In Jesus Holy Name April 17,2022
Text: Matthew 27:66-28:1-3,5 Redeemer
“Last at the Cross, First at the Tomb”
Easter is a wonderful celebration. I’m so glad you are here this morning to enjoy the experience of Easter worship. The spring flowers bloom in the sunshine. There is excitement as families come together. The music renews our soul.
Easter is not about us. Easter is not about our new Easter clothes. As much as our children enjoy an Easter Egg hunt. Easter is not about Easter eggs and chocolate Easter bunnies. Easter is about Jesus. Easter is about hope. Easter is knowing that death on this earth is not the end of life. Your soul, your spirit, was created by God to live forever. Easter is about Jesus and His resurrection from death and the grave, securing the promise that we too will rise from death.
One of my favorite lines in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” was the discussion that Pilate had with his wife during the trial of Jesus. Pilate was sharing with his wife the question he had asked Jesus just before Pilate sent Jesus to Herod. The question: “What is truth?” Pilate’s wife then looks at her husband and said: “If you cannot see truth when it is in front of you then no one can tell you what it is.”
To Pilate’s credit he could recognize truth when he saw it. He knew Jesus was not guilty of the accusations brought by the religious Pharisees. He was totally innocent. To his shame, Pilate gave in to peer pressure and chose to ignore the truth. History has judged the judge of Jesus and found him wanting. When it came time for Pilate to stand up for truth, he faltered and failed. Truth was thrown out the window and Pilate worshiped the god of expediency.
What is truth? Did Jesus rise really from the grave? Did he come back alive after the Roman soldiers made sure he was dead on Friday? The Pharisees had worried about that possibility…. That’s why they asked Pilate to post a guard at the tomb. On Friday evening, after the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Mary and Mary Magdalene were the last ones left at the cross. Everyone else had drifted away. They were waiting for Joseph of Arimathea to return.
Mary the mother of James, and Mary Magdalene, went to the graveside with
Joseph and Nicodemus to help prepare the body of Jesus for burial as best they could before the Sabbath sunset. They knew the body of Jesus was placed in a stone tomb. That was the plan. He was all boxed in.
Many of you know what it means to be the last one at the grave of one you love when all the others have gone home. There are tears, loss and memories. The tomb was sealed to keep Jesus there. Pilate placed a guard of soldiers by the entrance to the tomb to discourage body snatchers. No one was going to steal the body of Jesus. That should have been the end of the story.
It was not! That’s why we are here… the stone box and the linen shroud in which the body of Jesus had been placed…was empty. Death could not hold the Living God. The resurrection of Jesus is not a questionable addition to the Christian faith; the resurrection is the foundation of the Christian faith.
The resurrection of Jesus from death after his crucifixion is the lynchpin of history. The apostle Paul wrote: “If Christ had not been raised from the dead, your faith would be futile, and you would be dead in your sins.”
Look at the events of that first Resurrection Sunday. The women who had been closest to Jesus didn’t wend their way through the narrow streets in the predawn darkness so they might put together the ingredients for the first Easter Sonrise breakfast. They were going to the grave to complete the burial details. In their hands they carried spices. It was their last measure of devotion for the one they thought was going to change the world. They will be the first to visit the tomb.
And the disciples? In the hours since Jesus had died, they were not putting together a mass choir to sing the Hallelujah Chorus at the entrance to the tomb. Neither the men nor the women spent Saturday night dyeing Easter eggs and buying chocolate Easter bunnies and multicolored Peeps.
The disciples did none of these things. They were hiding. They were afraid. They thought they would be next; arrested, tried, whipped, beaten, crowned with thorns and crucified. They had forgotten the promise of Jesus. Not once, not twice, but three times Jesus had told them that he would be arrested and crucified. And then each time Jesus added… “I will rise from the dead on the third day.” They should have remembered.
We live in a culture that acts like Pilate, increasingly rejecting the very notion of
truth. There is a sense that it is fine for Christians to sing and pray in our “own little religious community” as long as we don’t try to influence the culture or bring biblical morality into the market place.
Today there are many contemporary pseudo-scholars who maintain the event of the resurrection was made up and manufactured by disciples. Individuals who hold a “modern world view” attempt to attack Christianity as untrue. Those with a “post modern world view” say Christianity is simply one truth among many other truths. Both are an attempt to stamp out the words of the angel… He is risen ………….. He is not here. Come and see the place where He was laid.”
The women who were last at the grave on Friday were the first to arrive at the tomb, all was quiet. The guards were gone. The air was crisp, with the freshness of spring. The stone was rolled away. As they entered the door of the tomb, their fears were confirmed… the body of Jesus was gone! The only item left in that stone box was a linen shroud in which the body of Jesus had been wrapped.
Inside that stone box, early in the morning, before the women reached the tomb, an explosion of light broke the darkness and filled the tomb with light. The body of Jesus was quickened by the Spirit of God. Energized by God the Father, God the son cast off the restrictions of death. He was alive! Instantaneously, he possessed a resurrected body.
The words of Jesus challenge our culture: “I am the resurrection and the life” Jesus said. “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes” into the eternity of my “Father’s presence except through me.”
God gives eternal choices and the choices have eternal consequences.
Isn’t that the story of Calvary? Have you ever wondered why Jesus was in the center on Calvary’s hill? Why not on the far left or right? Could it be that like the empty stone box in which his body had been placed offers people a choice? The thief on the right and the thief on the left, both crucified with Jesus had a choice. One chose to believe the other ridiculed Jesus.
The Pharisees who watched Jesus give sight to a man who was blind from birth, had a choice. Those who came to the home of Mary and Martha, knowing that Lazarus had been in the grave for four days, …. had a choice when they saw Lazarus come out alive. John tells us “many of the Jews who came from Jerusalem and saw what Jesus did put their faith in him.” But others did not.
Satan does not want people to hear the message of the angel: “Jesus is not here. He has risen from the dead.” Satan’s desire is to keep people locked in their box of fear. That box is often in the shape of a casket.
In the winter of 1982 Vice President, George Bush represented the United States at the funeral of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Bush was deeply moved by a silent protest carried out by Brezhnev’s widow. She stood motionless by the coffin until seconds before it was closed. Then, just as the soldiers touched the lid, Brezhnev’s wife performed an act of great courage and hope, a gesture that must surely rank as one of the most profound acts of civil disobedience ever committed.
She reached down and made the sign of the cross on her husband’s chest. There in the citadel of secular, atheistic power, the wife of the man who had run it all, hoped that her husband was wrong. She hoped that there was another life, and that life was represented by Jesus who died on the cross, and that same Jesus might yet have mercy on her husband.
You see, she knew that death was not the final word. Even though she had been told all her life by her husband and by the Kremlin that death was the end, she knew that there was ONE who was resurrected from the dead. His name was Jesus.
Many people in our culture do not know the “reason” we die. The bible says that death is our enemy (I Cor. 15:26) and it has been brought into our world by human sin. Jesus defeated sin on the cross. Jesus came into this world as an infant. He was placed in a wooden box. His first bed. Even then the angel gave the same message to shepherds. Do not be afraid. A savior has been born. He will save humanity from the consequences of sin.
Jesus came into the world so that by his perfect life, his vicarious suffering and death would erase God’s holy wrath against our broken commandments. His death on the cross destroyed the devil who holds people in the fear of death. Is there hope beyond the varnished wooden box placed in the ground? Yes! He is risen!
Jesus did not rise up from the stone slab as you and I might rise from bed early in the morning, throwing back the covers. No! John tells us his experience. “I ran to the tomb with Peter. I looked in and saw the strips of linen lying there as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head.” He was not there.
The resurrected body of Jesus was not bound by the molecules of that linen shroud, nor stone walls. His energized body passed right through the cloth. It fell limp like a glove from which a hand has been removed.
Is there hope? Yes, indeed. There is hope for life beyond the grave. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead will also give eternal life to all who confess Jesus as “the way, the truth, and the life.” Without this Easter event…you and I would be without hope. There would be a nagging emptiness in your soul.
When God created each human being He “placed eternity in the human heart”…Just as people know from observing creation that there is a creator, so we sense in our hearts that there is life after death.’ (From Decision Magazine April 2000 Billy Graham)
God has given each of us the ability to choose. The crucified robbers to the right and left of Jesus, on crosses of their own, had a choice about their eternal destiny. Pilate had a choice regarding truth. The Centurion at the foot of the cross had a choice to make about Jesus. You too have a choice regarding Jesus.
The strife is o’er… the battle done.
The powers of death have done their worst
Let shouts of holy joy outburst. He is risen! Alleluia! He is risen!
