Rolling Stone Series

[Remember ... the members have been placing stones at the foot of the cross for the past seven weeks of Lent and the pile of stones around the bases has gotten pretty impressive ... powerful visual. But when they come in on Easter morning, the stones are all gone.]

[Read Luke 15:11-24.]

You’ve probably never thought of the Parable of the Prodigal Son as an Easter story but I do. It is a glorious story of resurrection, of a new life, a new beginning. What makes it an Easter parable … or story, if you will … is the One telling it. You see, even though the father of the Prodigal Son saw him coming from a long way off, the father in Jesus’ parable waited until the son came home and when he saw him coming down the road, he pulled up the hem of his robe and ran to greet him, hugging him and covering him with kisses. Instead of lecturing his son or punishing him by making him work as a servant or a slave to pay back his debt, he ordered that the fatted calf be slain and held a huge party.

As I said, what makes this an Easter parable for me is the One telling it. God didn’t just pace nervously back and forth in Heaven waiting for us to come to our senses and return to Him. We were so far from Him and so lost in the big city … the world … that there was no way for us to find our way back … and so, He emptied Himself … He poured Himself into the confines of a human body and He came to us … hoping to wake us up from the hypnotic slumber of the world and show us the way home … the way back to Him.

And thank God. When I came to my senses … on my knees in the middle of a pig pen … Jesus was standing there with arms outstretched, ready to hug me and smother me with kisses and welcome me home … and then I learned what He had to do to come and find me. Well, He didn’t have to come and “find” me … I was the one who was lost … He always knew right where I was … but still … what He did … emptying Himself and taking on a form that I could recognize, that I could relate to … and then going to the cross and personally paying the debt for my disobedience and high-living. I will never understand the depth, the height, the width of His love but I will be forever grateful … not just praising Him and telling Him how grateful I am but showing Him.

One of the many poignant moments that I experienced on my trip to the Holy Land was when we visited a tomb like the one that Jesus was buried in. I say “like” because we don’t know where the exact tomb is or was … it could have been the one that they were showing us. It didn’t matter … it was a tomb like the one that I saw … a stunning visual I can assure you as we heard the story of Joseph and some of Jesus’ followers laying Jesus’ body on bench carved into the side of the tomb … His body wrapped in linen … the stone being rolled in front of the opening … and the Roman guards moving into position and standing guard at the entrance.

A lot of images and paintings of the tomb show Jesus stepping out of the tomb but the reality is that the opening to these tombs were very small and He would have had to stoop down to get through the entrance and then stand up … and I think that beautifully describes the Easter story … God left His throne in Heaven … stooped down to enter into our world … and then stood up … rising to His former glory after what happened on the cross.

The reason the entrance of the tomb is small is, well, very practical. Carving out a tomb with primitive tools was a lot of work … and very expensive … which is why John points out how a person with a title … like Joseph of Arimathea … was able to provide a “new tomb in which no one had ever been laid” (John 19:41) in a beautiful garden. We don’t know much about Joseph of Arimathea except that he was from some town called Arimathea … which is Hebrew for “A City of the Jews.” Scholar don’t know exactly where Arimathea was in Jesus’ day but we do know that Joseph must have been a man of wealth and means. He could afford to have a tomb carved out of solid rock, he was a member of the ruling religious elite, and apparently had some political connections and some pull with Pilate.