Easter Sunday

On Friday, it was lights out, darkness ruled, and we felt the chill cold of the nail. Life had ended. This morning, the irreversible has been reversed. Death has been defeated and no longer holds sway. This morning we are caught in the cascade of life bursting all around us. Jesus, Son of God, Sacrificial Lamb, Savior of the World who’d been dead and buried, has burst from the tomb! Christos Anesti!—Christ is Risen! Let’s pray…

Tulips are perhaps the perfect spring flower. In these parts they are, if not the first, among the first flowers to come to life. Tulips burst. They awaken with the warming of the soil and burst from the newly thawed soil in spring. So it is very appropriate that we have tulips this morning. Tulips are reminders of life bursting in spring. Today as we look back to the time of the first Easter morning, we’re met by the risen Christ in a story replete with life bursts.

The first life burst is represented by the dawn: “After the Sabbath, at dawn (burst) on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb” (v. 1). The sun was coming up; the cold of night was warming into the new day. With the dawn, the scriptures tell us, come fresh mercies from God, or fresh evidence that God is merciful. The women approaching the tomb where Jesus supposedly was had no idea just how grand the mercy of God would be this morning.

Then in verse 2, comes another life burst: “There was a violent earthquake (burst).” The grandeur of the moment was so much that even the earth underfoot could not bear the weight of it.

Then another: “An angel of the Lord came down from heaven (burst)” (v.2). The proclamation of Christ’s resurrection, as it was at his birth, came from the only place worthy and awesome enough to pronounce such events: heaven.

The Angel then declares the ultimate life burst: “(He) said to the women, ‘Don’t be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified, (who was dead). He is not here now, though; he has risen (burst), just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay’” (vv. 5-6, parenthesis and paraphrase mine). It’s as if the angel were saying, “the deepest, darkest, most secure place man can conceive of couldn’t contain him and when the time had come, he burst from the dank tomb.”

The women’s response to the news provides us with another burst: “the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran (burst) to tell his disciples” (v 8). What did the news of the resurrection do to them? They were afraid, yet filled with joy. A fuse had been lit, and it set them joyfully sprinting away to tell Jesus’ friends. This scene always presents a challenge to me. Why my general nonchalance when it comes to the resurrection?

I wonder what the women had been thinking about as they ran away from the tomb in the first place. I wonder if they’d been trying to figure out what happened to Jesus’ body. But then, look who bursts onto the scene: “Suddenly Jesus met them (burst) ‘Greetings,’ he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him.” Suddenly, Jesus met them! This was no ghost, no vision, no paranoid illusion; this was Him in the flesh.

All talk of a missing corpse, wishful hallucination or spiritual vapor vanished as they encountered the risen Jesus in the flesh and clasped his feet and worshipped him!

Frederick Buechner once wrote, “What convinced the people that (Jesus) had risen from the dead was not the absence of his corpse, but his living presence.”[i] The two Mary’s were the first to live that truth as the risen Jesus appeared to them in the flesh.

Notice what the angel does after rolling away the stone from the front of the tomb: “An angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it” (v. 2).

Don’t miss the symbolism. The stone covered the tomb where Jesus was buried. By all accounts it was massive. The only way to move it was two or three men pushing with all their strength. Jesus’ tomb was covered not only by a stone, by on that stone, over the seam where the stone and the tomb wall came together was Caesar’s seal. In other words, nobody messes with Caesar, tamper with this tomb and you tamper with Caesar.

Jesus was considered by Rome , to be a rogue prophet of the Jews. The Romans understood the Jewish tradition of venerating their prophet’s by making their tombs sacred places. So by placing Caesar’s seal over the door of Jesus’ tomb, Rome could remind the oppressed Jewish people that only Caesar was worth honoring, only Caesar held power, not some prophet!

It would be a bitter reminder to all who visited the place where Jesus lay that when you mess with Rome , you get squashed.

But that first Easter morning, God had something to say about that perspective. For the Resurrection of Jesus tells an incredible and fundamental truth about God. God is supreme over everything!

By rolling away the stone and breaking Caesar’s seal, and by having His angel sit on the stone, God says, “I rule”. And neither death nor earth’s rulers can challenge that. For I reign over life and death, over kings and rulers of the earth.

I don’t know about you, but I find hope knowing that. That no matter how bleak it looks here, no matter how strong the stench of corruption and sickness and death, they will not have the last say. God will. God sits on death.

Life burst that first Easter. Burst out of the tomb and into the path of his beloved disciples. They touched him; they ate and talked with him. We read this story and are no doubt inspired, encouraged and perhaps, at the same time, wishing it would happen to us that Jesus would walk into this room and allow us to touch him. The only evidence we have that Jesus actually rose from the dead is the stories preserved in the scriptures and passed down from our forbearers.

Perhaps you wonder, not so much today, but in the normal arduous days that follow Easter, if the whole thing is just a lark, a colossal trick by some religious zealots long, long ago. I wouldn’t be surprised to know that you had doubts about the whole thing. You wouldn’t be alone. Challenging the authenticity of the resurrection is a timeless quest for some. Accepting by faith that the resurrection happened, however, is the foundation of our life as Christians. To disbelieve the resurrection is to deny Christianity altogether. So it is an important question to wrestle with.

The first Christians staked everything on the Resurrection, so much so that the apostle Paul told the Corinthians, ‘And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith’.

Philip Yancey says that “people who discount the resurrection of Jesus tend to portray the disciples in one of two ways: either as gullible rubes with a weakness for ghost stories, or as shrewd conspirators who conceived a resurrection as a way to jump-start their new religion.”[ii] The Scriptures tell a very different story, however.

First of all, perhaps the most skeptical of the reports of Jesus’ resurrection were the disciples themselves. When the women came back from the tomb with the news that Jesus had risen, the disciples dismissed them as nonsensical. Even when Jesus appeared in the flesh, at least one of the disciples, Thomas—later known as ‘Doubting Thomas’—refused to believe it, and only confessed to belief once he touched Jesus’ scars. These remaining eleven disciples could hardly be accused of being gullible or fancying ghost stories.

As for the conspiracy theory, the disciples would’ve had to carry out an elaborate and airtight cover-up if they were going to fool anyone. It meant that they would’ve had to come up with a way to steal the body (buried behind an enormous stone and guarded by soldiers). It meant that they had to convince everyone Jesus knew to follow along (and many of Jesus’ closest followers scattered in fear the night he was arrested). It meant that they would have to be incredibly brave and confident to give off an air of believability. Instead, they cowered in fear and grief in a small room where even their shadows caused them to jump. These were not people capable to carry off a scheme that required clear thinking and logic!

Besides, the gospels were written several decades after the events of the first Easter. The authors—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—had they been constructing a legend, would have had plenty of time to corroborate the story. But each records roughly the same story, crucifixion details and all.

The stories of the resurrection were written by people who had life burst in on them, not who got together to make it all up. These are people who had their beloved Jesus reappear to them in the flesh while they were mourning and afraid. Imagine a loved one recently dead, ringing the doorbell of your home and embracing you. I suspect the response would be similar to the women at the tomb that day: fear and joy.

It was only after Jesus had been raised to life that the disciples found courage and boldness. Peter, James and John became the pillars of the new church—a far cry from the cowering mourners of Good Friday. Many who witnessed Jesus’ presence following Easter morning died for their belief in Him. I don’t know many conspirators or ghost story junkies who’d suffer being eaten by lions, burned alive or crucifixion to cling to their story.

Jesus rose and met them. He buoyed them by his presence and gifted them by his Holy Spirit. Their encounter with the risen Jesus changed their life and altered the course of history.

But what about us who live all these hundreds of years after Jesus’ resurrection? We haven’t Jesus in physical form with us to point to, and yet we cling to the hope of resurrection, calling ourselves Easter people. Where do we derive this hope from?

Before his crucifixion, Jesus taught his disciples about what was coming. He told them that he had to die in order that his teaching would spread. A grain of wheat must die in order to be spread. He told them that they would do more than he did because there were more of them, and they would be empowered by his Spirit, whom he called the ‘counselor’. He promised them that he would go in physical form, but would return to them in the person of the Holy Spirit—which is the very spirit of Jesus himself.

And we see Jesus every time we see life and restoration around us. When there is healing in marriage that is the Sprit of Jesus himself. When the poor are fed and clothed and find places to live, it is the Spirit of Christ at work. When a community of faith like ours becomes better worshippers and speaks words that build and are true, it is the Spirit of Christ at work. When relationships between parents and wayward children are restored, when people who’ve been bitter and resentful become grace-filled, when addictions are overcome and greed is turned to generosity, we are witness to the very presence of Jesus the Risen.

It’s easy to give credit elsewhere: good counseling, warm thoughts, coincidence, etc. But God is love; God is Healer, only God brings life. So anytime we see love, healing and life, we see God at work through the Spirit of Christ. For only God makes life burst.

Doesn’t it seem, though, to be increasingly difficult to believe that life and wholeness and love con overcome all that’s going on in our world? It’s harder all the time to believe the Easter message given the state of our world. But remember we must. Jesus said, promised, in fact, that in this world we will have trouble. It’s not God, however, that we blame for it. It is sin. But God so loved the world that he sent his son into it to redeem it, to save it, to save us, and bear witness to the promise that one day life will burst.

As theologian, Marva Dawn, once said, “We are not optimists for we see clearly that life here is hard. But we can’t be pessimists either, because we believe in the promises of God and therefore we have hope.” We are, as she suggests, “hopeful realists”. We look at the state of our world and grieve, but it is not an endless, hopeless, grief, for we believe that God will one day set things right to the core, because of what he did on that first Easter day.

The empty tomb, like a seed casing or an egg shell after a hatching, is reminder that the God of love didn’t let death get the final say. Death didn’t win, and therefore we have hope. Instead, love wins, and life bursts.

[i] Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life (San Francisco, USA: Harper San Francisco, 1992), parenthesis added.

[ii]Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1995).