Easter
I read this week* that there are sixty-five new massive rollercoasters opening around the world this year. There are already hundreds of breath-taking roller coasters around the globe, and they’ve all been rated by various rollercoaster enthusiasts. The top-rated rollercoaster in the world is reportedly the Kingda Ka at Six Flags in New Jersey. It goes from zero to 138 miles an hour in less than four seconds and has a straight, vertical 90 degree drop. I only know of one rollercoaster more dramatic, and that’s Matthew, chapters 27 and 28—and the rollercoaster of emotions connected with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I describe it as a rollercoaster of emotions because I want you to try to visualize and internalize the ups and downs of that world-changing weekend—the depths of horror and depression and despair; the tinges of excitement as hints and rumors of the resurrection began to appear; and then the massive explosion of joy which is still reverberating through history and is ringing out in millions of hearts today. I’d like to ask you three questions this morning along these lines:
Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?
Experience the Grief
(Matthew 27:32-39).
First, were you there when they crucified my Lord? Or to put it differently, can you imagine the grief experienced by His family and friends as they gazed at His beaten and battered body hanging exposed on the cross? Here’s the way Matthew expressed it in chapter 27 of his Gospel:
As they were going out, they met a man from Cyrene, named Simon, and they forced him to carry the cross. They came to a place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Scull). There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it. When they had crucified Him, they divided up His clothes by casting lots. And sitting down, they kept watch over Him there. Above His head they placed the written charge against Him: This is Jesus, the King of the Jews. Two robbers were crucified with Him, one on His right and one on His left. Those who passed by hurled insults at Him, shaking their heads….
From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” – which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
…And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, He gave up His spirit…
A man recently corresponded with me about this. He had read one of my books and was commenting about the hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross.” In his letter, he made an interesting observation. The crosses that hang around our necks or that adorn our churches are polished and smooth. If someone makes a wooden cross for a church sanctuary, for example, they typically sand it down and put a coat of varnish or polyurethane over it. You can run your hand over it without getting any cuts or splinters. It’s as smooth as a piece of furniture. But the Romans who cut the trees and split the wood and formed the cross of Christ had no such designs. The wood was rough and jagged and filled with hundreds of sharp splinters of varying sizes. The wood was perhaps riddled with insects. When the raw and scourged back of Jesus Christ was forced onto that wood and raised perpendicular to the ground, the full weight of his body bore down on all those splinters and exposed Him to all the tortures of that wood.
Mel Gibson tried to portray the torture of crucifixion in his movie about the passion of Christ, and people around the world were shocked at how graphic and bloody it was. But the reason is because the cross portrays our sins, and our sins are very ugly and very deadly. It’s a gruesome but a perfect symbol. The Bible teaches that on the cross, Jesus was bearing the ugliness and deadliness of our own sins, and the power of His shed blood is sufficient to obtain our eternal pardon.
Seven hundred years before the crucifixion of Christ, the prophet Isaiah predicted and described it for us and explained to us its meaning. He wrote: He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows… He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes are we healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
Every one of our sins was laid on our Lord that day. Think of it! Your sins and mine. The worst and darkest of all our secrets, and those sins that are so small that we may not even be aware of them. There’s not anything you can do that’s beyond the scope of the blood of Jesus Christ and His ability to fully pardon and forgive. So my first question today is, have you been to Calvary? Have you gazed upon the very dying form of one who suffered there for you and me? Can you imagine the grief of that day?
Were You There When They Laid Him in the Tomb?
Experience the Despair
(Matthew 27:57-61)
The second question is: Were you there then they laid Him in the tomb? In other words, can you imagine the despair of that Friday night and that black and hopeless Saturday? Let’s continue reading Matthew’s description of it:
As evening approached, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph who had himself become a disciple of Jesus. Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body, and Pilate ordered that it be given to him. Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a big stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting there opposite the tomb.
They were utterly helpless and felt utterly hopeless. Think of how Mary the mother of Jesus felt. Think of how Peter felt. Suppose that someone comes up to you, doubles up his fist, and slams it into your face. That would be bad enough, but what if he aims next for your stomach, then for your kidney. Multiple blows are catastrophic to our bodies and to our nervous systems. And here the followers of Jesus had multiple blows.
First, their dearest one had died. Second, He had died young. Third, He had been tortured to death before their very eyes. Fourth, they had deserted Him at His moment of greatest need, and they were overwhelmed, not only with grief but with guilt. Fifth, they had not only lost their friend, they had literally lost their religion. They had based their eternal destiny and their spiritual hope on Jesus as the Messiah, and they apparently been wrong. For us, when we suffer a crippling loss, at least we can find comfort and solace in our faith and in the promises of God; but these people no longer had that. Their so-called Messiah—or what was left of His mangled body—was in the tomb. Sixth, they no longer even had jobs or normal occupations or a routine to which they could return. They had left all to follow Him. Virtually everything in their lives had collapsed, and the blackness of despair had fallen over their lives like the edge of night.
Often as I read the Bible, I say to myself, “I wish I had been there just for the day. I wish I could have seen this or that take place.” But I’ve never wanted to have been there on that black Saturday when the followers of Christ were trapped in a nightmare and His body was laying lifeless in that tomb. Yet all of us need to go there and understand and appreciate it.
Were you there when they laid Him in the tomb? Can you imagine the despair of that day?
Were You There When He Rose Up from the Grave?
Experience the Joy
(Matthew 28:1-10)
But you can anticipate my third question: Were you there when He rose up from the grave? Can you imagine the intoxicating joy, the happiness, the exuberance of that dawning Easter Sunday? Matthew describes it like this:
After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of Him that they shook and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; He has risen, just as He said. Come and see the place where He lay. Then go quickly and tell His disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see Him.’ Now I have told you.” So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell His disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” He said. They came to Him, clasped His feet and worshipped Him. Then Jesus said, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see Me.”
The resurrection of Christ is biblically logical and theologically necessary. None of us would have invented a story like this, but now as we look back on it we can see the genius of God in the plan that He devised from the foundation of the world. He knew that in the freedom of our own wills, we would fall and fail and need forgiveness. So He Himself entered into humanity, died on the cross for our sins, and rose from the dead that death itself might be destroyed. This took place at a specific event in history, and that event is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. God was in Christ defeating sin and Satan, and destroying death and despair forever.
No wonder the angels said, “Go and spread the news. Go and tell someone else.” Can you imagine how impossible it would have been to have kept this a secret? This was brought home to me earlier this year when I read the story of a woman named Marty Halyburton whose husband was shot down during the Vietnam War. On October 17, 1965, Navy Pilot Porter Halyburton’s plane was shot down over North Vietnam, and American aircraft in the area saw nothing but a fireball. No ejection. No parachute. No radio transmission on the ground. No beeping from any emergency transmitters.
Shortly afterward, far away in Atlanta, Georgia, Georgia, a car pulled up and two men in uniform and a Navy chaplain knocked on the door of Porter’s wife, Marty. They told her that Porter had been shot down and killed in action over North Vietnam. They showed her a map of the area and pointed to where his plane had erupted in a ball of fire. “We know he’s dead,” they told her.
For several days, Marty was to numb to react. She simply held the couple’s baby and knew the child would never know her daddy. A memorial service was held, and an overflow crowd of people came to offer their condolences. Speakers spoke well of Porter’s young life and the happiness he had brought to so many people. He was a hero, they said, who gave his life for freedom. Flags were flown at half-staff all over town, and a grave-marker was placed in Porter’s memory in the family cemetery listing the dates of his birth and death.
Eighteen months passed and Marty tried to adjust to her tragic loss, but it was very hard, and eventually she even began dating a little; but every night she missed Porter.
Unknown to her, Porter had survived the crash and was being held by the North Vietnamese as a POW. Despite abuse and even torture, he was in reasonably good condition; but he anguished over the fact that he knew his family must think he was dead. But then one day, the North Vietnamese staged a publicity stunt in which the paraded some of the POWs through the streets of Hanoi, and United States Military Intelligence gained photographs and studied them with painstaking care. There among them was Porter Halyburton.
Shortly afterward, a man from the casualty branch of the Navy called Marty to inquire about her well-being. At first, Marty thought it was simply a courtesy call. But then he asked for directions to her house and asked if he could stop by. Then he said that he had flown in from Washington.
Marty hung up the phone and walked into the living room where her best friend happened to be waiting. “Dot,” said Marty, “this man is coming from Washington.”
“What do you think he wants?” said Dot.
Marty paused and then spoke flatly, “They’re coming to tell me that Porter’s alive.”
A few minutes later six men showed up, and Marty met them at the doorstep. One of them looked at her and said, “We’ve got something to talk to about you.” And Marty interrupted him and said, “I know what you have to say. You’ve come to tell me that my husband is alive.”
The man looked at her in amazement, then said, “I’ve been worrying about how I was going to tell you, and you’ve just made it easier for me.” They went into the house and told Marty everything they knew, but then they told her to keep the news to herself and not to share it with anyone except the very closest of immediate family members for fear of reprisals against the POWs if the news got out.
That, however, proved impossible to do. How do you hide the sparkle in your eyes, the bounce in your step, the smile on your face? How do you hide the sudden transformation that has come over your personality? How do you stand around talking to your friends without blurting out the news? How do you answer questions without hinting at the truth? In the end, the Navy realized this and they made it easier by officially changing Porter’s status; and from that moment on, Marty devoted her life to two things. First, she did all she could to keep the plight of American POWs in front of the American public. She met with congressmen and reporters and spoke at functions and spread the news so that the POWs would not be forgotten. And second, she started preparing for the day when Porter would come home again—as he, in fact, did.
As I read that story, I found that I identified with it, with the rising and falling of her emotions, with the rollercoaster experience she faced. I couldn’t help but think of Easter, of Christ, of the Resurrection, and of those original followers of Christ. That must be something of how they felt. First, the tragic, heart-numbing news that He was dead. Then the suspicions that He was alive after all. Then confirmation. But there’s one thing Marty endured that the disciples didn’t have to face. They were never told to keep it quiet.
How could anyone keep news like that quiet? If Christ has risen from the dead, don’t you think it will show up in the sparkle in our eyes, the smile on our face, the bounce in our step, the conversations we have with friends and family? The joy of resurrection is irrepressible.
We should live out that joy every day; and we can do it by giving our lives without reservation to the Lord Jesus Christ. What Jesus Christ did was very public before all the world, but it is very personal to each of us. In His omniscience, I believe that He had in mind every single individual in the world who needed or would ever need redemption. He was thinking of you, and today He is calling you to become His follower. He wants to forgive your sins, heal your hurts, and give you everlasting life.
If Jesus Christ could lift Peter and John and Mary from the depths of despair and infuse them with certain hope, He can do the same for you. If Jesus Christ could turn their sadness into gladness, He can do the same for you. If He could forgive their sin and give them eternal life, He can do so now for you here in this place. If He could burst the tomb and destroy death on that Easter Sunday, He can change your life today and put you on a new path and give you a purpose worth living for.
It’s time to get off the rollercoaster and onto the straight and narrow. The Bible says, “If we confess with our mouths Jesus as Lord and believe in our hearts that God has raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved; for with the heart one believes unto righteousness and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon Him. For whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:9-13).
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