The Reality of the Resurrection - 2016 Easter Day Sermon

John 20: 1-18

Ministers and preachers do strange things on Easter Day.  I have heard several reports of Methodist Ministers and Anglican Vicars eating daffodils in Easter Day services.  Don’t worry, I’m not about to start munching my way through the contents of our Easter cross: I’d much rather have a chocolate egg!

I’m not going to do anything strange today.  Instead I’m simply going to tell you of my belief, of my absolute personal conviction; that on that first Easter Day Jesus rose from the tomb to new resurrection life.  I don’t believe Jesus was an illusion or a ghost; I don’t believe that the resurrection was a growing conviction and realization in the minds of the disciples that Jesus was still alive, or that it was just a spiritual experience: I believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead.

I know that there are people in this congregation who will disagree with me about this, who struggle to or who just cannot believe in the resurrection of the physical body of Jesus: but I can only preach with conviction and integrity what I personally believe: and I believe that Jesus truly rose from the dead.

We are told that early on Sunday morning Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and that when she arrived she saw that the stone had been rolled away.  We are talking about quite a sizable piece of rock here that would have taken two or three men to move.  Two possibilities could have crossed Mary’s mind at this point.  She may have thought that the Jewish authorities has removed Jesus’ body.  The second possibility was tomb robbers.  Mary may have thought that the tomb had been broken into and the body of Jesus desecrated.  Either way, it was a situation Mary couldn’t face on her own and so she went back to the city to find Peter and John.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of them at this point that Jesus had risen from the dead.

All three of them returned to Jesus’ tomb, with John arriving first.  He looked into the tomb, but did not go in, and saw strips of cloth.  It must have been immediately apparent to him that the body of Jesus was gone.

What, then, had happened to Jesus’ body?  Where had it gone?

Peter arrived and went straight into the tomb.  We are told that he too saw strips of cloth lying there as well as the cloth that had wrapped Jesus head lying in its place, separate from the linen.  The implication here is that the material was lying as though the body of Jesus had simply passed through the cloth, leaving it to fall where it lay. 

William Barclay expresses it this way, “The whole point of the description is that the grave clothes did not look as if they had been pulled off or taken off: they were lying there in their regular folds as if the body of Jesus had simply evaporated out of them and left them lying.”

What, then, had happened to Jesus’ body?  Where had it gone?

Even now there is no suggestion that the idea of resurrection came to them.  Indeed, the author of the gospel tells us, “They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.”

At this point Peter and John returned to Jerusalem, leaving Mary Magdalene behind by the tomb.  She sees two angels in the tomb whom ask her why she is crying.  “They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they have put him.”

Then she turns round and sees Jesus standing there, but does not recognize him.  Why?  This lack of recognition has cast doubts in the minds of some as to the reality of the resurrection, but there are at least two good explanations.

Perhaps she did not recognize Jesus because of her tears.  Her vision was blurred through crying and she was not, after all, expecting to see Jesus alive again.

Perhaps, as one film of the life of Jesus suggested, Jesus simply had his back to Mary and she couldn’t see his face.  Again, she was not expecting to see Jesus alive.

If we are not expecting to see Jesus, then we don’t see Jesus. 

How often, I wonder, do we come to church with no real expectation of encountering Jesus?  Quite often, I would suggest.  We are hoping that we will like the hymns, that the prayers will be good and that the Scriptures will be read well.  We are hoping that the sermon won’t be too long or boring.

We need to have an expectation that we will meet the Risen Lord Jesus in our worship.  It is not an unrealistic expectation, because Jesus promised that where two or three gather in his name he would be with them.  The Risen Jesus is here, right now, present amongst us.  We don’t meet Jesus and feel his presence because we are distracted by a hymn we don’t like or perhaps by what the preacher is wearing; or our spiritual eyes are blurred with thoughts about what we are having for lunch or what’s on TV this afternoon.  We don’t meet the Risen Jesus because we don’t really think he is here.  If we want to meet the Risen Jesus we must concentrate on him, allowing no distractions with a hushed expectation that he is indeed with us.

Jesus asks who she is looking for and Mary thinks he is the gardener.  A natural assumption: she was not expecting to see Jesus alive.

Then Jesus said her name, and in that moment Mary came to the realization that it was Jesus speaking to her.  There must have been something so familiar in the way Jesus said her name that Mary suddenly realised what had happened, that she was indeed seeing Jesus alive!

The whole tenor of the account, the details of Mary exchange with this man she initially thought was the gardener, suggest that it is extremely unlikely that Mary was having a hallucination or feeling I her heart that I some way Jesus lived on.  Here we have solid, real human being with  whom Mary has a conversation, as she would with any other person, before she realised he was indeed Jesus resurrected.

She must also have touched him, again indicating beyond doubt that Jesus had risen bodily from the dead, because Jesus said to her, “Do not hold onto me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.  Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

These words both seem to confirm Jesus physical resurrection, but also cast some doubt.  Why didn’t he want Mary to hold on to him?

I agree with William Barclay who suggests that Jesus’ words mean, “Do not spend so long worshipping me in the joy of your new discovery.  Go and tell the good news to the rest of the disciples.  Don’t go on clutching me selfishly to yourself.  In a short time I am going back to my Father.  I want to meet my disciples as often as possible before then.  Go and tell them the good news that none of the time we have together should be wasted.”

Mary did as she was told.  She went back to the disciples and told them, “I have seen the Lord”.

Jesus truly rose from death, and that has huge implications for us as Christian disciples today.  It means that we have affirmation of Jesus’ words, “I am the resurrection and the life; affirmation that because he rose from the dead in a newly remade and renewed body, we too can be sure that bodily resurrection will come for us too.  St Paul wrote, in our passage from 1 Corinthians, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive!”  We are also assured in that same letter of Paul’s; “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.”

It means too that we can truly know Jesus as our living Lord.  To be a disciple is not to know about Jesus: it is to know Jesus.  It does not mean arguing about Jesus, it means meeting Jesus.  To know about Jesus intellectually is not enough; we need to know him personally.  Christianity is all about a personal, loving relationship with God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

It means that the Jesus who rose physically from the dead also ascended into heaven.  Jesus, in heaven, is still both completely divine and completely human.  He still knows what it is to be human and understands our concerns, our fears, the stresses in our lives.  When we pray in his name he knows what it is to be us in all our strength and in all our weakness and frailty.

The resurrection means, for us, that Jesus is alive and with us right now, and that we can be with him for eternity.

As Brian Wren wrote:

“Christ is alive!  No longer bound
to distant years in Palestine,
but saving, healing, here and now,
and touching every place and time.”

(This sermon was preached at Bramhope Methodist Church on 27th Marh 2016)

Father, Forgive Them - A Sermon for Good Friday

Every year as Good Friday approaches I look over the passages I preached from and sermons I’ve preached on previous Good Fridays as the start of a process to try and discern what the word is that God wants me to bring this year.  In 2014 I preached from Matthew’s account of Good Friday and the spiritual pain and significance of the cross.  Last year I preached from Mark’s account, so this year it felt right to look at Luke’s account of the last day of Jesus’ life.

As I read through Luke’s account one phrase jumped out at me above all others: Jesus’ words as they crucified him; “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Exactly who was Jesus asking God to forgive?

Was Jesus asking his Father to forgive the Roman soldiers who had just forced him to march, bleeding and in pain through the streets of Jerusalem and then nailed him to the cross?

Was Jesus asking his Heavenly Father to forgive Pontius Pilate who had sentenced him to death on the cross?

Was Jesus asking for forgiveness for the crowds who had shouted “crucify him” and the Jewish leaders who had put him through a farce of a trial?

Was Jesus asking Father God to forgive Judas who betrayed him?

I think that the answer is yes to all these questions.  Jesus was asking God to forgive all those who were involved in his death.  He was sticking firmly to the principle he laid down many times and particularly in the Lord’s Prayer, “forgiven us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Of course Jesus committed no sins during his entire life; he went to the cross in a state of sinless perfection: but he still forgave others and forgave them immediately.

I have left one group of people out who Jesus also forgave that day.  You and me and anybody else in the whole of human history who has sinned against God; who has rebelled against God and his revealed word, who has broken God’s law of love.  It was because of our sin that Jesus went to the cross, your sin and my sin and the sin of every other human being. 

Our sin separates us from God.   When we sin, we move ourselves away from God, away from his loving presence.  It isn’t God who moves, it is us who moves away from God.  Our only way back to God is for us to understand that God is willing to forgive our sins, all of them, no matter how much we have sinned or how badly we have sinned.

I was recently speaking to a colleague in another Circuit who went to see a lady, a faithful member of his congregation, who was in the terminal stages of multiple cancers.  Thirty years before she’d had an affair with a married man who subsequently left his wife and married her.  She was worried that she would be condemned to hell because she was still married to the man, even though she recognized that what she had done was a sin in the eyes of God.  My friend was able to reassure her that God had indeed forgiven her sin of adultery; she could be sure that she was forgiven because Jesus had given his life on the cross for us all to assure us of the forgiveness of sins.

“He died that we might be forgiven.
He died to make us good,
that we might go at last to heaven,
saved by his precious blood.”

When our Lord Jesus said, ““Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing”, he was forgiving us as well.

Forgiveness was on Jesus’ lips a second time as he hung on the cross.  Two thieves hung with him, one on either side, and one of them mocked him, “Aren’t you the Messiah?  Save yourself and us.”

The second thief rebuked the first saying, “We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve.  But this man has done nothing wrong.”  That same thief then said to Jesus, “Remember me when you come into your Kingdom.”

Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”  Only those whose sins are forgiven can come into the presence of God in paradise.  Jesus was telling the second thief that his sins had been forgiven.

The cross is all about forgiveness for sinners.

There is another sign of forgiveness in Luke’s account of the crucifixion.  We read that, “darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining.  And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.  Jesus called out in a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”  When he said this he breathed his last.

The curtain of the temple was torn in two and straight afterwards Jesus committed his spirit to God.  This is not a coincidence.

The curtain referred to is the curtain that covered the Holy of Holies, the place at the center of the Temple where the very presence of God was believed to be.  Only the High Priest could enter the Holy of Holies, and then only once a year after special ritual preparation to ensure that he was ritually clean.  Because of their sinful nature, nobody else was allowed to pass beyond the curtain.  The curtain was a physical representation of the barrier that sin places between us and God.

When Jesus died on the cross everything changed.  He died that we might be forgiven for our sins and as a symbol that his death accomplished all that he wanted it to the curtain was torn in two.  Jesus’ death ensured that there would be no barriers between us and God.

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

You are forgiven and I am forgiven: we are all forgiven for our sins and can be in permanent and everlasting relationship with God because Jesus died for us all.

“Is crucified for me and you
to bring us rebels back to God:
believe, believe the record true,
we all are saved by Jesus’ blood!
Pardon for all flows from his side:
my Lord, my Love is crucified.”