“Resurrection Wonder”
John 20: 1 – 18
1. Have any of you ever read the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes? In one storyline Calvin’s father is reading him a bedtime story – “Hamster Huey and Gooey Kablooey!” – and the poor father is getting really tired of this story. It’s Calvin’s favourite and he gets his dad to read it every night. His father tries to convince him to let him read a different story. Calvin won’t hear of it. So what does the father do? He completely changes the story as he reads it! By the end Calvin and his friend Hobbes are lying in bed, their eyes wide open in shock at the way the story turned out!
2. But aren’t we like that as children sometimes? Don’t children often want to have the same stories read again and again? I know that when reading time comes Ella will often have a favourite book. For awhile it was a peek-a-boo book. She would enjoy it again and again. But look at the father in the Calvin and Hobbes story. He was so familiar with the story that he was positively bored with it.
3. Sometimes I think our senses have been dulled and our appreciation of the Gospel story has been diminished with over-familiarity. Does familiarity breed boredom? I think sometimes that as Christians and churches we’ve lost that sense of resurrection wonder, of the joy that comes from an encounter with a living and resurrected Christ. Eugene Peterson, in Living the Resurrection, says, “We lose our vitality. We become dull. We continue to go through these life-affirming, Christ-honoring motions, but our hearts are no longer in it. It’s a curious thing but not uncommon for Christians to begin well and gradually get worse. Instead of progressing like a pilgrim from strength to strength, we regress. Just think of the Christians you really admire. Aren’t most of them recent converts? Isn’t it exciting? Then think of the Christians that you’re just bored to death with. Aren’t they people who have been Christians for forty or fifty years? Before we know it, we are regressing. We are hobbled. We become less. We lose the immediacy, spontaneity, and exuberance of resurrection life.” He then talks about how “resurrection takes place in the country of death.” Sometimes it seems like we’re in the country of death, and that we’ve forgotten what it means to be alive in Christ. We need resurrection to take place.
4. When we read or hear the Gospel story it ends just as we expect – with the resurrected Jesus – but perhaps that’s part of the problem. The ending no longer surprises us. No longer does the empty tomb catch us off guard like it did Mary Magdalene and Peter and John. The impact the story is intended to have is lost on us. You see, the story certainly doesn’t end where the disciples expected. They had no idea what was coming. When Jesus was crucified, they pretty much figured that was it. They scattered. They were afraid. They hid from the authorities. But the Gospels don’t end after Jesus is buried. There is more story to tell. Death is not the last word. The despair and sorrow of the cross finds it answer in the joy and wonder of the empty tomb. Resurrection follows burial. We have to realize that this is true of life now. Not just that we have hope of future resurrection, but that even now we can have life: life, life and more life! And that in having life, we also have joy and a wonder only possible because of that empty tomb.
5. Look at Mary. Mary didn’t even recognise Jesus at first. She thought he was the gardener. He had to address her by name. But then she does recognize him, for the sheep know the voice of their shepherd. The disciples with Jesus on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24) didn’t recognize Jesus at first either – only when he broke the bread did they realize. It took them a lot longer than Mary! You know, sometimes we can’t see God at work even when He’s right in front of us. We’re blind to His presence and to how He’s working.
6. Sometimes we limit what God can do. We hold our hands mere inches apart and say, “This is what God can do.” Even if we don’t say it, even if we believe in our minds otherwise, we still seem to live this way. But God stretches out His arms to the utmost and then says, “This is what I can do!” We can’t even begin to imagine what is possible with God. The resurrection tells us that there is more possible with God than we can ever hope to comprehend.
7. I believe this story of Jesus’ resurrection tells us that we all need to recover our sense of resurrection wonder, the wonder and amazement that the disciples had when they saw the empty tomb and the risen Lord for the first time, that experience of realizing that God is much bigger than we expected, that He no longer fits in the box that we put Him in. We need to recover that sense of expectation that with God all things are possible. We need to ask God to restore in us that realization that He is working all around us, that we are always in the presence of God and that there is always more going on than meets the eye.
8. Do you realize that of resurrection-life will be more profound and incredible than anything we experience in our lives now? The best we can experience in this life, the most profound joy we can have, pales in comparison to what life will be like in heaven when we have finally been raised with Christ in glory. The present reality of our lives in Christ is, as the hymn says, “a foretaste of glory divine.” We will all know death, but for those of who “know Christ and the power of his resurrection,” as Paul puts it, we will also know an eternity of joy and wonder and life.
9. But we are not just to focus on the future. The reality of our future resurrection shapes us in the present. Resurrection life, resurrection wonder, begins now. It shapes our attitude. It shapes how we see life. It affects how we interpret our experience. That Christ was raised makes us realize that anything is possible with God. Christ was raised on a specific day, at a specific time in our world, on this earth. It was an event that was recorded and witnessed. Check out 1 Corinthians 15 for a list of people who witnessed the resurrected Jesus. Do we not believe that God can still do things like this now in our time, in our day? We should be willing to expect the unexpected. The disciples never expected an empty tomb. Do we not believe that there are more empty tombs to come? Max Lucado has a book called He Still Moves Stones. Do we believe that? Do you? Do we not believe that God can still bring life from death, physically and spiritually? Do we not believe that God can still create something out of nothing, just as He did when His Spirit hovered over the surface of the waters in Genesis? Do we no longer expect God to act in ways that confound our expectations?
10. The disciples on the road to Emmaus asked themselves, “Were not our hearts burning within us . . .?” The Message has them ask, “Didn’t we feel on fire . . .?” Commenting on the road to Emmaus passage, one scholar writes, “In the light of the disciples’ experience later believers may be able to recognize their inward warmth of heart as springing from the presence of the risen Lord.” This remind me of John Wesley’s conversion experience when he felt “strangely warmed.” In The Message, the women who found the empty tomb in Matthew’s Gospel were “deep in wonder and full of joy.” And then we have Mary exclaiming to the disciples after seeing the resurrected Jesus, “I have seen the Lord!”
11. Is my heart burning? Is it on fire? Do I feel strangely warmed? What about you? Do you feel your heart burning and is it on fire? Do you feel strangely warmed today? Are you “deep in wonder and full of joy” at the sight of the empty tomb? This warmth, this joy, this burning within is the “deep wonder,” the resurrection wonder that God wants us to experience. Jesus is alive. The tomb is empty. The grave clothes are now folded and unused. Our Lord has risen. Death has been beaten. Life is now available. Like Mary, do you want to be able to say, “I have seen the Lord”? When we find ourselves filled with joy at the empty tomb, surprised and caught off guard by something God has done, filled with awe at what the Lord has done, filled with resurrection wonder, it is then when we can say, “I have seen the Lord!” Is that we truly want? Do we truly want to see the Lord? To see him at work in our lives, in our circumstances, amongst our neighbours, in our hearts, at our workplaces? Notice that I said see him at work. He’s already there. He goes ahead of you, just like the risen Jesus went ahead of the disciples to Galilee. God is present. But do you see him?
12. Did you know that many of the promises Jesus made in the farewell discourses (John 14 – 16) are fulfilled in the resurrection story? Jesus told his disciples that he is going to go and prepare a place for them (14:2, 3) and he tells Mary when she sees him that he is going to his Father, which is when he will prepare a place for us. Jesus promised his disciples that “again in a little and you will see me.” That promise is fulfilled here. Another promise is fulfilled as well. John 1:12 states that Jesus gave “power to become children of God” to all who believe, and in 20:17 we see the fulfillment of this promise. Jesus’ God and Father becomes the God and Father of his disciples. What is true of Jesus’ relationship with the Father is also now true for the disciples. And most importantly for us to day the promise that the mourning and weeping will be replaced by rejoicing is fulfilled by Mary when her weeping turns into wonder at the sight of her risen Lord. And these promises are for us today. Knowing this gives us reason to have resurrection wonder.
13. My prayer for all of us this Resurrection Sunday, this Lord’s Day, is that this story, the story of our Lord’s resurrection, of the empty tomb, will become fresh for us again. My prayer is that God, by the power of His Holy Spirit, will make the Bible fresh again as you read it, as you pray over it, as you meditate upon it, and that the Lord will make Scripture come alive for each of us just as He made Christ come alive in that tomb. My prayer is that we will be surprised again, that we will be caught off guard, the unexpected will happen, and resurrection wonder will fill our hearts as it did those first disciples so many years ago. My prayer is that each of us will desire, like the apostle Paul, “to know Christ and the power of his resurrection (Phil. 3:10).”
