Last Sunday, I was trying to explain how people’s attitudes about Jesus could have changed so drastically between his Triumphal Entry and the day of his death. The jubilant crowds turned against him, or at best kept silent as he was carried away to death. Of his trusted twelve, one betrayed him for money, another publicly renounced him and the other ten just melted into the shadows. My premise was that people were following the wrong Jesus. Many believed that Jesus was the Messiah, but what that meant was the issue. When Jesus turned out to be a messiah vastly different from what they had imagined, they turned away.
The premise of my message was that we should be certain that we are following the right Jesus; Jesus as he claimed to be; Jesus as the Bible presents him. Near the end of the sermon, a thought came to me and came out of my mouth something like this: “This is Sunday, we worship Jesus in freedom and with little fear, but a Friday may be coming when it is costly to be his follower. Let’s be sure that we’re following the right Jesus so that when hardship comes we don’t become disillusioned and fall away.” That application was not in my notes.
Later that afternoon I learned that almost fifty Coptic Christians had died in two separate terrorist attacks in Egypt. Not everyone who died that day had chosen to follow Jesus into harm’s way, but many had. The Coptic Christian community has lived for years with the reality of persecution and death. As I read articles about their ongoing response to living as targets of aggression I was impressed by three themes;
- It is common for them to read and reflect on scriptures that say followers of Jesus will face persecution.
- It is common for them to respond with love toward their persecutors and pray for their conversion.
- It is common for them to speak about how the hope of the resurrection keeps them going.
I’m certain that the Coptic worship services today, on Resurrections Sunday, look very different from what I’m used to, but I believe they are following the right Jesus. The resurrection was the game changer for the first followers of Jesus, it erased their cowardice and turned them into an unstoppable force that changed the world. Are you following the risen Jesus?
After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. John 2:22
