April 4 2021
Luke 24:1-12
The Lord is Risen! The Lord is Risen Indeed! Yes, indeed death could not hold our Lord and Savior and on this Easter morning we praise our God and we celebrate the truth that Jesus is alive and because he lives those who place their in him will live forever with him!
Now, it is quite natural for us to set our minds on the eternal on this the most glorious of days. After all, we hold fast to the confession, Christ in us is our hope of glory. So, yes, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the very ground of our hope but I believe that we have to ask ourselves is this all that the resurrection of Jesus is about? I mean any time it seems that Paul wrote of the hope we have in Jesus and his victory over death, he always seemed to make sure that faith and love were right there with what he had to say about hope. And so this morning, I want us to think about just what does the resurrection of Jesus, his wondrous victory over sin, death and the grave, what does this truth have to do with our faith? If that weren’t enough of a stretch, then I think that we also have to wonder does this great story that we celebrate today, that Jesus is not hanging out with the dead but is certainly on the side of the living, does this speak at all to how we love? You see, I do believe that the resurrection of Jesus does change eternity for all who place their hope in it, but there is a problem if we become so heavenly focused that we become no earthly good. This is a problem because what Jesus died and rose again for was to create a new creation one where the people he called into being would love God and work together with him doing good, the good that can overcome evil in the here and the now.
So, we can’t lose sight of the big picture as we take a look at our scripture for today, the resurrection story as recorded by Luke. Luke begins by telling us that it is the first day of the week, which is Luke’s way of stating that this is the eighth day, a day that symbolized the new creation, the old creation having been made in the first seven days. On this first day of the new creation, Luke tells us that “they” went to the tomb, and who he is referring to is the women who had followed Jesus, which we later learn were Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James. It was they who knew that it was their work to go to the tomb early, before the heat of the day, and rub embalming spices upon the dead body of Jesus whom they loved. Now, imagine their surprise when there in the dim light of the early dawn they discover that the huge rock which had sealed the hollowed out rock which was the final resting place of Jesus, this huge rock had been moved. Now, in their minds this could have only meant one thing that someone had come and stolen the body of Jesus. Why else would anyone exert that much effort to open the tomb? So, they rush in to the dark dank tomb sorrowful at the thought that someone would have done such an awful thing. Sure enough, the body of Jesus was gone.Luke tells us that while they were at a loss to know what to do next, suddenly right before them were two men. Their dazzling clothes, we are told, dispelled the darkness. The story tells us that the women were frightened which was probably an understatement. They fell to their knees and bowed their heads to the ground because these women knew that these were messengers who had come from the throne of God. And as these women knelt in trembling adoration, the next thing they heard was a very strange question: Why do you seek the living among the dead? It was if these heavenly beings picked a time like this to try out a little humor. The women must have thought what in the world kind of question is this. Then came the explanation to this angelic question, an even stranger statement for they told these women that the Jesus was not there because he had risen from the dead. Now, I am not sure who was more surprised at this moment because these messengers were kind of wondering why this was some new idea to these women, I mean after all, hadn’t Jesus himself told them how it was all going to happen. Yes, these women must have thought, it was all coming back to them. They may have remembered that day, as Luke records in the ninth chapter of his gospel, how Jesus point blank asked his disciples just who did they think he was and after much hemming and hawing Simon Peter blurted out that Jesus was the one, the long awaited Messiah. It was right after this most wondrous moment that Jesus began to speak like a madman because he told those he followed him that he was going to have suffer many things and he was going to be killed and on the third day he would be raised. Yet as these women pondered these words of Jesus over in their minds they also remembered that this was not just some solitary moment of absurdity, no, he had said the same thing again. It happened as Jesus and the crowd that followed him were coming into Jericho, the final stretch of their trip to Jerusalem and Jesus pulled the twelve away and spoke to them. Jesus told them that when they got to Jerusalem all that was written about the Son of Man by the prophets was going to happen just as they said it would. This meant that Jesus was going to be handed over to the people of the nations, the Romans, he was going to be mocked, shamefully treated and spit upon. After they flogged him they were going to kill him and on the third day he would rise. Perhaps these women at the tomb would have remembered the disciples babbling on about what Jesus had said but they would also would have remembered that none of them had any clue as to what Jesus meant. It may have been that the truth that Jesus had spoken to them was just so far a field from their expectations that they held for the Messiah but whatever the reason, the truth that Jesus spoke to them that day only met with confusion in the minds of the disciples. So, these women at the tomb had to reluctantly agree with these angelic messengers that stood before them that yes, Jesus had indeed told them of not only his death but also that he would rise again. Perhaps the point of these messengers shaking the cobwebs out of the memories of these women was so that they might begin to understand that the resurrection of Jesus is about the need to trust in the word of God which was uttered on the lips of Jesus. Jesus spoke the truth and the truth happened exactly as Jesus said it would. The resurrection of Jesus should have caught no one off guard because Jesus had talked to them about it and if that were not enough Jesus himself told them that everything that was going to happen just as the prophets who had lived over six hundred years earlier had predicted would happen. Again, since they were supposed to have known what was contained in the law and the prophets none of what was happening that early Sunday should have been a surprise. Yet, it was just that, a surprise, a shock. Death was such a certainty to them that even if they might attempt to hope beyond hope that Jesus was somehow going to be raised to life they just did not have the faith to make their hope a reality. It made no difference that they all knew that their God was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a way of speaking of their spiritual ancestors as if they were very much alive, even so how did such truth help them in the here and now believe that God reigns over death.But this is exactly the news that these dazzling beings were giving to these terrified women on that first Easter.
This news of Jesus, that he had been raised from the dead, that he now was among the living and not the dead, this news was too good of news for these women to keep to themselves. They went and they found the eleven faithful followers of Jesus and of course, these men, just like these women, remembered the words that Jesus spoke to them and it all suddenly clicked for them. Well, maybe not. No, when the disciples learned that Jesus had been raised from the dead from the very women who had been there and done that they dismissed what they had been told as being a bunch of nonsense, a story that simply was too full of fantasy to be believed. Yet in spite of such a rude response to the good news that the women had brought back from the tomb, Peter reconsiders and decides to go and check things out for himself. Luke records that after Peter saw the empty tomb for himself he went home marveling. The word translated as “marveling” might be better understood as being awestruck, as in to be personally and powerfully struck. We might say that the emptiness of the tomb hit Peter right upside the head. I think that in that moment Peter realized something that Paul also realized as he records it in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians. There Paul, writing about the resurrection of Jesus, argues that if Christ has not been raised then our faith is in vain, better translated as empty. In other words if the tomb was not empty then our faith would be empty but since the tomb is empty then our faith is full, it has substance. Paul goes on to say that if Christ has not been raised then our faith has no purpose and we are still in our sins which is a remarkable thing to consider. What Paul is implying is that the cross and the empty grave cannot be separated; both are equally necessary for our salvation. There at the cross the world saw the perfect love of God in human form in what appeared to all to be a sure defeat at the hands of the enemies of Jesus. How could one insist that loving our enemies in such a manner that this is the life we were created to live all because this is a life which perfectly reflects the perfect love of God. Such a life sure seems like a life that one would find hard to believe in. If all we had was a cross on Calvarys hill it would be almost impossible to have faith that the life of Jesus is the life all of us were created to live, a life of perfect love. But praise be to God, there was an empty tomb so now our faith can be made sure and our purpose, the purpose we hold on to by faith, a purpose defined by perfect love this we now know is the life of victory. This is how Paul concludes his work on the resurrection that in the end, in a twinkling of an eye the dead shall be raised imperishable and what is prophesied in the twenty fifth chapter of Isaiah will at last come true; death will be swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O, death where is your sting? The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law but thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! With the raising of Jesus from the tomb, the battle has been won, victory is at hand this we can be sure of, this is what Paul wants us to be perfectly clear about. Yet what is surprising is that in his next breath Paul does not turn our attention to the future but rather his focus is on the present. Paul doesn’t mention anything about our eternity being forever secure as well we know it will be but instead Paul tells us now that we know that the victory has been won by our Lord Jesus Christ, we are to be steadfast, immovable always abounding in the work of the Lord knowing that our work is not in vain. You see Paul is speaking about life right here and right now, this is where the empty tomb is supposed to make all the difference. The word translated as “vain” describing our work in the Lord is again the Greek word for empty. So, it is the empty tomb this is the reason that we are able to abound in that work God calls us to do, to not come up empty in our effort, one might say. And what this all leads us to is just what is work that we are to do? Well, what is interesting in what Paul writes here is that he uses two distinct words for work or labor. The first is simply means work or action but the second word translated often as labor actually means to strike or to toil. From this it is not hard to hear the words of Paul from his second letter to the church of Corinth, the fourth chapter, where he states that he is afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Christ, so that the life of Jesus might be evident. The death of Jesus, this willingness to suffer rather than seek vengeance upon those who seek to harm us because we understand that our purpose is to perfectly love as our Heavenly Father perfectly loves, this is the labor which is not empty. It is not empty because when we labor to love what we find is the power of the risen life of Christ working in us. Yes, because of Jesus we may find ourselves afflicted, perplexed, persecuted and struck down what Jesus meant by having to carry our cross, in order to follow him. Yet, no matter how difficult is this labor, what we find because of the resurrection of Jesus is that we aren’t crushed, we aren’t driven to despair, we are never forsaken nor are we destroyed. This is our victory given to us through the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is faith in the resurrection of Jesus, this is what is meant by putting our roots down deep into the living waters, the very life of God, this is what empowers us to not whither nor stumble when faced with suffering and persecution because of the word of God planted in our hearts.
So, yes we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus for the hope of eternity that lives with in our hearts but we also celebrate that because of the empty tomb our faith is not empty; our faith has purpose and meaning because Christ has been raised from the dead. Not only that but because of the victory over death Jesus displayed when he stepped out of the tomb to be with the living and not the dead now we can be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord all because that in the Lord, our labor, a labor that might cause us to suffer on account of loving others as God loves them, this labor will not be empty all because the tomb on Easter was found to be empty. This is the good news we declare, now and until Jesus comes again! Praise be to God. Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment