{"id":5292,"date":"2026-03-16T08:38:57","date_gmt":"2026-03-16T12:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5292"},"modified":"2026-03-16T08:38:57","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T12:38:57","slug":"he-rose-again-from-the-dead-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/16\/he-rose-again-from-the-dead-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"He Rose Again from the Dead (Part II)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a>
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Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.<\/em>
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Americans love happy endings.\u00a0
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Sitting in darkened movie theaters, we have come to expect that the monster will be vanquished, the toad will be changed back into a prince, the bad guys will be brought to justice, Beauty’s love will transform the Beast into a seriously ripped surfer dude, and everyone will live happily ever after.
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More than a few major films, however, have gone out of their way to present endings cloaked in sadness, contemplation, or moral ambiguity. Sometimes hearts remain broken and the bad guys win.
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Platoon <\/em>(1987), Million Dollar Baby<\/em> (2004) and No Country for Old Men<\/em> (2008) all won the Academy Award for Best Picture. None of them left audiences cheering.
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The winner of last night\u2019s Best Picture Oscar, One Battle After Another<\/em>, will never be confused with The Sound of Music<\/em>.

Even fans of 2004\u2019s Dodgeball<\/em>, a laugh-out-loud comedy, seldom realize that in the original version, the underdog team of Average Joe\u2019s loses<\/em> the big championship game to narcissistic White Goodman and Globo Gym. Test audiences were so upset that the writers had to go back to the drawing board and substitute a happy ending.

The ancient Greeks, those master storytellers of the classical world, would have preferred the original version.
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There is not a single happy ending in any of their epic literature or mythology.\u00a0The Greek notion of “hero” was someone who rose to glorious heights, only to come crashing back to earth through hubris, miscalculation, or betrayal.

Life is wretched and short, perhaps briefly glorious, and then you die.\u00a0

Historians have suggested that a story that raced rapidly around the Mediterranean world in the first century \u2013 that a Jewish miracle-worker named Jesus had come back to life and could supply his followers with love, grace, and power \u2013 is the first happy ending in world history.

It\u2019s no surprise that myriad people enthusiastically embraced it.\u00a0\u00a0

Will human history have a happy ending?\u00a0 \u00a0

Within the past two decades, astrophysicists have confirmed that the cosmos is headed for total entropy. That’s a fancy way of saying that all the stars are going to burn out, every particle will exhaust its energy, and every square inch of reality will be dark, cold, and absolutely motionless, with no hope of revival.\u00a0

No wonder \u201ceat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” sounds like a realistic Plan A for the next 24 hours, and every day to follow. \u00a0

If God doesn’t show up, there is no future.\u00a0And there are no happy endings.\u00a0

If God doesn’t show up, the people who knew us and loved us will leave our bodies in the cemetery and then walk away, knowing that the same fate awaits them, too.\u00a0 \u00a0

But if God does show up, there’s real hope for a real future – not\u00a0only for the cosmos, but for each of our own lives.\u00a0\u00a0
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Spoiler alert<\/em>: According to the Apostles\u2019 Creed, God did in fact show up on a Sunday morning in the vicinity of Jerusalem about A.D. 30. \u201cOn the third day he rose again from the dead\u2026\u201d That\u2019s far more than just an historical footnote, or a reason for worshippers to sigh on Easter morning, \u201cWell, maybe things will turn out OK after all.\u201d
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According to the New Testament, the resurrection was like an explosion that reverberated across the ancient world. It ultimately sent shock waves to the shores of every continent.\u00a0Something had happened \u2013 something that people thought might take place at the end of history, but which had suddenly happened to one special person in the very midst of history.\u00a0
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And now the word was going around that the cosmos itself was somehow different \u2013 that a new way of belonging to God had opened up, and that Death would no longer hold sway over the lives of Jesus\u2019 followers.\u00a0
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He rose again from the dead<\/em>.
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If we believe those words of the Apostles\u2019 Creed, we\u2019re forced to conclude that Jesus is alive. Here. And now. And that makes all the difference in the world.
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If Greek storytellers veered toward pain and tragedy, one of the great storytellers of our own time unfailingly veered toward hope and joy.
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Tony Campolo left us almost a year and a half ago. One of the stories he loved to tell, and which we\u2019ve shared in the past, concerns his opportunity to speak at a small Pentecostal college in eastern Pennsylvania.\u00a0
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Before the chapel service, several of the faculty members took Tony into a side room to pray with him. Tony got down on his knees and six men put their hands on his head and began to pray. Pentecostal prayers can be a bit like the Energizer bunny. They keep going and going and going. The longer those men prayed, the more they leaned on Campolo\u2019s head.\u00a0
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\u201cDo you feel the Spirit?\u201d one of them whispered. Tony recalls that he definitely felt something pressing on his neck.
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One of the faculty members kept praying about a man named Charlie Stoltzfus. \u201cOh, Lord, you know Charlie Stoltzfus. You know that he is about to abandon his wife and three children. Send an angel to bring that man back to his family.\u00a0 You know whom I\u2019m talking about, Lord\u2026Charlie Stoltzfus. He lives down the road about a mile on the right-hand side in a silver house trailer!\u201d\u00a0
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About that time Campolo was thinking, \u201cGod knows where this guy lives. He\u2019s not up in heaven saying, \u2018Uh, could you run that address by me one more time?\u2019\u201d Mostly Tony was just hoping at that point he could get back up off his knees.
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After the chapel talk, Campolo hopped into his car and headed home. He was getting onto the Pennsylvania turnpike when he saw a young hitchhiker. As Tony told the story, he acknowledged that picking up hitchhikers was less than wise, but as a Baptist preacher he hated to pass up a captive audience.\u00a0
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He opened the door to his car. \u201cHello,\u201d he said, \u201cMy name is Tony Campolo.\u201d \u201cHi,\u201d said the young man. \u201cMy name is Charlie Stoltzfus.\u201d
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Campolo said nothing. He drove down the turnpike, got off at the next exit, turned around, and headed back.\u00a0
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\u201cHey, mister,\u201d said the hitchhiker, \u201cwhere are you taking me?\u201d \u201cI am taking you home.\u201d <\/em>\u201cWhy?\u201d \u201cBecause you just left your wife and three children, right?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s right!\u201d\u00a0 Campolo exited the turnpike and drove straight to the silver trailer about a mile down the road \u2013 you know, the one on the right-hand side.\u00a0
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\u201cHow did you know I lived here?\u201d With all the solemnity he could muster, Campolo turned and said, \u201cGod told me!\u201d
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For the next hour Tony sat in that silver trailer with Charlie Stoltzfus and his wife. That was the day their marriage was healed. That was the day they both began a personal relationship with Jesus.
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Charlie Stoltzfus went on to become a Pentecostal preacher.
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Now, just in case you\u2019re thinking, \u201cStuff like that never <\/em>happens to me,\u201d one day all of us will be stunned when we learn what God has been doing in us and through and around us, all the time, day after day after day.
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If Jesus is indeed risen from the dead, he\u2019s not a spectator to what is going on.
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He\u2019s in all your meetings. Your family room. Your car. Alongside every step you take.
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The astonishing truth of Jesus\u2019 resurrection is that he is now able to make good on the promise of his name, Immanuel:
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He is God with us<\/em>.
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And just like that, happy endings seem more assured than ever.

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.\u00a0Americans love happy endings.\u00a0\u00a0Sitting in darkened movie theaters, we have come to expect that the monster will be vanquished, the toad will be changed… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5293,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1080,207],"class_list":["post-5292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apostles-creed","tag-resurrection"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5292"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5294,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5292\/revisions\/5294"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}