NOTE:
This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.
ENGAGE
Our relationships in life develop to a large degree based on how we perceive other people. That is certainly true when it comes to my relationship with Mary.
That relationship began one afternoon in the Student Union building at the University of Arizona as I noticed this attractive young woman who was also waiting to go into the same meeting where we were going to be trained to be student hosts for freshman orientation that summer. The relationship moved into its next phase when we began to work together that summer and I got to know her better and began to think that she would be someone I’d like to spend some time with. And then the relationship moved to a whole new level when I finally asked her out after she stalked me for several weeks at my job at the Lucky Wishbone.
As we dated and I got to know her better, I began to fall in love with her and I couldn’t wait to spend time with her. And so one day when she asked me to go to church with her, I figured I liked her enough to endure that for one Sunday, not realizing that I would meet Jesus there and enter into a personal relationship with Him. And the fact that Mary and I shared that relationship in common took our relationship to an even deeper level.
Over the nearly 42 years we’ve been married, our relationship has grown deeper as I’ve come to know her not only as my wife and best friend, but also as the mother of my children and the grandmother of my grandchildren, among other things. And because I know her in ways today that I never knew her back then, our relationship has come a long way since that day I first laid eyes on her.
TENSION
In much the same way, my relationship with Jesus is going to be influenced by my perception of who He is. The fact that you are here with us this morning as we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus means that you believe in Jesus to at least some degree. But based on my own personal observations as well as evidence from surveys that have been done over the years, I’m also pretty sure that not all of us see Jesus quite the same.
The good news is that in spite of the way that He has been fictionalized, satirized, and mythologized in our culture, still about 9 of 10 Americans believe that Jesus was a real person who once walked on earth. But that is not true everywhere. For instance, in England, that number drops to around 60% and the numbers tend to be lower among younger generations both here in the U.S. and around the world. But not surprisingly, even among those who believe Jesus actually lived here on earth, not everyone agrees when it comes to some of the crucial aspects of who He is:
• Only a little over half the adults in America believe that Jesus is God. About a quarter consider Him to be only a religious or spiritual leader.
• Only about half of Americans believe that Jesus lived a sinless life while here on earth
Even most of the world’s major religions acknowledge Jesus as a real person, although, as you would expect, they have some distinctly different ideas about who He is:
• Islam holds that He was a wise teacher and a prophet
• Buddhism and Hinduism view Him as a wise man
• Jehovah’s Witnesses consider Him to be an archangel who was God’s first created being
• Mormons consider Him to be a spirit being who attained Godhood
This morning, we’re going to look at a life transforming encounter that a very ordinary woman has with the resurrected Jesus that demonstrates that who we think Jesus is and how we respond to that perception is the most important decision we will ever make in our lives.
TRUTH
Today we embark on a new sermon series titled “40 Days with Jesus.” In Acts chapter 1, Luke reveals that after His resurrection, Jesus spent 40 days on the earth before He ascended to His father. And we know from what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15, that over those 40 days Jesus appeared to over 500 people. So for the next six weeks, we’ll be taking a look at some of those encounters to see what they teach us about how to grow in our relationships with Jesus, both personally and corporately.
We’ll begin this morning with His very first encounter after the resurrection. We’ll find that account in chapter 20 of John’s gospel account. John is the 4th of four gospel accounts in our Bible and you’ll find it right after Matthew, Mark, and Luke and before you get to the book of Acts.
[Read John 20:1-10]
As I mentioned earlier in the sunrise service, each of the gospel accounts give us a slightly different perspective on the resurrection. So, as we should expect, there are some differences in those four accounts, but it’s pretty easy to piece them together and find that they don’t contradict each other at all.
John’s account focuses on Mary Magdalene. Unfortunately, our culture has painted a very unbiblical picture of Mary. The rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar casts her as Jesus’ lover and implies that she is a prostitute. And more recently the best seller, The DaVinci Code, claims that she and Jesus were married and had children.
What we know about her from the Bible is very limited. In Luke 8, she is identified as one of a group of women who provided financial resources for Jesus and His disciples. We also know from that account that Jesus had freed her from 7 demons, but it is not clear exactly how that bondage had manifest itself in her life.
It’s instructive to note that the very first person that Jesus appears to after His resurrection is not who we would expect. He didn’t appear to the Jewish religious leaders or to the Roman officials or even to the apostles. Instead He appears to a very ordinary woman with a checkered past. That ought to be a tremendous encouragement to all of us. If Jesus chose this insignificant, formerly demon-possessed woman to be the first witness of His resurrection means that there is hope for every one of us, no matter what our past might look like.
Although John primary focuses on Mary, we know from the other gospel accounts that she came to the tomb early that Sunday morning with a group of other women. When she arrives at the tomb and notices the stone has been rolled away she runs back to tell Peter and John that somebody had stolen Jesus’ body, which was the only explanation that made sense to her at that point. So John and Peter head for the tomb. John, being younger, is able to outrun Peter and gets there first. He looks in and sees the grave clothes lying there, but he doesn’t enter. Peter finally arrives and, not surprisingly, he just barges into the tomb where he also sees the burial cloths lying there.
Many of you may be familiar with a story that has been making its way around the internet for over a decade now that claims that the fact that the face cloth was folded up is consistent with a Jewish tradition in which a folded napkin meant that someone was going to return to the table. There are a number of problems with that story. Most importantly, no one can cite any source for such a tradition in Jewish culture. In fact, it’s highly unlikely that the Jews even used the kind of napkins we think of in that culture. And as the ESV correctly translates the underlying Greek word, what John and Peter see is not a napkin anyway, but rather a “face cloth” that would have been used to wrap Jesus’ head.
There is plenty of evidence in the Bible that Jesus is indeed coming again, but the folded napkin isn’t part of that evidence. The significance of John’s description of the burial cloths lies in the fact that if someone had stolen the body, they wouldn’t have taken the time to unwrap the body and place those cloths neatly there in the tomb. Stealing bodies was actually somewhat common in Jesus’ day, but if someone stole a body, it was usually for the expensive spices that were used to embalm the body, so no one would take time to unwrap the body like that.
Unlike when Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead and he came out of the tomb with the face cloth still in place and others had to unbind him, Jesus merely came right out of the grave cloths with no need for anyone to unbind Him. As I said earlier this morning, the stone did not need to be moved so Jesus could get out of the tomb, but rather so others could get in to see that He had risen.
John finally entered the tomb and we are told that at that moment he believed. We don’t know the extent of his belief at that point but we are told that he still hadn’t connected the resurrection of Jesus with the Old Testament Scriptures that predicted it.
After that, Peter and John go back to their homes and leave Mary there by herself. Let’s pick up the account in verse 11:
[Read John 20:11-18]
By now Mary is literally bawling her eyes out and she finally decides to look into the tomb herself. There she sees two angels who ask her why she is weeping like that. The way the question is asked implies the empty tomb should have caused her to shout for joy, not shed tears of deep anguish and sorrow.
Mary’s response reveals that even after seeing the angels and the grave cloths placed neatly in the tomb, she still thinks that someone has stolen the body. The possibility that Jesus is alive doesn’t even cross her mind. So when Jesus speaks to her and also asks why she is crying, it’s not surprising that she doesn’t recognize Him. Between her tears, and the fact that Jesus’ resurrection body likely looked nothing like the bloodied body she had last seen on the cross, it’s easy to understand why she thinks He is merely the gardener.
I love Mary’s response here. If the gardener will just tell Mary where the body is, she claims that she will come retrieve the body and carry Jesus away. Unless she was some kind of body builder, I can’t imagine she was capable of doing that. But grief often causes us to say and do things we wouldn’t otherwise even think of.
When Jesus speaks Mary’s name, she immediately realizes this is Jesus. Jesus is still in the business of calling us by name and when He does, just like with Mary, it calls for a response on our part.
Mary responds by calling Jesus “Rabboni”, which is the Aramaic word for “teacher”. As we’ll see more fully in a moment, calling Jesus “teacher” is a good indication that Mary still didn’t understand the significance of the resurrection or the kind of Messiah that Jesus was. Even though she had earlier referred to Him as Lord, she still sees Jesus only as the good teacher she had followed for much of His earthly ministry. And that is the Jesus she wants to hand on to.
So as soon as she recognizes Jesus, Mary holds on to Him for dear life. In verse 17, we see that Jesus responds by literally commanding her to stop clinging to Him. Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion about what Jesus means here. Some of that occurs because of the KJV translation which renders Jesus’s command “Touch me not.” But we know from other Biblical accounts of the events after the resurrection that Jesus did not have a problem with people touching His resurrected body. In Matthew’s account of the resurrection, Jesus allowed a group of women to take hold of His feet and worship Him. And He invites Thomas to touch His hands and His side.
The verb that John uses here can mean to touch, but it more literally means “to fasten to”. So the picture than John paints for us here is that Mary is hanging on tight to Jesus because she doesn’t want to be separated from Him again. I think any of us would have probably felt that same way if we were in Mary’s shoes. But the problem here is that Mary is trying to cling to the pre-resurrection Jesus, which is clearly indicated by the fact that she calls Him “Teacher” and not “Savior” or “Lord”. Like many of Jesus’s followers, she had never understood that Jesus’ purpose in coming to this earth was to overcome sin and guilt, not to overcome the Roman government. So she wanted to hang on to the kind of relationship that she had with Jesus prior to His death and resurrection – one where He was primarily her teacher.
In that regard, she is a lot like many people today who are willing to cling to the Jesus that they consider to be a wise man or a good teacher, but who are not willing to embrace Him as their resurrected Savior and Lord.
But the resurrection had created the possibility for a completely new kind of relationship – both for Mary and for us, too. No longer would Jesus be physically present with His disciples because was going to ascend to heaven to be present with His heavenly Father where He would intercede constantly for them. And, as He had promised them earlier, once He ascended to His Father, He would send the Holy Spirit to dwell permanently in the life of very disciple. Although Mary, and many of the other disciples did not understand that at the time, that is actually better than Jesus being physically present on earth because as long as He was here, he was limited to being in one place at one time. But the Holy Spirit is always present in the life of every disciple.
That new kind of relationship is evidenced here by the way Jesus refers to His disciples in verse 17. He tells Mary to “go to my brothers…” This is the first time in John’s gospel where Jesus calls His disciples “brothers”. Right before His crucifixion, He told His disciples that He would no longer call them servants, but “friends” (John 15:15), but now He calls them brothers, which indicates a whole new kind of relationship. And He further reinforces the nature of that new relationship by calling God the Father “your Father” and “your God”.
I’m not sure that Mary had any idea how significant that was. Because of the resurrection, it was possible for Mary, and for all of us to go far beyond just being Jesus’ student, or follower or even friend. Because of the resurrection it is possible for us to become His brothers and sisters and to become children of God.
But in order for that to happen, Mary had to let go of who Jesus had been to her in the past and cling to who He was in the present. And the same thing is true for all of us. So here is the main idea that I want us all to take away from this passage this morning:
To become a child of God
I must cling to the living, resurrected Jesus
I don’t think Mary fully understood all that meant at that moment. But what I do know is that she immediately let go of Jesus and went back to the disciples, who were still in hiding at that point, and she told them everything that Jesus had said to her.
I can just imagine how the disciples, who had abandoned Jesus at His point of greatest need, would have reacted to what Mary told them. “He called us brothers? Are you sure you heard that right? After the way we failed Him, He called us brothers?” Can you imagine the kind of hope that must have given to those disciples?
The good news is that you can have that same kind of hope today. No matter what your perceptions about Jesus may have been in the past, and no matter how greatly you may have failed Him in the past, it is possible for you to become Jesus’ brother or sister and a child of the living God today by clinging to the living, resurrected Jesus.
APPLICATION
So how do I do that?
HOW TO CLING TO THE LIVING, RESURRECTED JESUS
Clinging to the living, resurrected Jesus is simple, but it’s not easy. I don’t have time this morning to cover every aspect of what it means to do that, but I do want to close this morning by sharing the basics. If you’ve never made the decision to cling to the living, resurrected Jesus by taking these steps and you’re interested in doing that, I’ll be sharing how we can help you do that in just a moment.
1. Acknowledge my sin and ask Jesus to forgive me
Just like Mary needed to be freed from her bondage to demons, all of us have violated God’s standards and need His forgiveness:
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
(Romans 3:23 ESV)
What we deserve for our sin is death, not just physical death, which we will all experience, but also spiritual death, which is permanent and eternal.
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
(Romans 6:23 ESV)
The good news is that God offers us the free gift of eternal life through Jesus. That leads to the second step I must take.
2. Believe that Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty for my sin
In a world that values individual effort, it’s easy to think that there is something I can do to overcome my own sin or to earn favor with God. But the Bible is clear that there is nothing I can do on my own to be made right with God.
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
(Ephesians 2:8–9 ESV)
Fortunately, God provided a way for the penalty for our sins to be paid – not by anything we do, but through the death of Jesus on the cross:
For our sake he made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
(2 Corinthians 5:21 ESV)
When Jesus, who lived a sinless life, died on the cross, God accepted His sacrifice as payment for our sin, so that when God looks at us He doesn’t see our sin, but rather the righteousness of Jesus. But in order for us to appropriate that righteousness, we have to take one more step.
3. Yield control of my life to Jesus
In the Bible, we frequently see the importance of making Jesus our Lord:
because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
(Romans 10:9 ESV)
Making Jesus my Lord simply means that I yield control of my life to Him. But that requires more than just lip service.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
(Matthew 7:21ESV)
Obviously, no one is capable of perfectly and consistently living according to God’s will. But what Jesus was pointing out here is that making Jesus my Lord requires more than just saying He is my Lord. If He is truly my Lord, my life will be evidence of that.
ACTION
We began this morning by saying that our relationship with Jesus is going to be influenced by our perception of who we think Jesus is. So as we close this morning, let me pose two questions. You’ll find these two questions on the outline in your bulletin and I want to ask you to indicate your answers to these questions by checking the appropriate box under each question.
Who is Jesus to you?
A myth or legend who never lived here on earth
A real person who was only a wise man, great teacher, or prophet who no longer lives.
God in the flesh who died on the cross for my sins and then rose from the grave and ascended to the Father where He is interceding for me today
Something else: ________________________________________________
And then based on how you answered that first question, let me ask a second:
How have you responded to Jesus?
I have ignored or rejected Him like so many people did after His resurrection
I have been clinging to the Jesus that I want Him to be just like Mary tried to do
I am clinging to the living, resurrected Jesus and am a child of God
Something else: ________________________________________________
For further help
You’ll notice that there is one more box on that sermon outline for those of you who might want to talk to someone more about how you can apply the ideas we’ve been talking about this morning. If you’ll just check that box and put down your name and contact information and then place that in the offering plate or give it to me or one of our greeters after the service, someone will contact you this week.
I would like to talk to someone about how I can cling to the living, resurrected Jesus and become a child of God
Name______________________________________________________________
Email ______________________________________________________________
Phone _____________________________________________________________
INSPIRATION
To become a child of God
I must cling to the living, resurrected Jesus
