The Good News of Jesus
05/16/2010 - The Resurrection of Jesus
This past Easter after we were finished up our worship gatherings here at Sunnyside we packed up the family and headed over to Warminster to meet my mother and my brother and his family for Easter dinner. It's become a tradition to meet at the Vereinigung Erzgebirge, the German Club that my mother has belonged to ever since she was a kid.
And so we always enjoy a delicious meal there and eat way too much and then head back to mom's house for the traditional family Easter egg hunt which is always a lot of fun and to be honest sometimes gets ugly ... to be really honest most times gets ugly. I never thought an Easter Egg Hunt was meant to be a contact sport but in our family it is!
But over the last five years we've added another tradition to Easter Sunday and that is to visit my father's grave. And so after dinner on the way home to mom's we stopped by the cemetery to pay our respects to dad who passed away five years ago, on April 9, 2005.
And I must admit it feels awkward when we're there. We're not always sure what to do or what to say. My mom always brings fresh flowers and puts them on the grave and this year we joined hands and prayed together thanking God for dad and what his life meant to all of us and then renewing the hope that one day that grave is going to be opened and dad is going to come out with a brand new body and we're going to see him again completely healed and whole.
That's the blessed hope that we as Christians have. We have the hope that one day Jesus is coming back and when he does his followers who have already died will come out of their tombs and be a given a brand new body, a resurrected body, a body just like Jesus had when he came out of his tomb. And those of us who are still alive when Jesus comes back will get that body as well without dying at all.
The apostle Paul puts it this way in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18, For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. 18Therefore encourage one another with these words.
Encourage one another with these words. That's the hope that we as believers in Jesus have. We don't look forward to annihilation and ending up decomposed into nothingness. We don't look forward to reincarnation and coming back again and again into this broken world in some other form of existence. We don't look forward to some cosmic kind of absorption like a single drop of water being absorbed into some eternal sea.
We look forward to the resurrection of our physical bodies when Jesus returns so that we will forever be with the Lord alive in the kingdom that he will establish on this resurrected earth. You may not like your body now, but you will love your body then!
In 1 Corinthians 15:50-53 Paul says we're going to need that new body to live in that new kingdom, I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep (die), but we will all be changed -52in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.
That's our hope. That's what we look forward to. Someday our physical bodies will be resurrected from the grave or from ashes in an urn and or just plain changed if we're still alive into immortal, imperishable, glorified bodies that will live forever in God's kingdom on this renewed earth.
And that was the hope that many Jewish people clung to in Jesus' day as well. They looked forward to the resurrection of the dead at the end of the age, some to everlasting life and others to everlasting shame and condemnation.
And they leaned on passages like Daniel 12:2, Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.
There will be a parting of the ways at the end of the age, but every human being God ever created will be resurrected from the grave someday.
The resurrection of the body was a deeply held Jewish belief. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea two well respected Jewish leaders, members of the Sanhedrin the ruling body in Israel, believed in that resurrection at the end of time and so did the Jewish women who watched Jesus die on the hill that day, but none of them were prepared for what was going to happen just three days after Jesus' death on that first Easter Sunday. If you have a Bible turn with me to Mark 16:1-8 as we ponder the resurrection of Jesus this morning.
Remember, last week we left Jesus in the tomb, Joseph's tomb. This is a picture of typical tomb in Israel carved out of a cave with a huge stone that was rolled in front of the entrance. Jesus' tomb may have looked very much like this. It looks like this one even has a garage too!
This is a picture of the garden tomb that exists today outside the city of Jerusalem in a garden at the base of the hill that some believe is Golgotha where Jesus was crucified. You can visit this tomb too and quietly reflect in that garden. You can also celebrate communion there with other Christ followers and have a very moving spiritual experience.
We're not sure what tomb housed Jesus, but we do know that it was close to sunset on that first Good Friday when Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea came out of the shadows of secrecy and openly took the body of Jesus down off the cross. They knew they had to hurry if they were going to give him a proper Jewish burial because the Sabbath was coming quickly and they wanted to get his body into the tomb before dark because once Sabbath hit no more work could be done.
So they took linen cloths and washed his body, then they anointed it with spices and perfumes, and finally they wrapped it in a linen shroud. And while they were busy with the body Mary of Magdala and Mary the mother of Joseph were there watching. They wanted to see for themselves where Jesus was put to rest.
And so we pick up the story in Mark 16:1, When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus' body. 2Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb 3and they asked each other, "Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?"
Like everyone else, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome rested on the Sabbath Day which lasted from sunset on Friday night until sunset on Saturday night. And during that time they stayed home. But as soon as the sun went down on Saturday night they went out shopping and bought spices so that they could go back and anoint the body of Jesus. Maybe they weren't satisfied with the job that Nic and Joe had done. Or maybe they all agreed that they needed to come back later and do more because they ran out of time. We don't know for sure, but we do know that the practice of Jewish burial was a two step process.
The first step was to wash the body, anoint it, wrap it in linen, and lay it on a shelf or a niche about waist high in the cave. That's what Nicodemus and Joseph had started on Friday night and the women were there to finish the job first thing on Sunday morning. Spices and perfumes were used to combat the odor of the decaying body because that tomb would eventually be opened again and shared with others in the family who would be buried there as well. So that was step one of a Jewish burial.
Step two was to come back to the tomb in about a year or two after the body had decomposed and unwrap the grave clothes, collect the bones, and put them in a bone box called an ossuary which would then be stored on another shelf often in the same tomb. So tombs were places that Jewish people not only visited, but went in and out of over the course of a lifetime.
And so while they're walking to the tomb they're wondering, "Who's going to roll the stone away? We forgot about that detail." Apparently it was a massive stone, but it could be moved. Joseph and Nicodemus had put it in place on Friday night but since that time Matthew tells us that Pilate had ordered that a seal be put on the stone and a guard posted. The Roman seal would have made it perfectly clear that anyone who tampered with the stone would be executed by crucifixion. It was a capital offense to move the stone.
The seal was actually the Pharisee's idea who had remembered that when Jesus was alive he said, "'After three days I will rise again."
Matthew 27:64, "So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first."
How weird is that? The disciples aren't expecting Jesus to rise from the dead, but the Pharisees are! The enemy remembered what he said, but the apostles didn't. And the women aren't expecting it either. They're not coming to the tomb that morning to see if the resurrection had come right on schedule. They're not thinking, "Hey we've got spices just in case he's still dead, but let's hope he's alive!" No. They're thinking about finishing up step one of the burial process. The only resurrection they know about is going to happen at the end of the age someday. But when they arrive they get the shock of their lives.
Look at verse 4, (Garden Tomb Slide)But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. 6"Don't be alarmed," he said. "You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him."
The barn door is wide open when they get there! And they're alarmed, Mark says. We know from John's gospel that their first reaction was that someone had come and taken the body. They didn't think Jesus had walked out. They thought he was stolen. But when they look inside they see a young man dressed in a white robe. Matthew in his gospel describes him as an angel whose appearance was like lightning and his clothes were as white as snow.
And he knows who they're looking for and that they're scared to death by the whole thing. They think they've stumbled onto a crime scene. They see the Roman seal that's been broken and the guards out cold. So the young man says, "Calm down. Don't be afraid. I know you're looking for Jesus the Nazarene who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him."
And what did they see when they looked at the shelf where Jesus corpse had been? John tells us that they saw the strips of linen that had been wrapped around his body and the cloth that had been wrapped around his head, but no Jesus. Yet they still didn't understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead. Resurrection was something way down the road it wasn't for now ... or was it?
Verse 7, But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.'"
8Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.
One author I read this week said the two most precious words in this whole passage are the words "and Peter." Go tell his disciples "and Peter" because Jesus isn't finished with Peter yet. Peter is still living through his worst nightmare, beating himself up for denying Jesus three times, wishing he had never gone to the courtyard of the high priest that night, tortured by the memory of his disloyalty, convinced that he's done with it all, certainly Jesus is done with him. But as we've seen already in this series Jesus will tenderly restore Peter on the beach by the Sea of Galilee and commission him for his future, world-changing ministry.
But notice the first eyewitnesses to the resurrection are women. In a culture that prevented women from testifying in a court of law Jesus makes women his primary witnesses. They become the apostles to the apostles. The word apostle literally means "messenger." These women are sent from the tomb with the message that Jesus is alive. And they're excited and they're scared and they don't know what to make of it all, but they're running as fast they can with the greatest news that's ever been told. "He's alive!"
And it is! The resurrection of Jesus Christ is what makes the good news of the gospel "good." It's the best news we have to share. It's the cornerstone of our faith. It's what sets Jesus apart from every other person who has ever walked this planet. No other religious leader, political figure, philosophical giant has a resurrection on their resume, only Jesus of Nazareth.
Take away Christmas and you lose two chapters one in Matthew and one in Luke, nothing else. Take away Easter and you don't a New Testament, you don't have a Christian faith, and as Paul says, you are still in your sins.
1 Corinthians 15:17-20, And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, you are still in your sins. 18Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all others. 20But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.
We no longer need to fear death. Death will not have the victory over God's people. It is not the end of our lives. Death is the doorway through which we pass into God's sweet presence and wait for the day when Jesus returns to this earth and our bodies come out of the grave and are joined together with our spirits to live forever with Jesus our King. That's the blessed hope that we cherish as Christ followers. That's what we remembered when we circled around my dad's grave and prayed together on Easter.
(Garden Tomb Slide) I love what Tom Wright says about the resurrection when he writes, "What is happening at the tomb is the action of God himself. The God who apparently remained silent on Good Friday is having the last word. He is answering the unspoken questions of Jesus' followers and the spoken question of Jesus himself on the cross.
What God is doing is not just displaying his supernatural power or a special favor for Jesus, he is starting something brand new, beginning the new world he promised long ago, sending the disciples to Galilee in the first place but then to the ends of the earth with the good news of what has happened. A whole new world is opening up in front of them and in front of us."
Jesus is alive and that makes all the difference. It gives us hope for the future and a reason to live for his kingdom right here, right now.