The Cheer That Knows

Hebrews 12:2 "...looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God."

There are two kinds of cheers in any arena. The first comes at tip-off, at kickoff, at the opening whistle. The crowd is loud and buzzing with anticipation. The energy is real, but it's untested. Nobody has suffered yet. Nobody has watched a lead evaporate or thought about leaving. The opening cheer is the cheer of possibility.

The second cheer comes after a fourth-quarter comeback. After the team went down by twenty and the crowd got quiet and half the seats emptied. The people still there have seen the worst of it. They stayed through the part that hurt. And when the final buzzer sounds and the right side wins, the sound that erupts from that arena is an entirely different animal. It's louder, but that's not what makes it different. It's informed. It carries the weight of everything that almost went wrong. Relief and joy and disbelief all hitting at once.

Easter worship is the second cheer.

One week ago, a crowd lined the road down the Mount of Olives and shouted, "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!" That was the opening cheer. Beautiful, sincere, and wrong about almost everything. They expected a conquering king, but they got a suffering servant. By Friday their anticipation had curdled into demands for execution. The opening cheer didn't hold because it was built on expectation, not knowledge.

But this morning, something has shifted in the fabric of reality itself. The tomb is empty. The stone is rolled away. Angels are asking the strangest question in Scripture: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" (Luke 24:5). The women who came with burial spices are running back to tell the disciples. Peter is sprinting toward a grave that can't hold what was put in it. And slowly, impossibly, the truth begins to dawn: He wasn't defeated. He went through it.

The writer of Hebrews gives us the staggering lens for understanding what happened. Jesus endured the cross for the joy that was set before him. Joy. He saw through Friday and Saturday to what was on the other side. What was that joy? Paul points to the simplest answer: Christ in you, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27). Us. We were the joy set before Him. A redeemed people, alive in Him, filled with His Spirit, carrying His presence into a broken world.

He endured the cross to get to us!

And now He is seated. Hebrews says it plainly: seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Old Testament priests never sat down because the work was never finished; there was always another sacrifice (Hebrews 10:11-12). But Jesus sat down because the work is done. The sacrifice is complete. The tomb is empty because what happened on the cross was sufficient, and the resurrection is God the Father's thundering declaration that He accepted it.

So when we sing today, we're the second crowd. We know things the Palm Sunday crowd didn't. We know the Hosannas turned to "Crucify." We know the disciples fled. We know Peter denied and Judas betrayed and the sky went dark at noon on a Friday. We've walked through this week with our eyes open, and we've seen what it cost.

And we're still singing.

That's what makes Easter worship different. We're singing out of knowledge of what He already did. The cross is behind us, the tomb is empty, and the King is enthroned. Our praise today isn't the naive cheer of a crowd that will scatter by Friday. It's the deep, scarred, joyful roar of people who watched it all fall apart and then watched God put it back together in a way no one imagined.

Paul couldn't contain it: "O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?" (1 Corinthians 15:55). That's not a theological statement. That's a taunt. A man who walked through Friday and Saturday and came out laughing at the thing that used to terrify him. The worst thing that could happen already happened, and Jesus walked out of it alive.

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

Today: Enter worship today as someone who walked through the week. You've been in the parade, in the tears, in the silence, in the crowd. Sing one song today with the cross in view and the empty tomb in front of you. Let your praise be the informed kind.

Prayer: "Jesus, You are risen and You are alive. You endured the cross for the joy of having us, and that love is more than I can hold. I worship You today as someone who knows what it cost. Thank You that death couldn't hold You, that the grave couldn't keep You, that the worst the world could do was not enough to stop what You came to finish. You are seated, the work is done, and we are Yours. You are risen. You are risen indeed! Amen."

-PK