Resurrection Sunday 07

He is risen! (He is risen indeed!)Happy Easter, or Resurrection Day, as I’ve started to say. Today is the holiest day of the Christian calendar, the day we celebrate the death of death, the day we celebrate Jesus conquering death. The grave couldn’t hold Him, death isn’t permanent, eternal life is ours for the asking in Jesus Christ. Because He lives, we also shall live. That is reason to celebrate this morning; but that is the reason to celebrate every day. The celebration of Jesus resurrection shouldn’t be tied to this one day of the year. It is for every day, it is for every desperate or frustrating moment. Despite what is going wrong in our lives, He is risen! Despite the circumstances we find ourselves in, or within the consequences of our decisions on this earth, our eternal place has been secured and the proof is that He is risen. He was not in the tomb when they came for Jesus.

Let’s look at John chapter 20, starting in verse 1. Please stand.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)

The Word of the Lord.

Let’s pray.

John’s gospel is the last written of the 4 gospel accounts. It is the most deeply theological, the viewpoint of John that comes through in his gospel is one of a person looking up at the God of the universe. Each of the gospel has a little different flavor; Luke portrays Jesus was a Messiah, but often times it is a more personal level viewpoint of Jesus that comes through. Matthew, being a Jew and writing for a Jewish audience, writes his gospel portraying Jesus as the Messiah, which is a very specific point of view. Mark writes quickly, or least I’ve long thought, to get the story out, the story of Jesus spread wide. But even in Mark, the words are carefully chosen and arranged so as to get across subtle underlying ideas about Christ and how He interacts with the people, how He is the fulfillment of the OT. But John, most of all, writes from a deeply theological point of view. He begins His gospel at the beginning of time, not just Jesus life. Jesus is the One being all of time has been leading up to, that everyone has been waiting for. John says to us all in his gospel; come and read about Him who we have all been longing for, whether you knew it or not.

Come and see what God has done; come and see and hear about Him whom death could not conquer, the grave couldn’t hold, who was before death and is beyond death. And come find yourself in Him. Powerful words to the early church that was struggling to survive, persecuted by former friends and neighbors, kicked out of the extended family because of Christ, officially persecuted by the Roman government. Despite all that, Jesus is worth the sacrifice, because He is risen! And in Him, we also will have the good fortune, the relationship with God that enables us to lie down in death and to be immediately resurrected someday.

You know, hopefully, the story of Jesus, and how He came to not be in the tomb that Sunday morning after Passover. He had been teaching and preaching all through Israel, as well as undermining the authority of the religious leadership of Israel. Those officially in power, the Pharisees and Temple scribes made life hard for the average Jew. Many different rules and regulations oppressed the people on a day to day basis, so much that the rules squashed the love of God out of the religion. The Jewish religion became about following rules and traditions more than following God. And then Jesus came. He helped people understand what it meant to lead a life sold out to God; a life focused on loving God and what that meant every day, from moment to moment. But in order to teach that way of living, that loving God is a lifestyle not an endless series of rituals, Jesus had to cross the Pharisees.

The Pharisees, from the beginning almost, seem to have been intent on shutting Jesus up one way or another. If they could not turn the crowds against Him by protesting that He healed on a Sunday or that His disciples didn’t wash their hands in accordance with the traditions of the elders, if they couldn’t trick Him into endorsing the Roman occupation or of inciting rebellion, they were just going to take Him out themselves. Which they did. We remembered Friday the hell Jesus went through the day of His betrayal, arrest, trial and execution. Which brings us to this morning’s passage, where we remember the hope and greatness of God because of what is not there, instead of what is. The clothing was there, the body wasn’t. Because, He was risen.

There were certain rituals that needed to be done to the body of the deceased; primarily the body needed to be covered in good smelling oils because a body decomposing tends to be rather smelly. Mary, and some other women in the other gospels, came that Sunday after Passover, the very first time they were available, to take care of Jesus body. Deep in grief, carrying oils out to the tombs, Mary comes upon the place of Jesus burial, some one else’s tomb, where His body had been laid Friday evening. But things were different than when she had left Friday night. Something is wrong. The tomb is no longer closed; but the rock is rolled away. Mary is about to learn the absence of something can sometimes give great hope.

There is really only on conclusion she can come to. She has listened to Jesus, perhaps even more intently than have the disciples. She knows who He is, but to see the empty tomb didn’t fill her with hope, just anxiety. She was in the moment, we have the benefit of hindsight. She was there, in front of the place where she knew Jesus body had been placed just a few days ago, and now the body is gone. This isn’t a feeling of hope, but one of loss and perhaps shame at the desecration of Jesus body. Who might have come and taken the body away? Was this the final insult, was it the final and worst punishment, that perhaps His body was taken and thrown into a trash heap, or left out for scavenging dogs to eat? Where was the body of her Lord? The empty tomb to us means He is risen, to her it did not yet mean that.

Sometimes the absence of something means life. You likely know someone who has been checked for something medical, something life threatening. Maybe it was a heart problem, or a genetic problem. The doctors check, and thank God, the person doesn’t have what the doctors suspected they might have. The absence of the disease means life. It means life is free to be lived again, without the threat of death hanging over every moment. The absence of war for returning soldiers means life; the absence of Jesus body in the tomb means that our eternality is secured in His love and His power. We know what the lack of the body meant. Mary didn’t. She would learn that He is risen! But not in that instant. She had not yet learned that sometimes the absence of a thing means life.

Mary runs to Peter, the leader of the disciples, and tells him that the body is missing. Peter of course, is going to run to the tomb. Maybe he doesn’t believe her, maybe he needs to see this for himself. Lots of maybes. Peter is with all the disciples, including the disciple Jesus loved, who we believe is John himself, the author of this gospel account. At this point, the account of Jesus missing body becomes an eye witness account. John joins the story already in progress. Mary comes into their presence crying, telling the simple story of Resurrection Sunday; the body isn’t there, where it should have been by all human accounts. But Jesus was more than human, and the body wasn’t moved by any humans. But they don’t understand all that quite yet. It is coming, Jesus is coming to them, but not quite yet.

I love this eyewitness account. John is just stating the facts; when Mary came and told them the body was missing, both he and Peter got up and ran to the tomb. And John outran Peter. Outran him, but didn’t duck into the cave first. He waited for Peter to come, and for Peter to lead him into the tomb. Peter always has that same passion and attitude where he just barges into things. He barges into a promise to never forsake Jesus, and by the time the rooster crows, he’s done it 3 times. He barges into a fellowship time with Jesus and Moses and Elijah, and says they should build a monument to remember the moment. He runs up, and barges right into the cave that held Jesus 3 days ago, but does no longer. The burial cloths are there, but not the body. The body is gone. Now Peter and John are going to learn the same lesson that Mary has already started to learn; that the absence of Jesus body is not a reason to panic or to be angry against the religious powers that be. Instead, the absence of the body will point to a deeper reality; that Jesus, as He told them He would do, defeated death, rebuilt the temple in 3 days and won salvation for us. The cloths were there, but not Jesus. He is risen.

He saw strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)

So John finally goes inside. He too sees what Peter has seen. The big nothing. The cloths set aside, but the absence of the body. It is exactly as Mary has reported. The body is indeed gone. Peter and Mary went into an empty tomb and saw that it was empty. In effect, they saw nothing. John, though, went into the empty tomb and believed. There is a fundamental difference between seeing nothing and not understanding, and seeing nothing and believing. John saw the absence of the body and believed. It all suddenly clicked. John knew Jesus was the Messiah, he had known that for a while. But now he understood what Jesus had been talking about. In Chapter 16 of John, right before the long prayer Jesus prays before His arrest, Jesus spends some time talking with the disciples using very plain language. Here are a couple verses illustrating what Jesus was saying to the disciples, and what John believed. (16:17ff) “Some of his disciples said to one another, “What does he mean by saying, ‘In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me,’ and ‘Because I am going to the Father’?” They kept asking, “What does he mean by ‘a little while’? We don’t understand what he is saying….I tell you the truth, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy.”

This is what is happening to John because of his belief, his understanding of why the body is gone. He understands this was all part of the plan. Jesus had to die on the cross because that is the only way that our sins, your sins, mine as well, can be cleaned up and covered over. He understands that Jesus death on the cross wasn’t a tragic accident that could have be avoided. Jesus knew He was headed to the cross. Jesus had known for a while, and hinted at it, but never came out and explained the whole plan to the disciples. If He had, they probably would have tried to prevent what needed to happen from happening. They would have tried to prevent Jesus from going to Jerusalem, tried to prevent Him from teaching at the Temple, tried to prevent Him from criticizing the religious hierarchy so that He wouldn’t get killed. But Jesus had to die. Our lives depend on his death. We are so lost in sin that without Jesus we cannot hope to know God at all. God is too righteous, we are too sinful. Even the very best of us fall far short of God’s perfection. So you and I, being far from the best of humanity, need Jesus to have died for our sins.

John is beginning to believe. He is beginning to understand that Jesus death was necessary because he sees for Himself that the body is gone. He is beginning to understand that the body’s absence means that what Jesus had been saying about the resurrection is true as well. Jesus needed to die for us, but His resurrection is also for us. Jesus is our hope because of the greatness of His absence from the tomb that Sunday morning. His absence from the tomb meant life for Him; it means life for all those who place their faith in Jesus as the Son of God.

Even from the circumstantial, non-biblical evidence we have, Jesus body really was gone. If the disciples had the body, they wouldn’t have given up their lives, as almost all of them did, while contending Jesus had risen. And if the Pharisees had the body, all they would have had to do to squelch the rumors about Jesus was produce the body. But the body resurrected; Jesus came out of the grave as Himself. There will still holes in His wrists, but they had healed. There was still a wound in His side, but it was healed as well.

Because Jesus invites us into His righteousness, His place of right relationship with God through Him, we too look forward to a resurrection like His. The grave, because of Christ, won’t hold us either. Our eternal resting place will not be in a cemetery someplace, but it will be with our Lord and Savior. That is the hope and promise we especially today remember and celebrate, but it should be an every day truth that we live into as Christians. Every day it is important to us to have the hope of Christ in our hearts. Every day we should be telling others about the hope we have in life and death because of the empty tomb. Every day is a day to live for God, to praise God, to love Jesus because of what He did for you. We live for Jesus because He died for us, because He rose for us. All of this because of what wasn’t in the tomb. What wasn’t there meant life; His life, our life.

Live into that this day, this week, this year. He wasn’t there that Sunday morning, because He is risen. It is the truth we live into each day; the joy, the love, the grace and forgiveness, the peace in our hearts because He wasn’t there. He is risen.

Let’s pray.