[Machine transcription]
Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Hallelujah.
Dear Saints, we rejoice today in this fact, in this truth, in this historical truth
that our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, dead, buried, and raised from the dead.
That he left the tomb.
There is year after year these surveys of Christians and they are asked this question,
if we found the body of Jesus, if we learned that Jesus was not truly raised from the dead,
would that make any difference for your faith?
And most of the time, most Christians say it wouldn’t make any difference at all.
Dear saints, that is wrong.
It makes all the difference.
If Christ is not raised from the dead, truly raised from the dead, then we, says St. Paul,
are still in our sins.
If Christ is not raised from the dead, then our faith is futile.
If Christ is not raised from the dead, then we should probably turn this room into a bowling
alley or something.
The parlor into a bar, eat, drink and be merry, tomorrow we die.
This is the main thing on Easter.
The main thing today to consider.
That Jesus was truly dead, truly buried, and truly raised from the dead.
And to consider it this morning, let’s just go and sit there and watch how things unfolded.
Can you imagine?
Okay, so imagine yourself with a lawn chair and a cup of coffee, okay?
And we’re going to go to the garden tomb sometime in the middle of the night on Friday before
the sun comes up, and we’re just going to watch what happens.
So we go and we sit down.
Well, the first thing that happens is we go into the garden and we see the soldiers there
and we ask them, would you mind if we just sat here and watched what happened?
And they said, for a sermon illustration, okay, no problem.
I don’t probably think they would let us stay, but we’ve got to get over that so we can sit
there and watch, okay?
The soldiers are there.
They probably don’t want to be there.
They were sent there by the Pharisees because the Pharisees, and this is an
amazing, one of these amazing points of the Easter story, is that the disciples
of Jesus, the followers of Jesus, the women who were with Jesus, they all
forgot that he promised he would be raised on the third day, but the Pharisees
didn’t forget it, and they’re the ones who sent the soldiers to make sure that
Jesus stayed in the tomb. So they’re there, sitting there around the fire,
probably think they’re wasting their time, and they’re, who knows, gambling or
telling soldier stories. And as you’re watching, now get this, the stone is still
there, it’s still sealed, and you see Jesus walking through the stone door out
of the grave, quietly, the soldiers don’t even notice, and then he’s gone.
Remember, it wasn’t Jesus who moved the stone away, it was the angels who did it later to
show that the grave was empty, so Jesus is already gone.
And then, just as the sun is starting to come up, two angels come down from heaven.
I imagine it like this, their feet hit the ground and there’s an earthquake, and the
seal of the tomb is broken, and one of the angels takes the stone that covers the tomb
and rolls it away, and the soldiers who were there all faint with fear as if they’re dead.
On all the paintings in the bulletin, it looks like the soldiers are sleeping.
That’s not sleep.
They’re passed out.
They fainted because they saw the angels and they freaked out.
One of the angels goes and sits on the place where Jesus’ body was, sits there in the
tomb.
The other angel, one of my favorite parts of the story, Easter story, the angel sits
on the tombs, on the stone that covered the tomb, triumphantly sitting there on the door,
probably arms crossed.
So, you’re watching this and amazed.
The soldiers start to sort of rouse themselves.
They come to, they see the angels, they see the open tomb, they look and see that the
tomb is empty, and they run away into Jerusalem to go and report what they’d seen.
In the meantime now, the sun is starting to come up, and you hear some people sort of
whispering on their way.
You recognize their voices as they get a little bit closer.
It’s the women who follow Jesus.
There’s Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, Joanna,
and some of the other women who followed Jesus.
And they now are coming to the tomb.
They’re carrying spices.
They’re sad.
They’re maybe crying.
They’re speaking to each other in broken voices.
And as they get closer to the tomb, you hear one of them say,
what are we thinking? How are we going to finish this burial work? Who’s going to roll the stone
away for us? It was a huge stone. What are we going to do? Didn’t you see them come into the
garden? And one of them, Mary, she’s at the front, Mary Magdalene, she sees the open tomb and the
stone moved aside and she yells and she drops her stuff and she runs.
She runs, in fact, we know, to go find Peter and John.
But the other women remain.
Mary leaves before she even sees the angel.
It seems like the angel who was there on the door had moved inside and now one of the angels
was sitting where the head of Jesus had been laid and the other was sitting where the feet
of Jesus were.
And the other women are marveling and weeping and they and they’re trying to figure out what’s going on
And they’re looking around and they can’t find the soldiers and there’s their campfire and the stones over there
And they go and they look in the tomb and Jesus isn’t there
But there are the angels and the angels say to them. Why are you weeping you?
Here’s another favorite part. We had it in the gospel reading
Say why are you looking for the living?
amongst the dead
Don’t be afraid, the angel says.
You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.
He’s not here.
Remember how he told you that in Galilee?
Go and tell his disciples that he’s risen from the dead.
And so the women, you see them come up out of the grave and they’re shaken, they don’t
know what to do.
They leave the garden.
They’re kind of afraid but joyful.
All this stuff is mixed up and they go and they leave the garden.
We find out from other readings that they sort of wandered around the city for a while
until Jesus actually appeared to them in the city a little bit later.
But we’re in the garden still.
So it’s quiet.
The angels we think are in the tomb but it seems like maybe they’ve actually gone or
disappeared for a little bit, because now we hear footsteps, people running.
There’s three of them.
One of them kind of runs lightly.
That’s John, and you see him come first, and he comes into the garden, and he sees the
tomb, and he stops at the mouth of the tomb, and he’s looking in, and then you hear coming
behind him, plodding steps, Peter, boom, boom, boom.
And Peter doesn’t stop at the tomb, he just goes all the way in, right past John, and
And John follows them, and they see the place where they laid Jesus, and they see the linen
cloth that was wrapped around His body.
It’s empty.
It’s lying there on the slab.
And then they see the shroud which was wrapped around Jesus’ face, and it’s folded up nicely
and set to the side.
What is going on here, they say to each other?
Mary comes along, Mary Magdalene, who had gone to tell them.
She comes along now later after them.
Peter and John come up out of the tomb, and you can notice as you watch, you can
notice that their faces have slightly different expressions on them. Peter is
befuddled. Where is the body of Jesus? Who in the world has done this? What is going
on? But on John’s face you see that he is starting to believe. Remember what he
said remember the resurrection maybe he’s alive again and these two leave the
grave leave the garden and now Mary is by herself Mary Magdalene remember she
had seven demons at one point and Jesus had delivered her she’s left alone in
the garden and she’s weeping sobbing I imagine walking around distraught she
doesn’t know what to do.
She was already sad enough that Jesus was dead and buried, but now she had come to finish
the work of burial, and Jesus’ body isn’t even there, and she’s walking around the
garden, walking around the tomb.
At last she goes, and she’s looking into the tomb, and now the angels are back.
You see it happen, and you would expect that Mary would sort of jump for fright because
that’s what always happens whenever anybody sees an angel, but it seems like Mary, who
was used to dealing with the spiritual, with the supernatural already.
She sees the angel, and the angels look back at her, and they say, woman, why are you weeping?
And Mary talks to the angels as if she talked to them all the time.
She says, where is his body?
Where have they put it?
And then something marvelous happens.
You see Jesus walk up behind Mary, and Mary has the sense that someone’s behind her, and
She turns and she thinks it’s the gardener.
Woman, Jesus says to her, why are you weeping?
And she says to him, have you taken his body?
Tell me where you’ve put it.
I’ll go and take it for you.
And Jesus says to her, Mary.
And she realizes that it’s Jesus.
And she falls down at his feet.
Teacher, she says.
And she grabs for his feet.
And Jesus says, don’t cling to me now, I haven’t yet ascended to my Father, but go tell my
disciples, go tell my brothers that I will ascend to my Father and your Father, to my
God and your God.
So Mary stands up and smiles at Jesus, wipes away the tears from her eyes, and she turns
And she runs out of the garden to go tell them that she has seen the Lord risen from
the dead, and then Jesus is gone.
And He’s gone.
He’s never going to come back to the tomb again.
He is done with the grave.
He’s left it behind.
Now if we were to then transform our lawn chair into like a hot air balloon and sort
of see what happens then, it’s all sort of crazy because the women are going around
town, kind of wandering around. Jesus appears to them, and Peter’s running
around, and Jesus appears to Peter, and then they all gather in the upper room,
all of them except for Thomas, and Jesus appears to them. But that’s next week’s
sermon. He’s showing them his hands on his side, that he’s eating fish with
them. He’s touching them so that they know that he’s not a ghost or a spirit,
spirit, but that He is alive, body and soul, and that He is out of the grave.
That it happened.
One thousand nine hundred eighty-nine years ago, it happened.
Now if you leave here this morning with nothing more than that, that is what you should take
with you.
That we are not here to celebrate some sort of myth, or some sort of story, or some sort
of ideal, or some sort of vague hope, or some sort of poetic, beautiful sort of thing, no,
none of that.
An event, a true event, that there was really grave clothes wrapped around Jesus, absorbing
the blood that was seeping out of His dead corpse.
That there was dirt on His feet when He got up out of the grave.
grave, that Jesus is risen and that His tomb is empty.
I have, as a pastor, probably put two hundred or so bodies in the ground, and they are all
still there, from Adam and Eve all the way until the people who are going to be buried
later this afternoon.
All the bodies have stayed in the grave, I mean, maybe half a dozen the Lord has called
back out of the grave, but then they had to go back again.
But Jesus is raised.
Death has no power over Him.
And that makes all the difference.
Jesus coming up out of the grave marks the end of the tyranny of death.
Jesus coming up out of the grave marks the end of the slavery to sin.
Jesus coming up out of the grave means that our despair and our hopelessness is over because
Christ has destroyed sin and death and the devil, all of this for you, for me.
Martin Luther loved to preach this little thing on Easter.
He liked to imagine the grave like a great devouring monster, and it would just eat people
all the time, one after another after another, every person just being devoured by the grave
until the grave tried to eat Jesus and Jesus gets stuck in the grave’s throat.
Someone comes along and gives the grave the Heimlich and three days later Jesus
is up out of the grave but in the meantime the grave is choked to death so
that Jesus is the death of death. Jesus is the murderer of murder. Jesus is the
destroyer of the destroyer and all of this for you. So one day we will all die.
We’ll be laid in the grave but one day later your grave, well I don’t know how
many days later, but someday later, your grave will be as empty as the grave of
Jesus. You will be raised and you will stand before the Lord in judgment with
nothing to fear, clothed in the righteousness of Christ and the victory
that he has won for us. And all of this, dear saints, because Christ is risen. He
He is risen indeed, hallelujah.
May his resurrection be your courage and your hope and your peace in this life to life everlasting.
May God grant it for Christ’s sake, amen.
And the peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds through Jesus
Christ our Lord, amen.
