At the age of seven, a young boy and his family were forced to leave their home, and the boy had to go to work to help support the family. When he was nine, his mother died. In his late teens he had a job as a store clerk, but lost it when he was twenty. He wanted to go to law school, but had no education. He went into debt when he was twenty-three to become a partner in a small store. Three years later his business partner died, and left him with a debt that took years for him to repay.
He dated a girl for four years and, at the
age of twenty-eight, decided to ask her to marry him. She turned him down. At
37, on his third try, he was elected to the US Congress. He then sought
re-election and failed. At the age of forty-five, he ran for the
Not really a stellar career, is it? Kind of “on again-off again,” with more failures than successes. In fact, you might wonder why anyone would take the time to research it and write it up?
Because, finally, at the age of fifty-one,
this man was elected President of the
You see, it’s the end of a story that makes the rest of it important and meaningful. Anybody who has read stories to a child and tried to stop the story in the middle, because it’s late or you have to go do something else, knows that’s true. You’ve heard the cry. “But I want to know how it ends!” The ending is everything.
[When we were in
Over the last month or more we’ve been looking at the cross, at Jesus’ crucifixion, from various different angles. We’ve looked at Jesus’ death on the cross as ransom, the payment of a great price to set people free. We’ve looked at it as substitution, Jesus taking our place and dying for us. We’ve looked at it as justification, as God’s way of setting us right. And last week Tim helped us look at the cross as God’s way of winning victory over sin and evil by taking it upon himself.
But why do we care? Why do we care what Jesus’ crucifixion meant? Why did the New Testament writers pull in so many metaphors to explain it?
Lots of people were crucified in the
ancient world; at least tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. The first
century Jewish historian Josephus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, both report an
incident in 88BC where 800 Pharisees were crucified on one day; while their
wives and children were made to watch. Josephus also tells us that during the
siege of
Crucifixion was a common tool used by the state (the Persian state, the Roman state, even the Jewish state – those 800 Pharisees were crucified by a Jewish king) it was a tool used by the state to strike terror into the hearts of those who would oppose them. So why do we treat Jesus’ crucifixion as different? What, out of all those tens, or hundreds of thousands of crucifixions makes this one different?
Seven words in Mark 16.6, “He is risen! He is not here.”
Why do we study the life and words of a
Jewish rabbi executed as a revolutionary by the
Because of those seven words, “He is risen! He is not here.”
It’s what we find at the end of the gospels that explains why they were written in the first place.
“He is risen! He is not here.”
If Jesus’ body had been in the tomb that morning when the women arrived, there would be no gospels, there would be no New Testament, there would be no church, and we certainly wouldn’t be sitting here this morning.
But, when they arrived that morning, the tomb was empty and a heavenly messenger told them, “He is risen! He is not here.”
The body was gone... This week I happened
upon a TV show about Adolf Hitler. Although we’re pretty sure that Hitler
committed suicide in the final hours of World War 2 his body has never been
found. It wasn’t until the fall of the
As you can imagine, the lack of a body has given rise to all kinds of rumours and conspiracy theories; that Hitler never died, that a double died in his place, even that the CIA have been hiding him somewhere in Kansas.
People have done similar things with Jesus. It seems that a guaranteed way to make money these days is to write a book that says something outrageous about Jesus. It doesn’t matter if you’re a novelist like Dan Brown, who claims that Jesus married and had children and died a natural death, or an Oxford professor like Richard Dawkins, who goes one better and claims that Jesus never existed in the first place, you can always be sure that people will buy your book and make you money.
Of course, the problem is that there isn’t a serious historian alive; Christian, Jewish or agnostic, (Dawkins is a biologist) who disagrees with the basic narrative of the gospels. That Jesus lived and taught in the first part of the first century. That he did things that those around him considered miraculous. That he caused a public disturbance in the temple. That shortly afterwards he was arrested tried and executed by crucifixion. And here’s the kicker. Most historians will agree that, shortly after his crucifixion, Jesus' tomb was empty and significant numbers of men and women experienced what they believed to be appearances of the risen Jesus.
These are the historical facts of Easter Sunday: an empty tomb and resurrection experiences. And you don’t have to be a Christian to believe those facts. Leading Jewish historians like 'Geza 'Vermes accept them, and even self-confessed agnostics like Professor Ed Sanders of Duke University, who wrote: "That Jesus' followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know." Something extraordinary happened on that first Easter, but the raw facts are that Jesus’ body was gone and that people reported seeing him alive.
They reported seeing
him alive. They didn’t report seeing a ghost or a vision. And they didn’t say
they saw Jesus resuscitated. A number of people are resuscitated in the Bible.
It’s what Jesus did for Lazarus. He brought him back from the dead. But Lazarus
still died eventually.
Jesus wasn’t resuscitated. No-one pulled him back from death. The messenger said, “he is risen.” A better translation is “he has been raised.” You see, Jesus was really dead; and dead people don’t do anything, certainly not rise from the dead. And the New Testament is clear that Jesus did not rise from the dead by himself.
Listen to Peter as he preaches in Acts 4:10 “then know this, you and all the people of
Or Paul in Romans 8:11 “… if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead
is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to
your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.” And again in Romans 10:9, “… if you
confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God
raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Except for one or two
exceptions, whenever the New Testament talks about Jesus’ resurrection, it
speaks of God raising Jesus or Jesus being raised by God. Jesus lived his
entire life in dependence upon God. That’s one of the main themes of Luke’s
gospel. And even in death he depended on his heavenly father to raise him from
the dead.
But what does that
mean? Why would God raise Jesus from the dead? Again, if we ask Peter, who
walked with Jesus for three years, and who was one of the first people at the
empty tomb, he says in Acts 2.36, “Therefore let
all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified,
both Lord and Christ.” For him, the
resurrection proves that Jesus was and is who he claimed to be, that he was,
and is, God’s solution to the problem of being human, to the problem of sin. That
he was God in the flesh, and that he had overcome sin and evil at the cross and
that, as a result, God had vindicated him and raised him from the dead.
How did he come to
that conclusion? Because resurrection was what he, and most of his fellow Jews,
looked forward to as God’s reward to the righteous. They believed that at the
end of history God would raise up all those who had been faithful to him and
they would live in what Revelation describes as “a new heaven and a new earth.”
Now, if you ask most
people, even most Christians, what resurrection means, they’ll tell you that
resurrection is about life after death. That it means our soul survives beyond
the grave and goes to be with God. That may be true, but it isn’t what Peter or
anybody else in the Bible believed about resurrection. If that had been the
point there was no need for Jesus’ body to be gone. All that needed to happen
was for people to see visions of him to be convinced that he survived beyond
the grave.
But in the Bible
“resurrection” is not about some kind of spiritual existence after death. It’s
about being physically raised from the dead in a redeemed body to live in a
redeemed creation at the end of history. What was so radical about Jesus was
that he got his redeemed body early.
In Rom 8:29 Paul calls
him “the firstborn among many brothers
and sisters.” In
What the disciples saw
after Jesus’ resurrection was not a ghost. It was not a disembodied spirit. Luke
makes a point of that when he tells us about Jesus eating a piece of broiled
fish. Ghosts don’t eat. No, the Jesus that they met after the resurrection was
real, physical, maybe more than physical (he did appear in a room with
the doors locked) but certainly not less than physical.
The body was gone because Jesus had gone through death and come out the
other side with a new, redeemed body.
So what difference
does that make?
A third thing that the
messenger said to the women was ‘He is going
ahead of you into
As we studied in Mark
earlier on this year we saw again and again that Jesus calls people to follow
him. Those who respond to that call and choose to follow him become his
disciples, and that applies to us even today. When you are a disciple you
follow Jesus. He goes first, he goes ahead, and you follow after him. And what
we see here is that that pattern continues, even through death. The messenger
tells the women that Jesus has gone
ahead to
The same call applies to us. Jesus has gone ahead of us and he calls us to follow him. That means that he calls us to live redeemed lives now. Jesus is the firstborn from the dead, the first model of a new kind of humanity. And as we put our faith in him, believe that he can give us new life, and trust him with our future, we can enter into that new way of life.
Unlike Jesus, we won’t get our new, redeemed bodies until he returns at the end of everything. In fact one of the things that Paul and the rest of the New Testament writers struggle with is what it means to live between resurrections, between Jesus’ resurrection – which gives us hope for the future – and our own resurrection at the end of history. That’s a whole other series of sermons, but in a sentence it means living like Jesus, living today in a way that reflects our destiny as God’s children.
We started off saying that the ending is what makes sense of the story. That’s true for the gospels. It’s also true for you and me. We can live today in ways that reflect the new heaven and new earth that the Bible tells us will be our eternal destiny. We have a choice, each one of us. We can either live our lives our own way, a way that leads to death. Or we can follow Jesus, who is “The Way,” the way that leads through death and into new life. He has gone before us and calls us to follow him, secure in the knowledge that he has conquered death and that as we follow him we will know true life.