The 3rd Day

Ephesians 1:15–23 NRSV

I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

Today is a special day in the life of the church, as we remember the ascension of Christ. Today is the day that signals the end of Jesus’s earthly ministry as he ascended into heaven. This moment, when Jesus took up his throne in heaven, signals an incredible shift in God’s mode of activity in the world. Whereas God had previously acted upon human affairs in person — through a divine messenger known as The Angel of the YHWH — through the divinely inspired lives of prophets, priests, and kings, and then finally through the person of Jesus Christ, the ascension of Christ into heaven meant that God would begin to influence this world through a group of people called “The Church.”

But before we get to this moment in history I want to back things up just a little bit. We are now at the very end of a sermon series called Resurrected where we have been looking at the lives of people who experienced the Risen Christ and had their own lives resurrected and transformed. And until now we have been talking about individual accounts of people like Mary Magdalene, Peter, Paul, the disciples on the Emmaus Road, and Thomas. But today we are going to talk about the very first person to experience the Risen Christ. The Risen Christ.

I know, he probably didn’t have a mirror in the tomb. But I’m just trying to put myself in the tomb with Jesus here after being dead. We know from other sources towards the end of our Bibles that Jesus wasn’t just dead in there. His Spirit was busy overcoming the powers of death and evil during those 3 days. But I just know how I feel when wake up in the morning from the 3 glorious hours consecutive of sleep that my kids grace me with. Like who am I, what am I doing here, and why is that kid screaming?

So I’m just gonna go out on a limb and think that Jesus was a little disoriented when he woke up in a cold dark tomb after 3 days of being dead. And then I’m just imagining the memories flooding back into his mind. The pain and anguish of his body breaking on the cross. The humiliation of being mocked by the crowds. The utter heartbreak of being deserted by most of his disciples. The utter alone-ness and isolation that his human flesh and human psyche must have experienced in that final 24 hours.

And then to wake up. Alone in the silence of a tomb on the 3rd day.

Have you ever had a ridiculously hard day at work? Gone to bed after a particularly nasty fight with your kids or your spouse? Woken up in a jail cell or some other deeply unfavorable place? Like coming to consciousness and feeling the weight of everything that is wrong with your life still lingering there? It makes it really really hard to get up and get moving. I don’t know about you but its times like that where I am most motivated to stay in bed and just try to pretend the world doesn’t exist.

But here is the beauty of what the 3rd day looked like for Jesus. He woke up, carrying the physical scars of the cross and the emotional scars of the relationships that were tested and strained in his last 24 hours and he went to find his people.

Luke 24:36–49 NRSV

While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence. Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

So this is Jesus’s play. He wakes up from death and goes out and starts to find his people. He goes and meets Mary Magdalene and the Disciples on the road to Emmaus, and then the disciples as a whole group, and then to Thomas who wasn’t with the group the first time he showed up, and he does all of this so that the people that he cares about, the people who cared about him, might be able to share in the joy of the resurrection.

Jesus knows that the resurrection is not something that only occured to him. Jesus knows that resurrection is the hope and the plan that God has for all of humanity. But we can only experience the resurrection if the truth of resurrection is brought to us. The disciples can only share in the resurrection of Jesus if Jesus seeks them out and meets with them as a community.

And this is what the Apostle Paul is driving at when he writes to the church in Ephesus, saying that he prays that our hearts would be enlightened and that we would know the hope that is to be found in our inheritance because of the resurrection of Jesus. That anyone who believes in this reality finds resurrection as well because we share in the very power of Christ as his body — the church.

Paul is making a connection here that we can not miss. The church is the body of Christ — the fullness of Christ — the mode by which Christ’s reign in heaven and on earth is brought to fruition. You and me and the whole host of people in this world who have come to declare their allegiance to Jesus and the Kingdom of God are the way that God has decided to insure that his will is done here on earth as it is in heaven.

And that’s a terrifying thought no? Like have you met us? We are not good at that at all. Like at all. Even when we try.

But you and I both know that God is fully aware of just how not good we are. But God has chosen to partner with humans since the very beginning of all things. Recall the words of God in Genesis after creating humanity:

Genesis 1:26–28 NRSV

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

From the very beginning of things, God created humans with the purpose of ruling on earth as God’s representatives. To be the image of God is to bare the weight of responsibility over this world in God’s place. And humans did that really well for like a few days, until the whole world broke because of human disobedience. An offer was made to rule over the world as god — to decide good and evil on our own terms — and chaos was sparked and humans just existed in these cycles of violence and decay. God acted in the world to keep it from fully imploding — influencing people and a nation called Israel. But still it was all far from good. So Go came in the person of Jesus to make a way for humans to truly be able to live out this divine identity as the image of God and divine mandate to rule over the world on God’s behalf.

And so, the resurrection power that Jesus shared with his very first community became the grand regathering of humanity to hear and experience this divine mandate — and to be assured that this time they would be able to live it out — empowered by the Spirit of the Living God.

This is what this all means for people like you and I who are 2000 years removed from the 3rd day experience of Jesus and his disciples. It means that we have been called into transformed and resurrected lives so that we can live out the fullness of the human experience. And unlike what our world, our culture, and some broken understanding of the American dream tell us — living out the fullness of the human experience has really very little to do with getting what WE want and has everything to do with getting what God wants.

We have been conditioned to extreme individualism over the past several decades. And a lot of that has to do with the central role that technology plays in our lives. Social connectedness thanks to the internet is finally starting to be exposed as false advertising. It makes us less social. And honestly that is just one small fraction of the problem of individualism that we experience. Our framework of society is so deeply centered on the individual that we are not programmed to look for fulfillment, transformation, or resurrection outside of ourselves. We are programmed to go to amazon.com, search for self-help books, read them, and then wonder why we don’t feel better. Well maybe, just maybe, because the self is the problem. And I’ve never seen a problem fix itself.

What we all need is to radically rearrange the way that we seek transformation. We need a new vision of what it looks like for us to live our best lives now. We need a fresh understanding of what living out the fullness of the human experience entails. It entails the very thing that Jesus did on the 3rd day. He got up, walked out of that tomb that symbolized the extreme hurt and isolation that was thrust upon him by the powers of this world and he went out and he found his people. He found the people that he was going to use to transform the world. And he got them together and he commissioned them to go out and to bring the good news and the power of the resurrection to every single corner of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, the Roman Empire, and eventually the entire world.

And these people were not commissioned and then sent out solo, like good luck out there! They were sent out as communities to form other communities that eventually took on the name “Church.” And that’s our call as well. We are meant to bring the knowledge and power of the resurrection to people and a world in need through the power of communities. And we aren’t just talking about little church communities, we are talking about you — a person with a divine mandate to spread the resurrection story — creating transformed little resurrection communities all over your world. In your workplaces, play places, garden spaces, eating places, and wherever else you can think of.

You can not follow Jesus alone, and those who are alone this world need you to show up in their lives and show them just how much power there is in the resurrection story of Jesus. This is what we are after. This is what Jesus was raised from the grave to invite us to be a part of. This is how we live resurrected lives that bring the transformational power of Jesus’s resurrection to our world.