My friend Nate has a part in the current show playing at the Sight and Sound theater in Strasburg.
I went on their website this morning to look into ticket availability and was happy to see that they’ve made some tweaks to their telling of the Easter story:
It’s a good thing these folks know how to adjust on the fly because without that resurrection scene at the end, the show flat-out sucked. The tomb was sealed, the curtain went up, and the house lights came on. You should have seen the looks on people’s faces as they were leaving.
Got me thinking about what the resurrection means to the story of Jesus.
Without the resurrection, he’s an amazing guy who died a brutal death and predicted he would rise from the dead but didn’t. In that case, we learn what we can from him, file him in the “brilliant, but a little nutty” drawer, and go on with our lives.
With the resurrection, suddenly it’s a lot harder to ignore the things he said. His claim to be God’s son sent to die a sacrificial death to redeem our relationship with God holds a lot more weight.
Like the barbershop quartet scene in The Usual Suspects, sometimes one scene can make all the difference.