Easter

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God of life, your Spirit raised Jesus from dead. Your Spirit inspired the prophets and writers of Scripture. Your Spirit draws us to Christ and helps us to acknowledge him as Lord. We ask that you will send your Spirit now to give us deeper insight, encouragement, faith, and hope through the proclamation of the Easter gospel. Amen.

Hear the word of our Lord for us this morning from the gospel of Luke chapter 24.

Luke 24:1–12 NIV

On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ ” Then they remembered his words. When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.

L: This is the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ!

P: Praise to you, O Christ!

Introduction

Several years ago now, I read an article or a book about preaching on Easter. I honestly can’t remember which. And, I don’t even remember the author so I cannot give his person the credit. But this was their point. The temptation for preachers on Easter is to try to come up with some new creative insight or illustration to make Easter come alive for people. Preacher may want the thrill of that new insight, but people simply need to be reminded of the truth and hope of the resurrection. In other words, don’t try to impress people with your preaching, point them back to the empty tomb.

That has really stuck with me, so that’s what we are going to do today. As we think about the resurrection story from the gospel of Luke, I want to highlight three ways we can Deny the Resurrection in our lives. We can deny the reality of the resurrection, the meaning of the resurrection, and the spiritual reality of the resurrection.

Deny the Reality of the Resurrection

First, the women come to the tomb early on Sunday morning expecting the tomb to be, well, occupied. They knew as well as you and I do that when people die, they stay dead. Even after the see the empty tomb and meet the angels and hear the good news of Jesus’ resurrection, when they go back and tell the disciples, the disciples do not believe them.

I think sometimes, as modern, educated, scientific minded people, we can think people living in the first century were simply dumber then us, less wise to the ways of the world, more easily duped, more inclined to believe crazy rumors and outlandish tales to be true.

Perhaps this might be true, but the many people believing conspiracy theories about everything from the moon landing to Sandy hook to Covid and the latest election all point to a world where many people are being lies. Because either the conspiracy theorists have been duped or the rest of us have. But someone is believing a lie. We might not be any smarter than people in the past.

But, even if we are smarter and wiser to the was of disinformation, we should be much slower to think ancient Greek and Romans would be fooled by resurrection for another reason. Roman and Greek philosophy taught that our bodies are bad and the goal of life was to escape this physical world to live in some sort of disembodied bliss. For them, while crucifixion was terrible and horrifying, death itself was something to be accepted and embraced. It was an escape from this broken and messed up world. It would make no sense to them that someone would be resurrected with a physical body and come back to the world. It is philosophically ludicrous. It flips their whole world view on its head.

That’s why Luke provides a list of people they can ask about the resurrection. Mary Magdalene. Joanna. Marry the mother of James. Even Peter who runs to the tomb. Remember, Luke is writing his gospel somewhere between 60 and 80 AD. It has only been 30-50 years since Jesus died. So, he lists some eyewitnesses you can go see and talk to if you want to investigate the matter for yourself. Paul does something similar in 1 Corinthians 15 when he lists all the appearances of Jesus before the ascension. They want people to go check out the truth for themselves. Talk to the eye witnesses. Listen to their stories. And then decide for yourself if this is true.

Imagine for just a moment if someone came to Grandville and starting telling a story about how President Kennedy and made an appearance in Grand Rapids in 1975. Roughly 45 years ago. I imagine we would all go and talk with people we knew who lived in Grand Rapids at that time. I would talk to my parents and obviously many of you, because certainly even if you had not seen President Kennedy alive in 1975, you would have heard about it. We would investigate. Luke is inviting his original audience to do the same.

Every year around this time, there will be news stories and articles written about the real Jesus, trying to explain what really happened, because we struggle to believe resurrection can really happen.

I want to suggest to you this morning that this is a form or arrogance, chronological arrogance. It assumes somehow that people who lived 2,000 years ago were too dumb to see the lie in these historical documents. Thousands of them, just 50 days after Jesus’ death, heard the disciples tell the story and dedicated their lives to living in response to the resurrection of Jesus. They were all just foolish suckers. The thousands upon thousands who believed because of the written gospels and the testimony of Paul and the eye witnesses they both pointed to, were just not very bright people. You are assuming people back then were just plain dumber than we are.

Do you really think the people who invented Euclidean Geometry and read Plato and Aristotle for fun were somehow less good at logic and reasoning than we are? The Greek are the people who basically invented logical arguments!

But hey, I will give you this. You stand right with the disciples on Easter Sunday. They didn’t believe either. The claim is ridiculous. Dead people do not come back to life and certainly not with some totally different sort of body like Jesus did. And yet, after they met Jesus they all believed too and willingly gave up their lives for the claim the tomb was empty.

Do we really believe the hundreds of people who died for making this claim in those first 50 years after the resurrection were all so foolish as to not consider the facts? All of them were predisposed, just like you and me, to think resurrection is impossible. Believing in the resurrection did not make their lives easier, only harder. And still they knew it to be true. So true, doubting Thomas could exclaim, “My Lord and my God!”

Sometimes we can deny the resurrection, but have we really considered the evidence?

Deny the Meaning of the Resurrection

Other times, we fully believe in the resurrection, but we deny the meaning of the resurrection. When the women come to the tomb, the angel says to them, “Remember how he told you, ‘The son of Man must be delivered overt to the ands of sinners, be crucified, and on the third day be raised again.’”

The word ‘must’ carried a lot of weight in that sentence. Jesus must be delivered and crucified and raised. Something deeply important happens on this holy weekend and the church has been wrestling with how to explain it for 2,000 years. Why must he suffer? Why must he die? Why must he be raised?

I imagine most of us here today do not deny the resurrection. We believe it to be true. But like the women, we know Jesus must suffer, die and be raised, but we also don’t really know. He suffered and died because he loved us. Yep. He suffered and died because he lived a life of such amazing integrity that the powers that be had to get rid of him. Yep. He suffered and died to give us an example. Yep. By why must he suffer and die?

For the last three months, I have been slowly working my way through this great book called Crucifixion by Fleming Rutledge. In it, she spends 600 pages trying to explain all the ways the church has sought to explain what happened on the cross and Easter Sunday morning. These are the two big ideas that overlap with one another that explain why Jesus must suffer, die, and be raised.

First, there are consequences for sin. All the way back in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve first sinned, their were consequences. The ground is cursed. Child bearing is painful. Their relationship with each other is broken. They will die. And they can no longer be in the presence of God. Everything the world got broken. We all became enemies of God.

On the cross, Jesus stood in our place. He took the consequence for our sin on himself. This is why Jesus says on the cross, Why have you abandoned me? He experienced the separation from God that my sin and your sin deserve. To take out place, he had to suffer the consequences of our sin and be separated from God. But, because he died in this way, Paul tells us in Romasn 5

Romans 5:10 NIV

For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

Jesus death reconciles us to God. This is one reason why he must suffer, die and be raised. To bear the consequence of our sin.

But there is another reason. On the cross, the powers of our world. The powers of oppression and violence. The powers of fear and anxiety. The powers of sin and the devil so often enacted through the powers of earthly empires did their worst to him. The judged. They mocked. They beat. They cast aside. if all Jesus did was die on the cross and bear the consequence, the powers of sin and death would still rule, but Jesus resurrection undoes the power of sin and death in our world. They have no power over Jesus or those who follow him.

At the end of his powerful section in 1 Corinthians defending the reality of the physical resurrection of Jesus, Paul ends with this moving paragraph:

1 Corinthians 15:50–57 NIV

I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

We have been forgiven. The consequence of our sin has been born by Jesus. And, the power of sin has been defeated by his resurrection. And yet, some of us still live under the law. As if we had to earn God’s favor by being good enough. When we live as if God needs us to be good in order to love us… when we live as if other people need to get their lived together before we can accept them as brothers and sisters in Christ... when we make our faith about following the rules, we deny the power, the meaning, of the resurrection in our lives.

Deny the Spiritual Truth of the Resurrection

And then finally, some of us know the resurrection is true. We know our faith is about grace and not our performance. But we deny the spiritual truth of the resurrection. We live as if being a Christian is all about thinking the right things about Jesus and doing the right things in our lives and we miss on the greatest hope of the resurrection. If that is where you are today, you, too, are deny the resurrection. You are deny the spiritual reality of our living Jesus

Because, if Jesus was truly raised with a new body that will never perish spoil or fade, a body that will never die, then he is still alive today and we can have a relationship with him. If you are a good church goer and a good Bible believing Christian, but you do not have a living active relationship with Jesus, I want you to know there is more to Christianity than thinking the right thoughts or doing the right things. There is also a God who deeply loves you and longs to be with you and have an ongoing relationship with you.

Do you remember when you were a teenager? Maybe when you first came to faith? You had this passion and longing to accomplish something. A driving energy to go out into the world and make something of yourself. When you first believed a deep desire to pursue God. To pursue the living God, not some boring staid idea of God, but the living God who is out in the world bringing the dead back to life, making resurrection out of the ashes of our lives.

Easter is our annual reminder that our God is still out there, still redeeming what was lost, still breathing life into the dead, do we have the courage to run into the world and join him?

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.