Easter Sunday, 2002
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
The Rev’d Quintin morrow
The men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise.” And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.
An American on vacation in Mexico was strolling outside his hotel in Acapulco, enjoying the sunny, warm Mexican weather. Suddenly, his attention was seized by the screams of a woman kneeling frantically in front of a child, and by the now gathering crowd of natives and tourists.
The man knew enough Spanish to determine that the child had swallowed a coin. Rushing into the circle of people, the man without thinking grabbed the child by the heels, held him upside down and shook him violently. After about a minute, an American quarter dropped from the child’s mouth and rolled down the sidewalk.
The woman who had been screaming, obviously the boy’s mother, was overcome with gratitude. In the best English she could muster she said, “Oh, muchas gracias, senor!” “You seemed to know just how to get it out of him. Are you a doctora?”
“No, senora,” the man replied sheepishly, staring down at the pavement, “actually, I work for the Internal Revenue Service.”
According to the old saw, the only two constants in this life are death and taxes. But we would be well advised to call the truth of that statement in question. You see, two thousand years ago a Jewish carpenter from Nazareth was crucified by the Romans for sedition. His body was wrapped in a linen shroud and placed in the borrowed tomb of a friend. The tomb was sealed, and soldiers of the emperor were placed to guard the entrance to prevent his corpse from being stolen. And three days later, this Jewish carpenter from Nazareth, Jesus, son of Mary, and Son of God, was resurrected from the dead. If that story is true, and I am telling you it is, then maybe death isn’t what it used to be. If this man came back from the dead, maybe He has the power to bring others back from the dead. Maybe, since one man wrestled with death and defeated it, death has been de-clawed and de-fanged. Maybe, death is dead. Maybe the only constant left in life is taxes. Imagine that.
It all hangs on the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. If He didn’t really rise from the dead, then Jesus was a liar, the Bible is fiction and Christianity is the most inviting and persuasive but evil scam ever perpetrated on the human race. Let’s be clear: There really isn’t a middle road, a place for ambivalence or much wiggle room. The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead cannot be true for me and not true for you, or true for him and not for her. It is claims to be a historically verifiable event occurring in space and time, like the invention of the telephone, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the D-Day landings on Normandy or the sinking of the Titanic. Either the resurrection is true, or it is false. If false, then the eleven disciples of Jesus vainly died the death of martyrs, the early Christians who were fed to lions in Roman coliseums threw their lives away for nothing, and the Christians suffering today around the globe are suffering for a lie, because they all believed and believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. People will suffer and die for all sorts of silly causes, but a lie they know to be a lie isn’t one of them. Paul puts the matter rather succinctly in I Corinthians:
If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those who have died in Christ have perished. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied (I Cor. 15:16-18).
What if it’s true? What if Jesus Christ really rose from the dead? Well, then, this resurrection has profound, cosmic, universal and personal consequences.
Can we know? I think so. It is as simple as weighing the likelihood of the resurrection against its alternatives. As out- rageous to our reason as the resurrection sounds, the alternatives to it require a greater exercise of faith then simply believing that the resurrection of Jesus is true.
We know Jesus lived and died. Apart from the Gospels, secular contemporary Roman records verify that much. But did He rise from the dead? Perhaps the disciples just hallucinated and thought they saw Him resurrected. The problem here is that you must believe that hallucinations happen to groups and not to individuals. Moreover, at the writing of his First Corinthian letter, the Apostle Paul was able to produce over 500 people who had seen Jesus back from the dead. Maybe Jesus didn’t really die on the cross. Perhaps he simply slipped into a coma, and the soldiers thought he was dead. Possibly the cool air of the tomb revived Jesus, he came from the tomb and His disciples saw Him said He had been resurrected. The difficulty here, of course, is that you must ignore three important facts. One, the Romans were masters at crucifixion, it being a form of capital punishment of their invention. Two, Roman soldiers who botched crucifixions were themselves crucified. And three, we know from John’s Gospel that the soldiers broke the legs of the two other malefactors who were crucified with Jesus, and a soldier thrust a spear into Jesus’ side, all to insure that the three victims that day were indeed dead. Could it be that the disciples went to the wrong tomb, found it empty and proclaimed Jesus had risen from the dead? The hitch here is that it isn’t just an empty which is the primary evidence for the claim that Jesus Christ is alive today. It is His resurrected body. The disciples and the women who followed Jesus in His earthly ministry saw Him put to death, helped to bury Him and three days alter encountered Him walking and talking and eating. Moreover, they willingly sacrificed their lives rather than deny that they had seen Him alive from the dead. Maybe the disciples conspired together to propagate a hoax. Chuck Colson, the former Nixon advisor who did jail time for his complicity in the Watergate break-ins, tells how difficult it is to keep a cover-up going. Colson said that when the news media began investigating the Watergate break-in, all of President Nixon’s top advisors got together and agreed to the same story, the same dates, the same facts, all to protect the most powerful man in the world. Yet, Colson says, as soon as the media scrutiny began in earnest, every one of them folded like a cheap suit. Colson’s point is this: If 6 Harvard and Yale educated men could not withstand a modicum of media scrutiny to protect the most powerful man in the world, how likely is it that 11 Galilean fisherman could withstand torture, imprisonment and death to cover a hoax concerning an obscure, itinerant Jewish rabbi. No. As incredible as the resurrection seems to us, the alternatives are more incredible.
Granting then that the resurrection is true, or if you are skeptic here this morning, granting the possibility that it’s true, what does it mean? Something this unusual, this momentous, must have a profound and important meaning.
It does. For Jesus Christ the resurrection means two things. For us, it means three things.
For Jesus the resurrection first of all means that His sacrificial death on the cross was accepted by the Father. He cried from the cross, “It is finished!” That was not a whimpering whisper but a triumphant shout. What was finished? The pain of crucifixion? No. What was finished was His work of redemption. “The son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many,” Jesus said in Mk. 10:45. Jesus died on the cross as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. And we know that God the Father accepted His sacrifice because He resurrected Jesus from the dead.
In his sermon to the Stoics and Epicureans on Mars Hill in Acts 17, the Apostle Paul says this:
In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead (Acts 17:30-31).
For Jesus the resurrection second of all means that He is who claimed to be. The Jews wanted Jesus crucified because according to them, He was making himself out to be the Son of God, and equal with God. And they were right. He was. The only thing is, He was only declaring Himself to be the Son of God because He really was. Over and over throughout His public ministry, Jesus said that He would be handed over to the Gentiles, put to death and after three days rise again. If He was right about that, it stands to reason that He was right about his identity as well. Indeed, who else but the Son of God could manage to come back from the dead?
But what does the resurrection mean for us?
Firstly, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead means a death to sin. You can have a new life. Paul writes in Romans 6:
Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
It has been said that the best sleep aid is a clear conscience. But maybe you’re here today and you don’t have a clear conscience. Maybe you need forgiveness. Maybe you need a fresh start. Maybe you need a new life. Jesus Christ was crucified for our sins and raised for our justification. The consequence of that for all who come to Him by faith, as Paul notes, is new life. “Whoever is in Christ is a new creation. Old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new.”
The powers of sin and guilt and the curse of judgment have been broken. “I have come that you might have life, and that you might have it more abundantly,” Jesus said. “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Secondly, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead means a death to hopelessness and a birth of hope. Peter writes in his first letter:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (I Pet. 1:3).
There is a lot of study being done these days on the differences in generations. The baby boomers are different from the Gen-Xers. The Gen-Exers are different from those in Gen-Y. Regardless of the differences, what is clear is that if you could hang one sign over the present generation, it would read: “No hope within.” The collapse of man’s great hope in science, the relativism of truth, increased violence, the cheapening of human life, the denial of any notion of transcendence or objective moral norms have all combined to create a hopeless generation; a generation of young people who are persuaded that nothing finally has any meaning.
The resurrection has created a new hope for those who have put their trust in the Resurrected One. Suddenly, with the discovery that the heavens are not empty or silent, and that there is a God who loves us and has a purpose for our lives, and with the realization that it was unfathomable love which took Jesus to the cross, life takes on new meaning. Heartache has purpose. Troubles come with a companion. We are never against the wall, but are instead leaning on the everlasting arms. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” The resurrection of Jesus gives us a real, living hope, because we know that with this God, crosses are always followed by resurrections and empty tombs. We can dare to hope because we know that with this God Good Fridays are always followed by Easter Sundays.
And thirdly, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead means a death to death. Paul tells us how it’s going to all end up.
In I Thess. 4 he says:
But I do not want you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have died, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who are dead in Jesus…For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be the Lord.
The ancient Greek Stoic philosophers used to say the fearing or mourning death was silly. Their formula was this: When I am, death is not; when death is, I am not. But it isn’t that simple is it. Death is a tragedy. It takes our loved ones from us, seemingly destroys all the progress made in a life and ends the only existence we know.
But the resurrection of Jesus means that death has lost its power. The Lord said that he was the resurrection and the life. And that whosoever believed in him would live, even though he die; and that whosoever believes him will not die forever.
If the resurrection was true, then it follows that who Jesus claimed to be and what he said must also be true. Death is done. It is now a temporary inconvenience for those in Christ. We will bury our loved ones. And we will be buried. But they and we will rise again. Because Christ was raised, all those united to him by faith will also be raised. You’ve got God’s word on it, and the resurrection of Jesus is the proof.
The only things certain in this life are death and taxes. Phooey. Because of the resurrection of Jesus, the only thing certain in this life is resurrection and eternal life for those who put their trust in Jesus Christ.
After John demonstrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ in his Gospel, he writes:
These things were written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.
That’s what the resurrection was about—life. A new life now. A new hope now. And eternal life yet to come.
The resurrection demands a response. And that response is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. In Romans 10:9-10 St. Paul says,
That 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. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.
Coming to Christ is a matter of 1) Acknowledging your guilt and your need; 2) Asking Jesus to be your Lord and Savior; and 3) Accepting the free gift of everlasting life purchased for you on the cross and ratified for you by the resurrection. Jesus is the Son of God. The Bible is true—every word of it. Believe and receive. Today.
Philip Yancey ends his book The Jesus I Never Knew with this:
I know a woman whose grandmother lies buried under 150-year-old live oak trees in the cemetery of an Episcopal church in rural Louisiana. In accordance with the grandmother’s instructions, only one word is carved on the tombstone: “Waiting.”
AMEN.
