In the summer of 2022, I visited the charming Alpine town of Oberammergau, Germany. I wandered its leafy streets lined with mural-painted houses, their balconies overflowing with flower boxes.
After indulging in ice cream and searching for the town’s famed woodcarvings, I settled in my seat for a five-and-a-half-hour performance of Jesus’ final week on earth. Since 1634, Oberammergau has placed on a Passion play involving just about all its residents, first staged in thanksgiving for the top of a bubonic plague outbreak. Normally the performances happen in the primary 12 months of a latest decade (2000, 2010, etc.), but the brand new plague of COVID-19 delayed 2020’s play by two years.
Scores of buses were depositing tourists from many foreign countries. Looking around, I saw groups from China, Japan, and Korea, along with many Europeans and Americans. That summer, almost half 1,000,000 people would travel to secular Germany to sit down through this presentation of Jesus’ passion, spoken and sung in a language that few in the group could understand.
What attracted them? I wondered. At one point, greater than a thousand actors filled the stage, shouting in guttural German, “Kreuzige ihn!” (Crucify him!) The audience fell silent as Pilate’s soldiers tortured and mocked their prisoner.
Some in my tour group criticized the play for shortchanging the Resurrection; in spite of everything, only 3 of the libretto’s 132 pages focused on that seminal event. Yet the ratio reflects the Gospels’ accounts, which give much more attention to the ordeal of trials and crucifixion than to the triumphant conclusion. The criticism, nonetheless, raised a matter: Would a practice similar to Oberammergau’s have continued for 4 centuries if all it commemorated were a notable person’s death?
In Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and Moscow’s Red Square, respectively, I actually have watched hundreds of individuals stand in line to view the preserved bodies of Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin. Martyrs too may achieve an honored place in historical memory: Abraham Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi—and in recent days, Alexei Navalny.
Is that how we’d remember Jesus, aside from Easter?
During his last meal with the disciples before his arrest, Jesus tried to elucidate the momentous changes underway. John 13–17 records much of the dialogue, wherein Jesus foretells the longer term. “One of you goes to betray me,” he says, and identifies the offender (13:21–27). He tells them that he, their leader, is departing, but not likely; in some ways he’ll be even closer. More than ever before, he makes his identity clear, causing Philip to puzzle over the sensational claim, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9).
Two assertions that evening will need to have haunted his disciples in the times to come back. The first: “In this world you’ll have trouble. But take heart! I actually have overcome the world” (16:33). Within a number of hours, the disciples would witness Jesus’ arrest and an excruciating sequence of abuse and execution reserved for the worst of criminals. This is how he overcomes the world? It was an excessive amount of to swallow for Peter, who first showed bravado by brandishing a sword on Jesus’ behalf (18:10–11). Soon, though, he would follow Judas in a three-fold act of betrayal (13:38; 18:27).
The second mind-bending assertion: “But very truly I let you know, it’s in your good that I’m going away” (16:7). The disciples were still basking within the glow of Palm Sunday, just a number of days before, when shouts of Hosanna! Blessed is the king of Israel! echoed through the streets of Jerusalem (12:13). They were anticipating glory, the smug reward of loyalists who’ve forged their lots with a conquering hero. Jesus abruptly redefined glory by washing their feet—against Peter’s protest—and by naming the best love as laying down one’s life for one’s friends (13:1–17; 15:13).
I sympathize with the disciples’ bafflement. Wouldn’t it have been higher if Jesus had stayed on earth? How otherwise would Christian history have unfolded if we had a Pope Jesus to veto the Crusades and Inquisitions, ban slavery, and answer our questions on ethical matters similar to just wars and gender issues?
But Jesus outlined the ways wherein his departure may very well be construed nearly as good. He would bring a few latest form of intimacy: “I now not call you servants … Instead, I actually have called you friends” (15:15). Drawing on a well-known analogy, he likened their latest closeness to a grape branch’s connection to the vine (15:1–16). In short, he was elevating human agency in order that his followers would do the work of God, just as he had done. Moreover, by leaving earth, he would open the way in which for God’s Spirit, the Advocate, to come back and supply the nourishment and wisdom they needed (14:26; 16:7).
Although reclining around the identical table, Jesus and his disciples viewed reality very otherwise. Jesus reminisced cosmically a few time “before the creation of the world” (17:24), while the Twelve (now the Eleven) could barely remember their lives before this strange rabbi ordered them to follow him. Jesus saw “the prince of this world” (14:30) coming for him through Judas’s treachery, whereas the disciples thought Judas was running an errand. Jesus foresaw the persecution to come back, the descent into Hades, his resurrection and return to the Father; the disciples murmured amongst themselves, “We don’t understand what he’s saying” (16:18).
Easter modified the whole lot, but not . A Hollywood script would have had Jesus appearing on Pilate’s porch on Monday morning, with a choir of angels booming, “He’s back!”
Jesus showed less drama, the form of low-key approach depicted at Oberammergau. He surprised women on the empty tomb, joined a few old friends on the solution to Emmaus, mysteriously appeared in a locked room to handle Thomas’s doubts, and gave a fishing lesson to some disciples who had returned to their former occupations in Galilee.
After about six weeks of such random sightings, the disciples gathered again, still unsure concerning the future. Would Jesus remain on earth in spite of everything? If not, what did he expect of them? In the primary meeting with the disciples after his resurrection, Jesus had commissioned them: “As the Father has sent me, I’m sending you” (John 20:21). And on the Ascension, he literally turned over the mission to the ragtag group that was still hoping he would revive their faded dreams of glory.
It’s as much as you now, he said in effect. Jesus had healed diseases, forged out demons, and brought comfort and solace to the poor, the oppressed, and the suffering—but only in a single small corner of the Roman empire. Now he was setting loose his followers to take that very same message to Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth.
Two thousand years later, 3 billion people world wide discover as followers of Jesus. The message he brought has spread to Europe, Asia, and each other continent. The probability of that spread without the jolting event we have a good time as Easter is vanishingly small. Before his resurrection, Jesus’ few followers were denying him and hiding from the temple police. Even afterward, Thomas doubted until he saw proof in flesh and scars. But as they got here to grasp what had happened within the Resurrection, the disciples were in a position to glimpse Jesus’ cosmic view.
At the top of that poignant Last Supper described in John 13–17, Jesus prayed for all who would follow. “My prayer will not be for them alone. I pray also for individuals who will consider in me through their message, that every one of them could also be one, Father, just as you might be in me and I’m in you. May additionally they be in us in order that the world may consider that you could have sent me,” he said. “Then the world will know that you simply sent me and have loved them at the same time as you could have loved me” (17:20–23).
How are we doing, we Jesus followers within the twenty first century? We must be known for our unity and our confident hope, for we “will not be of the world any greater than I’m of the world,” as Jesus prayed (17:14). If we truly consider Jesus has risen and let that reality soak in, it should help calm fear and anxiety over such matters because the economy, the 2024 elections, and global unrest. To the watching world, followers of Jesus should stand out as peacemakers: as “bridge” people committed to like, not despise, our opponents—even our enemies.
A friend of mine was stopped dead in her tracks by a skeptic. After listening to her explain her faith, he said this: “But you don’t act like you suspect God is alive.”
I attempt to turn the skeptic’s accusation into a matter: Do I act like God is alive? It is a great query, one I need to ask myself again each day.
Philip Yancey is the creator of many books including, most recently, the memoir Where the Light Fell.
