Misconceptions About Jesus and Easter

It is Easter Saturday so we are currently in the day the Bible barely talks about. If you read the gospels they go through the last week of Jesus (Mark 11- 16:8 is my fave) and they say what happened on each day including Saturday. This is the day Jesus was laid in the tomb as recorded in Matthew 27:57-66. 

For some reason as a child I thought Jesus spent that day in Hell hiding under some fireproof blanket and stealing the key of Life back from the Devil. That apparently isn't in the gospels ... I feel like there are a lot of more misconceptions about Jesus and Easter. Allow me to just list three (even though there are way more).

1. Easter Sunday (April 20 this year) isn't like the exact day Jesus rose from the dead. Every year the date changes. The way people determine Easter is quiet confusing: it is observed on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, as calculated according to tables based in Western churches on the Gregorian calendar and in Orthodox churches on the Julian calendar according to dictionary.com. 

2. Christ is not Jesus' last name. It took me a while to get that and understand that Jesus is THE Christ. Christ also means Messiah. The Messiah is the One who had been prophesized about  all throughout the Old Testament so when people called Jesus the Christ or Messiah (like Peter in Mark 8:27-30) they were acknowledging who He was.

3. You may have heard this one a lot, or maybe not, but one thing constantly being reinforced in my mind at my church is that Jesus isn't and wasn't a "moral teacher". I love the way C.S. Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity: "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

There are many more misconceptions but that's all I want to list now. Since tomorrow is Easter (the second best holiday of the year other than the month of Christmas (the day after Thanksgiving up until the day after Christmas)) I would encourage you to read what Jesus did the day He rose form the dead. On the blogs Lies Young Women Believe (check out their blog) they posted something called the "Best Week Ever" where every day this week they went through passages in the Bible of what Jesus did on that day the week He died. 

I encourage you to read the selections tomorrow (Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20 & also Romans 6:23 & Ephesians 2:1) with me. And comment below if you have had any other misconceptions about Easter.