Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! …Are you sure? This year’s Easter sermon looks at the story of Jesus’ resurrection and its implications for us today. Happy Easter!
This year’s Easter Sunday Scripture readings are John 20:1-18 and 1 Corinthians 15:19-26. In thinking about Easter this year, I found helpful Debie Thomas’ essay for Journey with Jesus.
Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed!
Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed!
Are you sure? How do you know? Because some of the people in this story don’t seem too sure Jesus is alive, at least not at first.
The story starts with Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb early on Sunday morning, coming to take care of the burial rituals they hadn’t had time to finish on Friday evening as the Sabbath was beginning.
She comes into the tomb, and something’s wrong. In fact, everything’s wrong. The body she’s supposed to be anointing is just…gone!
So she runs to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, who we assume is John, the one writing the story, and she doesn’t say, “Good news! Jesus is alive! Death is defeated, the tomb is empty, Christ is risen!” No, she says, “They’ve taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they’ve put him.”
This is not good news; this is terrible. It’s a final insult from the empire to Jesus, the one his followers thought was God’s messiah, the one they believed would set them free.
It wasn’t enough to kill him, to execute him in the most painful, humiliating way possible, now they can’t even let his body rest in peace!
So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. I love verse four—we have confirmation in two weeks, and I would love for someone to pick this for their verse—verse four: “Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.”
Remember, scholars think John who’s writing this account is the “other disciple,” and he wants to make sure that for all eternity, everyone will know he was faster than Peter. He could have been the one to go in the tomb and find it empty! But he stopped at the door. I get the feeling that decades later, he really wishes he’d gone in!
But he stops at the entrance, looks in, and you know what? It’s hard to see inside. It’s early in the morning, and the lighting in the cave is not great, and it looks like there’s come cloth there, but he can’t quite make out Jesus’ body.
Then Peter catches up, and he doesn’t hesitate; he goes right inside. Maybe he was running so hard to try to catch John that he couldn’t stop, I don’t know.
But Peter goes in, and he finds the burial linens lying there, and the head cloth lying separately, and he’s confused. His first thought isn’t that Jesus is alive, but that if the body’s been moved like Mary Magdalene thought, why would the cloth still be there?
Finally, the other disciple (who, let the reader note, had been the first one to reach the tomb!), he also goes inside. And John writes, “He saw and believed.” But they still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.
They still did not understand. They go back to the others, but they’re still not sure, and that’s a common theme for a while.
They believe Jesus is alive they believe a miracle has happened (at least John does), but they spend the rest of the day hidden in a locked room, afraid of being arrested.
That night, Jesus appears to them while Thomas is out on an errand, and even after the other 10 believe, Thomas spends a whole week doubting, unsure if it’s really possible.
That very afternoon, Jesus spends hours in conversation with two other disciples, Cleopas and someone else, maybe his wife, walking from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus, and it’s not until they’re ready to eat supper that they realize this person explaining the Scriptures to them is Jesus himself.
In the other Gospel accounts of Easter, the first reactions to the good news are fear and doubt. As we heard in the song from Peter’s perspective, “circumstance and speculation couldn’t lift me very high. ‘Cause I’d seen them crucify him. Then I saw him die.”
The logic of the world says when you’re dead, you’re dead. Easter should not be possible.
Even Mary Magdalene, the first one to faithfully come to the tomb in the morning, all she can do is stand weeping outside the tomb. And then when she—alone of all the people who’d come to the empty tomb—when she encounters the risen Jesus, she also doesn’t recognize him. It’s not until Jesus says her name that she recognizes him and believes.
Easter is not easy to believe. Plenty of people have tried to scientifically explain Easter. There are books you can buy about how the resurrection is the most-attested event in human history, all about the plethora of evidence supporting that Jesus literally, physically rose from the dead.
But finally, it comes down to faith. Ultimately, for us to believe, we need Jesus to call our name. We need the Holy Spirit to enlighten us, to keep us in the true faith, as Martin Luther put it in the Small Catechism.
We need to encounter our risen Savior in our own lives, in the waters of baptism, in the physical stuff of Holy Communion, by hearing and reading God’s word.
As people living in a broken world, as people all too familiar with death and suffering, it takes faith to believe the power of death has been defeated. It takes faith to sing Alleluia, to declare the truth of the resurrection, to declare death is not the end of God’s story. It takes faith to believe a death on a cross has eternal meaning, that our sins are forgiven, that God’s love extends even to us.
What if it’s not true? Well, says Paul, then we are of all people most to be pitied. If Jesus was born, taught some nice things about loving people, even did some apparently miraculous healings, and then died, well, that’s not unusual.
There have been a lot of great moral teachers in the world, a lot of people who heroically gave of themselves to heal others, to protect others, people who put a dent in the universe.
And if we gathered here every Sunday morning to celebrate any of them, if 2.4 billion people were claiming they’d found the source of eternal life and it was some itinerant peasant teacher who was executed as a criminal two thousand years ago, well, that’d be pretty sad, wouldn’t it?
We’d deserve the world’s pity. What a waste!
But what if it is true? Well, then everything changes!
Paul says, “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead.” Jesus’ resurrection means the power of death has been destroyed. Easter changes the equation; death will no longer get the last word!
We are captives to sin no longer, because Jesus has put our sins to death on the cross and reconciled us to God. Jesus was not just another rabbi or philosopher; he was exactly who he said he was: The Son of God, God in the flesh, God with us.
It wasn’t some plot by the disciples, or some trick of the light; the tomb Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter and the other disciple found was empty! And not only empty, as if they might have had the wrong tomb or something, but with the linen wrappings lying there.
John may have believed right away, but by the end of the story, all the witnesses will move from doubt to faith—Peter, Mary Magdalene, Cleopus, even Thomas. Most of them will eventually be so certain they’ll lay down their lives for the truth of the resurrection. May God grant you and I that same faith through the power of the Holy Spirit.
We don’t need to win arguments. We don’t have to have irrefutable proof, tangible evidence to point to. There is a mystery to faith, and that’s ok. We are called to live by faith.
We are called to trust the witness of those who have seen, to allow their faith to carry us through the seasons of doubt, and as the Holy Spirit moves us, to join in sharing the good news, to join in the witness of all the saints.
We are called to live in hope and trust, to answer and believe when Jesus speaks our name.
We are called to join with all creation in praising God, giving thanks because Christ is risen! He is risen indeed.
Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed.