The most important thing that ever happened in the history of the world was when Jesus rose from the grave–but why? How is resurrection different from raising the dead? What is vindication? What will our lives be like when we are resurrected? We’re going to talk about Passover and about Yom HaBikkurim–the day of First Fruits–because they are 100% about Jesus!
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
Parents, all Scripture this week comes from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible.
Hey kids, this week we are going to explore the most important thing that ever happened in the whole history of the world and why it changed everything! And it might surprise you when I tell you that it wasn’t when baby Jesus was born and placed in the manger and the angels sang and the shepherds visited! It wasn’t the Last Supper, when He broke the Passover matzah bread and poured the wine and gave them to His disciples to eat and drink, telling them that it was His body and blood. It wasn’t when He fed the five thousand or walked on water or healed the man who was paralyzed. It wasn’t even the day He died on the Cross. Nope—the most important day ever was when Jesus rose from the dead and today we will talk about why, and what resurrection is and isn’t, and why it’s different from what happened to Lazarus, the widow’s only son, the twelve-year-old daughter of the synagogue official, or the boys that Elijah and Elisha raised from the dead. All those were really awesome, of course, but resurrection has only ever happened to one person in the whole history of the world and that person was Jesus!
Why are we talking about this? Because this weekend we celebrate both the Passover and Resurrection Sunday, which is called something like Pascha all over the world except in German and English where it was named Oster or Easter after the month it usually happened in. What I call it is First Fruits because on the day that Jesus was resurrected, the priests were in the Temple presenting the first sheaf of the barley harvest to God. But we will talk about that later too! In Hebrew, the day of First Fruits is called Yom HaBikkurim. Not bickering, no one likes bickering–Bikkurim (Bih-koo-reem).
When Jesus died on the Cross, He was really dead. And that is a big deal. Throughout history, there have been rumors that He was just faking it, or He had just passed out, or that he wasn’t really human and so He didn’t really die, or that He was dead but his disciples sneaked past dangerous, sleeping guards who were armed with weapons and rolled the big heavy stone away without being heard, even breaking the seal on the tomb to do it, and stole the body. Well, all that is pretty hard to believe. How to do you stay perfectly still when someone sticks a spear in your side to see if you are really dead? And how would you not bleed to death after that anyway? And how would no one ever notice that He wasn’t really human? His mom would have figured it out for sure. And the reason people came up with these kinds of claims is for a couple of reasons (1) the highest Jewish authorities didn’t want the people to know that Jesus had risen from the dead and they probably didn’t believe it themselves. If all the people whom He had preached to and healed and fed knew that God had raised Him from the dead, they would all be following Him and believing in Him and it would be all over for the authorities who had Him killed. I mean, only God can resurrect someone—which is different than raising someone from the dead. Way different. And the only reason God would resurrect someone would be to prove that they were innocent and right about every claim they made about themselves and the Kingdom of Heaven. I am going to teach you guys an important vocabulary word—vindication. I know, it’s a long word but it has a very important meaning. When you are vindicated, it means that you are proven to be in the right. When someone has been in jail for a crime they didn’t really commit, and that happens quite a bit, and people find out who really did it or find evidence that they are innocent, the judge will find them innocent and vindicate them. Being vindicated tells the world that the court system was wrong and the person who went to jail was right.
And that’s what would have happened if the chief priests ever admitted that Jesus was alive again. They would have to admit that Jesus was right about everything He had said and done, and that they had gotten Pilate (who was a really evil person) to kill an innocent man in the most terrible way possible. They would have to admit that they condemned (which means that they said he was guilty) someone who had said that He would be coming to judge them, someone who had done wonderful things for people, and who fed the poor and healed the people who couldn’t walk or see or hear or speak. You have to admit that anyone who said that someone like that was guilty, would be in huge trouble with the people if they had that person killed by the Romans.
But there were others later, among the Gentiles—and Gentiles are people who aren’t Jewish by birth—who said things that were just as wrong. You see, someone who was crucified in those days was an embarrassment! People were humiliated if someone they knew was crucified. They said it was a slave’s death, a death for the lowest of the low, a traitor to the Roman Empire. It was so bad that if you were a Roman citizen, no matter what you did and no matter how horrible it was, you couldn’t be crucified. The Romans believed that their citizens were too special to be crucified–and you were either born a citizen, or got your citizenship after serving in the army for twenty-five years (and survived it), or got it because you were a slave in a citizen’s house who got freed after you were 30 years old, or you could buy your citizenship—although no one seems to have any idea how much it cost but we know it was a lot! I guess if you have to ask, you can’t afford it!
So, because they couldn’t deal with the embarrassment of following and believing in someone who was executed as a criminal and tortured and hung out naked for everyone to see, they came up with some other theories. No, the Romans didn’t really kill Him—they were stupid and He tricked them. Yeah, it looked like He was dead but that’s because he wasn’t actually a human but he really had a pretend body and he was just a spirit in disguise. They said these things because, in their way of thinking, it was too strange to think that someone is Divine, who is in some way God even though we don’t totally understand that because our brains are too small and if He explained it we would probably explode—well, they couldn’t see how someone like that could also be so human that He could die a real death. Nobody really understands even though people try to come up with little sayings and mind pictures to explain it. Sometimes we just have to say, “I have no idea how this works but I know it does!” A god who could die? That made no sense whatsoever to a Gentile who had been brought up to think that was nonsense. And we know that people made fun of the early Christians for it! There is even graffiti making fun of a man named Alexamenos for worshiping a god who could be nailed to a cross and killed by mere mortals! As for the ones who thought Jesus had a pretend body, they were called Gnostics (Nawh-sticks) and they thought that the physical world was so evil and yucky that there was no way that a divine being would ever have a real body with real skin and a body that had to eat and poop and pee and all that. Because they thought to the goal of life was to escape their bodies and be spirits, they figured that God hated real bodies too.
I know, grownups come up with some strange stuff to make them feel better about believing in Jesus, right? And you don’t have to remember any of that because it is nutty and confusing and that’s not what the Bible tells us so why even go there? What the Bible tells us is that, before His death, Jesus said over and over again that on the third day, He would rise from the dead. It was so confusing that even His own disciples didn’t understand. They didn’t like to hear it. Peter even told Him that it shouldn’t happen! Peter didn’t understand that Jesus didn’t come to lead an army to kill all of Israel’s enemies but to make them into the kinds of people who were no longer violent and who loved their neighbors as themselves. And when we are angry with people—like Peter and the rest of the Jews were angry at the invading army that took over their country and cruelly taxed them and abused them and enslaved them and starved them by taking their food and using it themselves. Who can blame them, right? They thought that the Messiah, the anointed Savior from God, would destroy all of Israel’s enemies and begin a wonderful new Kingdom where Israel would rule the world and no one would mess with them again and they could worship God at His Temple in peace. And that sounds pretty awesome when you are suffering—but it wasn’t God’s plan. Instead of sending a Savior who would kill, He sent a Savior who would die.
If you have ever read CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, you know how he explained what Jesus did by having Aslan do something similar for Edward to save him from the consequences of his sins and to defeat the witch. The witch punished the wrong one, someone who was totally innocent, she killed him in a terrible way. When she did that, Aslan came back to life and destroyed her kingdom. That’s an allegory, a story that explains one thing by telling a story about something else, written to be entertaining. But what Jesus did was far more amazing—what Jesus did was real. You see, none of us are innocent—so when we die, it really doesn’t do much of anything to Satan. We’re supposed to die—all humans die at some point, right? But Jesus was perfect and never sinned, so He didn’t deserve to die. The curse on Adam and Eve didn’t apply to Him because where they disobeyed, Jesus obeyed. Where Adam and Eve lied, Jesus never did. When Adam and Eve tried to make themselves to be more like God, Jesus was humble and served everyone even though He could work miracles. Jesus broke the curses of the Garden. They didn’t apply to Him and so Satan didn’t have any power over Him. And Satan sure tried to tempt Him, but it didn’t work! And people tried to tempt Him, but that didn’t work either. And He didn’t want to die, He asked God to make another way. But even though He didn’t want to do it (and not wanting to be crucified isn’t a sin! It’s just honest!), well He did it because He was perfectly obedient. That means that the power of death, which we can’t do anything about, couldn’t keep Jesus dead. And in trying to keep Jesus dead, Satan and death lost the battle and are now weak and dying. They still work on us, even when we believe Jesus, but not like they worked before we believed. And that’s why it is so important to talk about Resurrection, which is like the greatest thing about our future!
When Elijah, Elisha, and Jesus raised people from the dead, it was very different from what happened to Jesus. The boys raised by Elijah and Elisha, the daughter of Jairus, the widow’s son, and Lazarus were raised from the dead. That means that they were dead, but became alive again, but had the same exact bodies. Like in a video game—not one where you start over from the beginning but where you pick up exactly where you left off. If you were raised from the dead, nothing about you or your body changed except that you are alive and healthy again. And don’t get me wrong, that’s awesome! It’s amazing! It’s a miracle! But it isn’t the same as what happened to Jesus and what will happen to us someday, because all those people who were raised from the dead died again just like normal people.
When Jesus died, and this is hard to hear, His body was really torn up badly. Isaiah 53 says that he didn’t even look like a human being anymore because they tortured him so badly. In paintings, you only see the nails in His hands and feet and the blood from His forehead where they put the crown of thorns on Him. But we know from the Bible that they beat His face and pulled out His beard, and the Romans scourged Him with metal-tipped whips on his front and on His back. When He was put on the Cross, He didn’t even look like Himself anymore. Without the sign above His head, no one would know it was Him. But three days later, when the women went back to the tomb to wrap Him in spices, they saw a man who looked like a gardener and they asked him if he knew where they had taken Jesus. They were so upset. Now, if Jesus looked the way He looked before He died, they would have recognized Him right away. But Jesus looked different—Jesus was perfect. Jesus had a resurrected body—and someday we will too. With His resurrected body, he could appear suddenly in a room. He could walk along with people who knew Him personally and they didn’t know it was Him. He still had the nail holes and the spear wound in His side so that they would believe it was Him but other than that, Jesus was not the same. Jesus had a body that wouldn’t grow any older, that couldn’t get sick—but he still ate! And that’s definitely something to look forward to. The people who said that Jesus never had a real body thought that having a body was the worst thing in the world, they wanted to be set free from their bodies so that they could be spirit beings. But the Bible tells us that resurrection is about having a real body after we die—a perfect body that can still enjoy eating and singing praises to God and hugging and all sorts of things. That means my son won’t have medical problems anymore. It means that the problems that my strokes caused won’t be a problem anymore. Many years ago, I had a dream of what it would be like. I saw a woman walking toward me, she was famous but she had died about twenty years earlier. And she wasn’t pretty when she was alive. But in my dream, she walked up to me and whispered in my ear the most wonderful things about God (which I can’t remember! Darnit!) and she looked the way she always did but instead of not being pretty, she was the most beautiful person I have ever seen in my life. When I woke up, I was crying because not being able to look at her anymore was horrible. I would have done anything to see her face again. And so I know that no matter what we look like now, we will look the same when we resurrect only we will all be incredibly beautiful—and you know what? That means we are already beautiful, but we can’t see it here because of sin. You’re beautiful, and if we weren’t all messed up because of sin, everyone would know it. But you can know it. I already do know it.
No wheelchairs, no leg braces, no fake knees or shunts or crutches. No brain damage, nothing that we experience in this world. God is going to free us from all the bad things that have ever happened to us, isn’t that wonderful? People who are hurting on the outside won’t hurt anymore, and people who hurt on the inside won’t hurt either. All the bad things that have happened and make you sad, they won’t bother you ever again. If you were raised from the dead, like Lazarus, it would be totally different. He still had the exact same body and memories. Not us. And people will finally get real justice for the things that have hurt them. Justice is when bad things were done to us and someone makes those things right again. Of course, we still have the memories and the hurts from bad things so no one can really make things right again here—they can just hopefully make things better. But when we are resurrected, here on earth like it talks about at the end of the book of Revelation, we will not be hurt by those things anymore. They won’t matter to us anymore. We will all live together with everyone else who loves God and Jesus will be King over all the earth and we won’t hurt the way we do now. Just like Jesus’s body doesn’t hurt anymore. He was on the Cross and it was horrible but He isn’t there now. He is sitting beside His Father, talking to Him about us, and surrounded by angels.
And with our new bodies, because we are resurrected and not raised, we will be able to do amazing things that we can’t imagine now. Without sin in our lives and without people hurting us, just imagine the amazing things we can do with our lives! Just think of the things we will understand! The people who wanted Jesus to have a fake body didn’t understand that bodies are important to God, even though He doesn’t have one. Which is funny because we call God “he” right? Ancient Hebrew had no word for “it” and besides, it would be rude to call God an “it”!!! Jesus is a He, of course, but throughout the Bible, God is described as both father and mother because the only way we can describe God is through metaphors, by talking about what He is like. Although He is like a father, and like a mother, and like a husband, and like a king, He is beyond all of those things. Those labels just help us to understand better. But even though He has no body, we do have bodies and our bodies are very important to Him. That’s why Jesus healed bodies and spoke to ears and listened to mouths and fed tummies and touched people who weren’t supposed to be touched and fixed them so they could go home again. Our bodies are important to God—He designed them to be good, so we could be His hands and feet and to do what He can do without needing a body at all! He doesn’t have a body—He doesn’t need one. He can do more without a body than all of us can do together with our bodies. So, He isn’t a man or a woman or a human at all. He’s God, and He’s amazing. If God was a human, we’d all be in big trouble because we know what humans are like!
Jesus showed us a future where there wouldn’t be any sickness or suffering or hunger or thirst or teasing or bullying or people who are in the in-crowd and people who aren’t. The future, the world to come here on earth when Jesus is King, is a world with real, perfect bodies and where we will see everyone as beautiful because they already are beautiful. God sees us the way I saw that woman in my dream. He doesn’t look at our faces and see us as the world sees us, He sees us as His beautiful creations. People don’t understand what it is to be beautiful. I am glad God made me understand it.
Now, back to Jesus not being recognized in the Garden after He was resurrected. In John 21, starting in verse 14, we see Jesus appearing first to Mary Magdalene: “Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know it was Jesus. “Woman,” Jesus said to her, “why are you crying? Who is it that you’re seeking?” Supposing he was the gardener, she replied, “Sir, if you’ve carried him away, tell me where you’ve put him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” Turning around, she said to him in Aramaic, “Rabboni!”—which means “Teacher.” “Don’t cling to me,” Jesus told her, “since I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them what he had said to her.”
When Mary heard His voice, she knew it was Jesus and I imagine she was about to fall to His feet and grab them because she was so relieved to see Him alive—after all, it was Mary and the other women who stayed with Him at the Cross and saw everything while the disciples were gone—although one man was there, either John or maybe Lazarus. She knew He was dead! It wasn’t a rumor to her, there was no mistake! But Jesus told her not to touch Him because He hadn’t gone to see God yet. And I imagine He went because Mary ran off to tell the disciples and I can’t imagine she would leave while He was still there—I sure wouldn’t and I bet you wouldn’t either. As long as Jesus is there, I am there too. But why did Jesus go? Why didn’t He go with Mary to see the disciples? Why didn’t He parade around town or go to the Temple and work miracles? Well, like we talked about last year for Passover, Jesus was the Lamb of God and so He was just like that lamb the Israelites ate in Egypt, only a lamb in Egypt was only good for one family and only for that night—but what Jesus did on the Cross as the ultimate Lamb of God destroyed sin and destroyed death for everyone who believes forever. But something else always happened the week of Passover. On the Sunday during the Passover week, the priests would take a very special offering of the new barley crop to the Temple. They would cut a sheaf, which is the stems plus the barley heads (which is what you can eat)—if you have seen a cartoon or a picture of Joseph’s dream of all the sheafs bowing down before him, you know what I mean. The priests would take the sheaf and do a special kind of offering. They would hold the sheaf up and wave it before the Lord so that He would bless the harvest and then everyone could eat the barley, but they couldn’t eat it until God got some first. That was called Bikkurim, or First Fruits. And that was the very same day that Jesus was resurrected. Satan tried to keep Him dead and poured all his power into doing it but Jesus lives again forever. That’s why Paul said, “But as it is, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead also comes through a man.” All those sheaves of barley for more than a thousand years, every year, were all pointing the way to Jesus being resurrected from the dead.
I love you. Happy Passover. Happy Firstfruits. Happy Resurrection Sunday.