday, with three mistakes to avoid in each case.

Good Friday

1. Don’t avoid the suffering.

We live in a strange era regarding the confrontation of physical pain. Video games and movies have never been more graphic regarding what a previous generation would have called “insults to the human body”—from war wounds to torture scenes to the whole genre of body horror.

At the same time, most of us are nicely insulated from actual injury and death. Ambulances come and whisk away victims to hospitals—or morgues. Meat processing plants in remote regions turn animals into cleanly wrapped food to drop in the fryer or plunk on the grill. And discussing even the typical traumas of childbirth is restricted to close friends and family members.

Jesus did not meet a quick and sanitary end, however. Not for him a guillotine or rifle shot. Putting aside the personal controversies surrounding director Mel Gibson, his Passion of the Christ portrays its subject realistically: not only in the copious blood, but in the relentless and extended scenes of soldierly mistreatment and then the crucifixion itself. Jesus suffered a lot, and he suffered for a long time. And it matters that he did.

Jeremy Ward, physiologist at King’s College London, spoke to The Guardian about the rigours of crucifixion:

Someone nailed to a crucifix with their arms stretched out on either side could expect to live for no more than 24 hours. Seven-inch nails would be driven through the wrists so that the bones there could support the body's weight. The nail would sever the median nerve, which not only caused immense pain but would have paralysed the victim's hands.

The feet were nailed to the upright part of the crucifix, so that the knees were bent at around 45 degrees. To speed death, executioners would often break the legs of their victims to give no chance of using their thigh muscles as support. It was probably unnecessary, as their strength would not have lasted more than a few minutes even if they were unharmed.

Once the legs gave out, the weight would be transferred to the arms, gradually dragging the shoulders from their sockets. The elbows and wrists would follow a few minutes later; by now, the arms would be six or seven inches longer. The victim would have no choice but to bear his weight on his chest. He would immediately have trouble breathing as the weight caused the rib cage to lift up and force him into an almost perpetual state of inhalation.

Suffocation would usually follow, but the relief of death could also arrive in other ways. "The resultant lack of oxygen in the blood would cause damage to tissues and blood vessels, allowing fluid to diffuse out of the blood into tissues, including the lungs and the sac around the heart," says Ward.

This would make the lungs stiffer and make breathing even more difficult, and the pressure around the heart would impair its pumping. [A pulmonary embolism or heart attack might then follow.]

To be clear, this is one expert’s view. A scholarly article in the Journal of the Royal Medical Society lists no fewer than ten (overlapping) theories of how people died on crosses, and a more recent article focuses on Jesus’ death in particular.

Christian preachers must also help congregations see that the physical suffering evident in the crucifixion—and preceded by a beating from the Roman soldiers—is not only terrible in itself, but a sign of what else Jesus was suffering: abandonment by his friends, scorn from his enemies, cynical injustice from the authorities, abuse from the ignorant, shame before his people.

All of this psychological pain would then have been amplified unimaginably by the spiritual burden of atoning for the world's sins: as if Jesus were to pull down on himself the mountain of human wretchedness, an avalanche of ugly, stupid, cruel, and pointless sin.

With this dark vision placed before us, the preacher nonetheless should avoid any morbid fascination with the particular agonies of crucifixion. For a mixed congregation on a Good Friday, a little detail goes a long way.

We must notice, however, that Jesus’ suffering before his death receives extended attention in the four gospels, while his actual death is mentioned only briefly. Jesus’ suffering matters right along with his eventual death—and that matters theologically, as we will see. For now, the mistake to be avoided is the understandable, but un-Biblical, urge to euphemize or even just skip lightly past Jesus’ misery.

2. Don’t assume people understand the point of crucifixion.

What do your people need to know that ancient people seeing Jesus on the Cross would have known?

At a minimum, audiences today need to understand that crucifixion was primarily a means of propaganda, a form of state terrorism. The Romans used it to tell subject peoples to get in line and stay in line—or else this.

Crucifixion was so powerful a message because it was not primarily a means of execution, but of torture—and public torture. Imagine the victim pushing up and down, struggling to breathe as his nervous system screams. This grotesque dance of death would go on for hours.

The point was as simple as it was ruthless. Do not challenge the powers. Do not disturb the pax Romana. Caesar is Lord, Rome rules, and you must submit.

Rome concluded the so-called Spartacus revolt of 71 BC by crucifying 6000 rebels up and down the Appian Way, the main road into the city. “This is what Rome does to troublemakers. Don’t be one.” By Jesus’ day, everyone in the Roman Empire would have gotten the terrifying message.

Make clear to your people, then, that the Cross is about shame, about being put in your (small, subservient) place. This fundamental implication of crucifixion is at the heart of Paul’s remark that a crucified God is conceptually absurd to the Gentiles of the Roman world and deeply offensive to the Jews (I Corinthians 1:22–24).

Crucifixion is not a noble death, but the death of a mouse being toyed with by a cat. Crucifixion is for losers. Don’t be one.

3. Don't assume understanding of the atonement.

It has become common even in evangelical seminaries and churches to downplay substitutionary atonement as the heart of what God is doing on the Cross. Other so-called theories of atonement are favoured instead.

“Christ acts as an inspiring example of dedication to the Kingdom of God,” is one alternative going back at least as far as Peter Abelard in the high middle ages, although Christ allowing himself to be captured, humiliated, and killed doesn’t seem very inspiring—if you deny substitutionary atonement.

“Christ is offering the world a demonstration of God’s love,” say some, although how Christ is doing anything to improve my situation, or anyone’s situation, by getting himself crucified isn’t obvious—if you deny substitutionary atonement.

“Christ is triumphing over our spiritual enemies,” say others, in the train of Gustav Aulén’s Christus Victor (1930/1931), although how Jesus is subduing anyone or anything by hanging on a cross isn’t apparent—if you deny substitutionary atonement.

“Behold,” says the great Announcer of the coming of Jesus, John the Baptist, and precisely whom are we to behold? What is the concise way John summarizes his understanding of the One Who brings in God’s Kingdom? “The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

Thus the Jewish prophet John identifies the Jewish messiah Jesus as the culmination of the Jewish covenant with the Jewish God that has, at its heart—not the moral example theory or the declaration of love theory or the warfare theory of atonement, but—the satisfaction theory, and specifically the idea of substitutionary atonement, the innocent for the guilty.

In ThinkBetter Media’s guides to Salvation 101 and 102, we have set out what God does to save the world, and how the Cross figures in that. A brief explanation of atonement on Good Friday is also available here. So we’ll just agree for now that a good Good Friday sermon simply cannot avoid putting the atonement front and centre.

Jesus suffered and died for our sins so that we would not have to suffer and die for our sins—that we would, yes, avoid hell. Whatever else the triune God accomplished, accomplishes, and will accomplish in the complex economy of salvation, suffering and dying in our stead is the centre of what Jesus accomplished on the Cross.

In sum, a Good Friday sermon should make people squirm. And it should help people repent and give thanks.

Easter Sunday

When teaching university and seminary students about the Resurrection, I learned three things the hard way. Let me offer them to you preachers as you speak about it on Easter.

1. Don’t assume everyone understands the concept of “resurrection.”

None of the English words that sound like “resurrection” are immediately helpful in decoding our word of the day.

Two nearby words, and two starkly alternative concepts, need to be distinguished from resurrection. The first is resuscitation. This is what ambulance crews and emergency-room teams do: bring back to life someone who seems dead—or was even briefly “clinically” dead. A person loses consciousness and is “revived” (even that word means “given new life”).

Resurrection, however, means to be truly dead, such that normally you’d be done for, and then being raised to life in the same body—but a gloriously renewed version of that body. The resurrected Jesus was recognizably still Jesus, but enjoying a fresh new version of the body that had been tortured to death.

Second, to many Canadians the word and even the concept of resurrection reminds them of reincarnation. After all, didn’t Jesus’ soul just depart a battered, worn-out corpse to take up residence in a new healthy body?

Again, resurrection means not changing one body for a different one, but enjoying the same body new and improved, so to speak. The lingering presence of the graveclothes in the tomb underscores the identity of Jesus’ crucified body with his resurrected one.

Finally, hyper-spiritual Christians—who can be found across the denominational spectrum from Catholics and Orthodox to Pentecostals and charismatics—deny the resurrection entirely. They may not explicitly say so, but what they mean by “resurrection” isn’t that. They look forward to the migration of the soul upward to a heavenly realm to enjoy mystical communion with God. The End.

That beatific vision, however, is not the vision of Revelation 21–22. In this last great tableau in the Bible, an actual city comes down from heaven to earth to be lived in as cities are lived in: by bodily creatures.

So don’t preach about “the resurrection” before you do what your professors always told you to do: define your terms!

2. Don’t assume everyone understands the historicity of the resurrection.

By “historicity” I mean two things: (1) that the resurrection is not merely symbolic (although it is significant, as we shall see) but actually happened; and (2) that the resurrection can be believed as an actual event on the same basis on which we believe in other ancient events: reliable testimony.

From the early church until now, certain people in Christian circles have propagated a false view of the resurrection as merely symbolic: the triumph of life over death, good over evil, hope over despair, and so on. As such, this lovely fictional story can be made to fit more-or-less comfortably with the even more culturally benign images of spring: flowers, eggs, and bunnies.

Jesus really did, however, come out of that grave alive. He really did converse with individuals, couples, small groups, and even a crowd or two before ascending to heaven forty days later. Most vividly, he prepared and ate a snack with his disciples on the beach (John 21).

We Christians believe all this because the Bible says so. But we don’t believe the Bible just because the Bible says so, in a weird bit of circular reasoning that has perplexed many an inquisitive child in Sunday School. We believe the resurrection happened because reliable people have told us it did—and because subsequent history is very difficult, if not impossible, to understand if it didn’t.

Whole books have been written arguing for the historical veracity of the resurrection testimony not only in the Gospels but in other New Testament books as well. My own brief presentation also offers footnotes for readers to explore more of that literature. For now, a preacher can say just this.

First, the New Testament documents have been shown to be reasonably reliable guides to the non-miraculous events they describe. Even many non-Christian scholars agree. So when they start describing unusual events, their credibility is considerably greater than zero.

Second, the resurrection is foundational to the earliest preaching of the apostles (Acts 2) and to the earliest theological formulation of the Christian message (so the Pauline epistles). This community, apparently otherwise sensible and not given to weirdness of any other sort, evidently started believing in the resurrection literally within hours of its purported occurrence. There was no time for a myth to spring up.

Third, there might have been time for a deception to spring up. But then: (1) Why would the disciples lie to spread this outlandish, unprecedented teaching that served no ulterior motive? (2) Why wouldn’t the authorities simply find Jesus’ corpse, put it on display, and smother the Christian deceit in its cradle? and (3) Why would so many people come immediately to believe this preposterous and utterly unexpected tale?

Since then, furthermore, people—lots of people, and some of them evidently intelligent—have come to come to believe in the resurrection as fact. The world’s largest religion stems from belief that this event really happened. If it didn’t happen, what is the alternative explanation for Christianity’s early success and rapid growth?

3. Don’t assume that everyone understands the theological significance of the resurrection.

Beware theological shorthand, like “because Christ was raised, we can know that we will also be raised.” Just because that swimmer over there is pulled from the ocean doesn’t mean I will be over here—unless, I suppose, there is an omnipotent Lifeguard who has promised to save everyone else also. We preachers have to explain why what happened to Jesus has anything to do with what might happen to us.

What is foundationally apostolic in such an assertion is that the resurrection of Jesus is God (the Father's) vindication of all that Jesus said and did. Peter makes this clear in Acts 2:30–32 and 36: Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would put one of his descendants on his throne. Foreseeing this, David spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, saying, "He was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh experience corruption." This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. . . . Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.

Paul makes the same point in I Corinthians 15:17: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins." Paul's point is not a soteriological one—that somehow Jesus's resurrection rescues us from our sins. His point of a logical one (vv. 13–15):

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised.

The resurrection of Jesus is the public event by which God validates all that came before. No resurrection? No validation. That's the first and earliest significance of the resurrection—quite literally, the resurrection as a sign of God's power and authority in Christ.

Next, blithely announcing that “We are raised with Christ” will not make any immediate sense, especially after two thousand years of Christians dying and not being raised from the dead.

Just as Christian views form a spectrum about the Lord’s Supper—from folks who see it as just bread and wine symbolizing the offering of Christ’s body and blood for us, at one end, to folks who see the elements transforming into the literal body and blood of Christ at the moment of consecration, at the other—so Christians disagree about just how the resurrection of Jesus blesses the rest of us who are, as yet, un-resurrected.

Is Jesus’ resurrection simply a promising demonstration? Or is our mystical union with him through his incarnation such that we are, in some way, literally raised to new life with him in his resurrection?

You can safely leave those metaphysics for the theologians to dispute. The most lucid theological mind of the early church puts the Christian situation thus:

All of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.

For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, ghat we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.

Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.

In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:3–11).

Whatever else Paul is saying here (!), he is saying that the resurrection of Jesus to new life marks the beginning of new life for all who follow in his train, a new life that will eventuate in, yes, our own resurrection. Until then, we are to live in the light of this new era inaugurated by Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection: dead to sin, as he died, and alive to God evermore, as his actual resurrection demonstrates and our renewal by the Holy Spirit enables.

Jesus’ resurrection signifies that death is not the end, but the beginning of everlasting life in the age to come.

Jesus’ resurrection signifies that the meaning of our lives is not restricted to this life, but instead consists in how this life opens onto the next one.

Jesus’ resurrection signifies that all that is human is good—spiritual and material, soul and body—and will go forward into the age to come.

And Jesus’ resurrection signifies that we must dedicate ourselves to becoming saintly so that when God is ready to award us our new bodies and welcome us into the New Jerusalem, we have souls to match.

(Again, for more on the rich economy of salvation, see our introductions in Salvation 101 and 102.)

Whatever else it is, therefore, the resurrection of Jesus is a symbol of God’s promise to all who are in Christ: new, embodied, eternal life as humans finally fit to flourish in the world to come. This is what we look forward to. This is our destiny.

In sum, as you preach the Resurrection, help your congregation understand what it is, why we believe it, and how it helps us.

So, yes, you’ll likely need more than a ten-minute homily to avoid these mistakes. But I trust the Holy Spirit to guide you in your preparation and delivery of God’s Word. May your congregation can enter with you more deeply and clearly into the mysteries of this Holy Weekend.

And may we all emerge from this Sunday equipped by good preaching to make better decisions for or against the Great Offer God makes to each of us each Easter.