The Resurrection of Christ

Introduction

Suppose you got up and flicked the news on first thing this morning

And to your surprise it did not lead with the pandemic, or the restrictions, or even Brexit

Instead, the lead story was of the discovery in a cave near Jerusalem of an ossuary

An ossuary was a box into which the bones of people who died used to be put after their bodies had decomposed

The newsworthy thing about this ossuary was that the absolutely clear, irrefutable result of the best scientific DNA testing was that these were beyond any doubt the mortal remains of Jesus Christ.

Now: hearing that news, would you still have come to church this morning?

I suppose you might have come to see if others had heard the news, or maybe out of habit or a desire to meet good friends, but would it still make sense to turn up?

Or to put the question differently: would it still make sense to be a Christian believer, and to try to live a Christian lifestyle?

In this chapter, which is perhaps the longest single sustained argument that Paul develops anywhere in his writings, he explains why the answer to that question is ‘no’, it wouldn’t make sense.

As he says in v14, if Christ has not been raised, then ‘our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain’

And as he says again in v17, if Christ has not been raised, ‘your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.’

The Question: What is so special about the death and resurrection of Jesus?

Death by crucifixion was nothing unusual in Jesus’s day.

The Roman Empire was a brutally efficient killing machine, and its favoured mode of execution was crucifixion for anyone other than Roman citizens. So on its own, Jesus’s death was one of thousands who suffered that cruel and inhumane death.

Raising the dead was rare, but certainly not unheard of.

In the OT in 1 Kings, the prophet Elijah had raised the son of the widow of Zarepath.

Jesus raised the synagogue ruler’s daughter, the son of the widow of Nain, and perhaps most famously, Lazarus.

So what - if anything - was special about the death and the resurrection of Jesus?

What was special about His death?

What is distinctive about his death is that, as we are told, he died ‘for our sins’

What does it mean that he died, ‘for our sins’?

Well first we might say that he didn’t die for his own sins, because he had none. He was the only person ever to have lived who never sinned. He completely and fully obeyed the law of God. That really matters.

When it says that he died ‘for our sins’, it means, among other things, that he died purposefully, and that purpose was to bear the penalty our sins deserved and which we could never pay ourselves.

As the prophet Isaiah put it 800 years earlier, ‘Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are 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.’

Think about the words in that statement: borne, carried, stricken, smitten, afflicted, pierced, crushed, chastised, wounded

None were for things he had done or to benefit him - they were all for us.

Our griefs and sorrows were carried by him.

Our transgressions, our iniquities, were laid on him.

What was special about both his death and his resurrection?

Paul repeats himself within the same sentence in v3 - did you notice?

He says that Christ died ‘in accordance with the Scriptures’

And then in the next breath he says that he was raised on the third day ‘in accordance with the Scriptures’

What does that mean?

It doesn’t mean the Bible as we know it, because the NT had not been written for the most part. So it’s referring to what we call the OT. That was Jesus’s Bible.

It doesn’t just mean either that if you scour the OT carefully enough you will find passages that speak about the death and the resurrection of the Messiah who was to come - though it is true that you will, passages like the one from Isaiah that we have just read part of, and others in the Psalms for example.

It refers to the fact that, as one writer has put it, the whole of the OT is a story without an ending.

At the end of the OT, God’s chosen people are partly dispersed into other nations without any distinctive national identity any more, the rest who remained in ithe land are under the heel of Rome. What had become of God’s plan, of those great prophecies in Isaiah, and Ezekiel and elsewhere that spoke of a glorious future and a kingdom of God that would never end?

The answer is that they all come rushing together in Jesus, and his death and resurrection.

His death and resurrection are what the whole complex storyline of the OT is leading to and pointing to, from Genesis to Malachi.

Remember that cryptic sentence on the serpent in the Garden of Eden in Gen 3: “He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel’? It’s talking about what Jesus would do.

Remember that amazing story in Exodus of the killing of the passover lamb, and the application of its blood to the doorpost and the lintels, and of that blood protecting the Israelite children from death? It’s talking about what Jesus would do.

Have you ever tried to make sense of those complex rules about sacrifices in Leviticus? It’s all pointing forward to the one final sacrifice that Jesus would be.

Luke tells a story in ch24 of 2 dispirited disciples who were walking home after the crucifixion, who were joined by someone they were kept from recognising but we the readers are let into the fact that it was the risen Christ.

And Luke tells us that he gently chided them, saying, ‘O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?

And then he goes on: ‘And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself’

That is why Jesus’s resurrection was different to Lazarus and the others.

They died, then stepped as it were out of death back into the same kind of life as they had, only to die again.

Jesus died, but went through death and out on the other side, inaugurating what the Bible calls the ‘new creation’ - a whole new order of things that he will one day bring to its great consummation in the new heavens and the new earth

And those who are united to him by faith are, here and now, part of that new creation. As Paul says in one of his letters, ‘If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation’

And the resurrection for us means that we will one day be given new bodies that are suited to life in that new creation when God makes everything new.