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April 11, 2004 |
Easter Sunday, 2004 |
Pastor Brian Shimer
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"Why Do You Seek The Living Among the Dead?"
Luke 24: 1-12
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This Sunday is known for joy. There are Easter egg hunts, special brunches
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advertised, parties and fancy clothes. Look at all of you! There is something about Easter Sunday that is special. I know when our girls were young, their grandparents always seemed to come up with special Easter dresses for them to wear. And they loved those dresses sometimes even wearing hats as well. I. This Sunday is special. Today people are here who only come to church today and maybe at Christmas time or for another special event. Why come today?
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Perhaps for family tradition. "I am not much into church, but I want to stay in good | |
graces with my wife." People come, perhaps, because they know that this among Sundays is somehow important.
What makes this Sunday special?
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Well, if the women of the first century were here they could tell you the thing that
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made that first Sunday special was the singular fact that Jesus is Alive. You know the accounts proclaim that the stone was rolled away, the tomb was empty, the body was gone, the wrappings were there like a discarded chrysalis, as if wrapped around the body.
Wouldn't you have wondered what had happened? I know they did. Many of them had been there to watch Jesus die. A fact confirmed by the centurion who did not break Jesus' legs to rush death but speared his side.
There was not enough time to properly anoint Jesus' body that day. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea after taking his body down from the cross wrapped the body in cloth including 75 pounds of spices in the folds of the cloth and placed him in Joseph's new tomb outside Jerusalem.
After patiently waiting and grieving through the Sabbath, the women came to the tomb first thing on Sunday morning to properly anoint his body. What foolish love! They did not even know how they could get into the tomb. How could they have unwrapped the body from the cloths stiffened with the spices? They loved Jesus and no difficulty would stop them.
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How shocked they were to encounter the empty tomb, the angelic witnesses
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with such a question: "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" What is the answer? Why were they in a tomb looking for Jesus? Because they believed he was dead. Today many still believe Jesus is dead.
One young man who saw the movie The Passion of the Christ was not impressed with the ending. He said, "The ending ruined it." When asked why, he said, "Because Jesus did not rise from the dead. That is just opinion."
That is what he had been taught in his Mormon upbringing, that there was no resurrection.
It is safer to keep Jesus dead. If he is dead, our answer to the angels' question would simply be this: "Because Jesus is dead! We only seek his body not him."
In the late 1800s all kinds of theories were created to rationalize the resurrection. One was that Jesus just swooned on the cross. The centurion who had watched thousands of people die mistook this fainting spell for death. The disciples did not notice as they wrapped his body that he was still breathing, so put him into the tomb. In the coolness of the air, Jesus revived, unwrapped himself and left the cloths there on the slab exactly in the shape of his body as if his body were still in them. Then he staggered, naked, weakened from the incredible loss of blood, with a hole in his side, and pushed the 2000 pound stone up its track away from the entrance. Then he exited from the tomb. Would this have made the guard shake like dead men? Would a man in Jesus' condition look like one who had triumphed over death? I think it takes much more faith to believe this happened than to believe the resurrection.
Others say Jesus did not bodily rise but just rose spiritually in the minds of the disciples. The body was still there somewhere, but they lost the location of the tomb and never found it. Or as one of the participants in the ridiculous Jesus Seminar says, "wild dogs came and consumed it." So, the disciples saw a vision of him after his resurrection. How do you explain 500 people at one time seeing that vision? Or the fact that this vision lasted over a month!
However people want to keep Jesus dead, and they have all kinds of methods, the fact is they seek to do so.
You see it is not just hear-say, it is not just an invented tale that Jesus is alive. It is not something we say just on Easter Sunday, because of religious tradition. It is an indisputable fact.
Thomas Arnold, Professor of History at Oxford and author of the 3-volume History of Rome, wrote: "I know of no one fact in the history of mankind which is proved by better and fuller evidence of every sort, … than the great sign … that Jesus died and rose again from the dead."
Josh McDowell sought to prove it false. He writes, "After more than 700 hours of studying this subject and thoroughly investigating its foundation, I came to the conclusion that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is … the most important fact of history."
In the 1930s a lawyer named Frank Morison also sought to refute the evidence for the resurrection. "He figured that an intelligent, rational approach to Jesus would completely discount his resurrection. However, upon approaching the facts with his legal background and training, he had to change his mind. He eventually wrote a best-seller, Who Moved the Stone which decisively deals with evidence for the resurrection."
Quotes from More Than a Carpenter, by Josh McDowell, ibid. pp 89, 96, 98 ubp).
Beyond the eyewitness accounts that confirm Jesus is alive, there is the testimony of the lives of the apostles. Usually people are willing to lie and face death if they have something to gain from it. The terrorists in 9-11 hoped to gain the promise of heaven if they killed themselves in the Jihad. They faced death for a lie but believed it was true. But did the apostles face death while believing it was a lie?
If it all was a concocted tale, why would they have written it as they did? Why include Peter's denial of Jesus, Judas' betrayal, the disciples' fear and disbelief? Why have women be the first ones to the tomb? In that era, a woman was not a reliable witness. An orthodox Jewish man would pray daily, "Thank you God that I was not born a woman."
And look at how their lives change? These eleven men and the others went from being fearful, hiding followers to mighty bold witnesses in a matter of days. How can that be? There is only one explanation. The women were looking in the wrong place for Jesus. He was not dead, he was truly alive. Not just spiritually alive, but Jesus was physically walking about in a resurrected body.
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It is little wonder then that this Sunday is important to us for we celebrate today
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what we celebrate every Sunday of the year and live in our daily lives that Jesus lives
Ah, but what if Jesus were to ask you this question: "why are you seeking the Living among the dead?" You might answer, what do you mean, Lord?
And perhaps Jesus would say:
"Child, today you were feeling hopeless when you encountered so and so who put you down and instead of seeking me, you turned to eat that cookie, hoping the sugar would chase hopelessness away. And it worked for a moment so you ate another."
Where do you go when you hit difficulties or situations in life that make you quake? Circumstances that bring up feelings of pain, loneliness, fears, panic, torment, anger or the sense of being out of control?
What do you turn to? What do you do? Where do you run?
Everyone has set patterns in life of how they face difficulty. And God is saying, "Children, change those patterns. Stop running to the tomb. Instead learn to run to Me." How did Paul say it to the Colossian Christians? "Set your minds on things above not on earthly things" (Colossians 3:1-3).
Everyone has a dead thing. It might be a book, the TV, a movie, food or drink; it might be shopping, a relationship, sexual sin or some evil action. It could be almost anything. It is not that the thing itself is necessarily bad (outside of some sinful choice) -- it is our use of it. You will not find life if you keep running toward death.
Jesus is Alive. It is time to change where we run. Turn off the TV. Close the Book. Turn away from the refrigerator. Don't go to the mall. Don't open the bottle. Don't go there!
Tell a friend that this is where you have been running and that you are going to try to change this pattern. All of us need to do this. I am doing this currently. And by being accountable to friends who ask me how I am doing, I am strengthened when tempted to run to the tomb.
Run to him: pray, seek the Word, write out the feelings, be honest with Jesus. "Pour out your hearts to me," says the Heavenly Father in the book of Psalms.
Then you will find life -- the power of the resurrection will work in you and through you. What is the good news of this Sunday? Jesus is Alive? Well, let's live Him!
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