Write Team: A post-Easter reflection

In these weeks following Easter, glimpse backward with me approximately 2,000 years to the days after Jesus’ resurrection.

His followers huddled together in an upstairs room, hiding for fear they, too, would be arrested.

The women said he was alive. Mary had encountered him at the garden tomb, mistaking him for the gardener in the morning mist. Several of the disciples said they had seen him too. Peter declared the grave empty, and Jesus had appeared to Thomas, urging him to place his hands into the nail prints, so that Thomas might believe.

The glorious reality dawned on all of them – He really was alive!

Later, he appeared to them on the road, at the seaside and in the upstairs room.

In the following weeks, as many as 5,000 people saw him at one time.

They were convinced that he was God. The Messiah had come. They didn’t understand it all, but they knew it had happened. All history was changed.

One day he led them to a hillside outside of town where they saw him ascend, and they were further amazed.

His Spirit came upon them and they experienced his presence in a new way.

They met in homes to remember him with simple ceremonies of wine and bread. Some sold their possessions, pooled everything and set out to tell the world..

Others were martyred as fierce persecution drove them from Jerusalem and Antioch and into other parts of the world. Wherever they went, they told their story of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection. People said they “turned the world upside down.”

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote down all they remembered the three years he had been with them and what he had taught them. Paul, not one of the original 12 and who also claimed to be an apostle, wrote letters to the fledging churches.

Believers circulated from place to place. Even from jail, he wrote to them, instructing and encouraging them. After awhile, they gathered his letters with the accounts of the Apostles, the Book of Acts written by Luke and letters written by James and others. Believers preserved the writings, copied them carefully and regarded them as sacred.

In the 2,000 years that followed, the Christian message spread all over the world. Missionaries preached and taught in distant places and many believed.

Wherever two or three gathered in His name, Jesus said he would be with them.

Today choirs sing, praise bands lead worship, people clap and dance and others quietly pray or recall familiar liturgies.

In big churches, small churches, store front churches, shopping malls and mega-churches, people preach in His name and study “The Book.”

In England, where church attendance is down to 5%, pastors and priests visit grocery stores to present the message to shoppers, calling them to personal faith and urging them to return to their churches.

On mission fields across the world, people still hear the message and believe.

Today more professing Christians live in third-world countries than in the U.S. Some say America has entered the “post-Christian” age.

Jesus said He would “build His church” and He is doing it. He said the “gates of hell would not prevail against it,” and they won’t.

Those in the first century were never the same after his resurrection.

And, if we believe in Him, we won’t be either.

Carole Ledbetter is a former Write Team member who resides in Ottawa.