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)