John 20:1-10

10/31/10
John 20:1-10
Hudson UMC

Normally, resurrection is something that we tend to associate with Spring. After all, that is when Easter falls in the church year. At the same time, we are reminded of the general idea of rebirth when we look around and see flowers blooming and trees getting their leaves. So it might feel just a little bit odd that we are going to talk about resurrection at this time of year, after a week that, for my money, was the first real week of late autumn or early winter. It has been cold, it has been windy, it has been not all that pleasant to be outside.

And yet, I think that it is great that our journey through John has brought us to this point at this time of year. It seems that it is precisely when everything around us seems to be going to sleep, when all of nature is in the dying part of its cycle, that we need to hear the word of hope contained in the resurrection. We need to always remember that the hope of the gospel is not just true when we look around and can see all of the world joining in resurrection, but is also true when our world is getting darker, when our world is getting colder.

The resurrection accounts in the New Testament are very interesting. None of the four gospels present the resurrection as if it were an ordinary thing. There are some who would say that believing in the resurrection would have been so much easier to those during Jesus’ time because they tended to believe that anything they couldn’t explain was the miraculous act of God. That is an interesting thought, but not one that we can take seriously on the basis of the New Testament. According to each of the four gospels, the resurrection came as a complete surprise, something that the disciples never would have expected, even though Jesus had spoken of it over and over again. They knew, just like we know, that dead is dead. Once someone has died, they don’t come back again.

And yet, the tomb is empty. Even here in John, as we will see next week, the disciples do not jump immediately to thinking that Jesus was physically raised. Mary Magdalene was convinced that someone had stolen the body. This emptiness of the tomb is extremely important because it was so baffling to the people. In each of the gospels, we are presented with the reality of the empty tomb and the confusion of the disciples. In each, the disciples are portrayed as being astonished and at least dimly aware that this is extremely important, but are totally unsure as to what it really means. Over a longer or shorter span of text, we see them trying to come to terms with what has happen, to understand what it really means that Jesus was raised from the dead. However, we also see that they do not understand in any kind of real way until they received the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.

When we look at how the disciples behave in response to this astonishing fact, that the tomb that Jesus was laid in was now empty, we can see how different it was to their normal way of responding. Let us look primarily at Peter. This is the same Peter who has been so bold throughout the whole ministry of Christ. He claimed that he was willing to die for his master and even inflicted harm on another human being to defend Him. We are used to Peter making a big show of everything. What happens here? He runs to the tomb, goes inside, sees everything, not wrapped on a dead body, but organized neatly, and then what? He goes home. It makes you want to say, “Really, Peter? Is that all you’re going to do?” It just seems so completely anticlimactic.

So, if we look just at the information presented in this particular passage, we have to say that, if we were to ask the disciples what they were thinking, they would say something like, “The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is extremely important, but we have no idea what it means.” The question that we need to ask today, though, is, “Do we have any better idea of what is going on? Do we know what significance the resurrection of Christ from the dead has for us today?” If the answer to that question is no, if we really don’t have any more clarity about the significance of the resurrection then we have to ask why we are here in church. Confusion isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if it never moves to some kind of clarity, we have to ask why we care.

So, even though the disciples at the time did not understand what difference it made that Christ was raised from the dead, as people who live on the other side of Pentecost from the people in our text for this morning, what can we say about it? The first thing that it means is that our God is a God who is indeed more powerful than anything we can imagine. This is important because, if Jesus remained in the tomb, we would have to ask whether God was not finally defeated by death. After all, to outside observers, Jesus would have seemed to be an eccentric traveling preacher who was finally defeated by the power structures of the time, whose ministry ended in death. Instead, the resurrection declares that what seemed like defeat was really nothing of the kind, that not even death, that great enemy of humanity, can stop God.

This impacts us every day. As Christians, we live our lives, as Paul says, “in Christ.” Like we saw in John, chapter fifteen, when we say we are “in Christ” we mean that we are “in Christ” as branches are in a vine. We are so connected that our very existence depends on his and, as I have said before, it is Christ’s blood that pumps through our veins and gives us life. The point is that if we are so deeply connected to Christ and death cannot defeat Christ, what does that say about us? As those who are bound to Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, we need not fear that death will be the end of us, for just as Christ was raised from the dead in glory, so will we who are bound to Him be raised.

Another major implication of the resurrection of Christ is tied to the significance of the crucifixion. One of the things we discovered was that the fact that God had to enter into our broken condition so completely and endure it even to death shows us that our human nature is not what it ought to be. When God deals with our sin and alienation, He does not just wave a magic wand or snap His fingers to take care of it, but puts His very self on the line and suffers and dies, all for us because God refuses to be without us. The resurrection shows us that God is not content just to put the sinfulness of our humanity to death, but does not stop short of resurrecting it in glory, healed and perfected by the very power of God.

The wonderful thing about this is that it gives us a glimpse into where God is leading us at the end of the day. God’s actions in our world of space and time are not random, they are not arbitrary, but instead are clearly directed toward a particular goal. We see that things will not always be as they are now. Things will be transformed; so much so that we might not have any idea at first what has happened. And yet, we can see that, in spite of the fact that God’s ultimate plans seem so different than what we know today, we can see that there is still continuity between this world and the world to come. After all, when Jesus was raised, it was not simply a spiritual resurrection (whatever that might be), but, when He was resurrected, it left the tomb empty.

But the question that some people have asked over the years, especially in our modern world of science, is, “But can we really believe that Jesus was raised from the dead?” After all, if we look around at our world, we don’t see people being raised from the dead. If we have no modern examples of the resurrection, can we really be expected to believe in it? This is a serious question because, according to the church from the very earliest days, even within the New Testament documents, if Christ has not actually been raised from the dead, our faith is based on a lie and we are, of all people, most to be pitied.

And yet, in spite of the fact that this seems so logical, it is less convincing than some might think. The fact that there is only one of something throughout all of history is not proof that it must be a misunderstanding. After all, this universe of ours has never existed before and it will never exist again. The universe of space and time as we know it is absolutely one of a kind and yet we could not deny it without being totally irrational. Natural science has actually become more compatible with Christian faith than it has ever been before.

To give an example, I want to relate an experience that Thomas F. Torrance, who is something of a theological hero of mine, as many of you know, shared in an interview. He was sharing a platform with another well-known theologian who denied that Jesus was raised physically from the dead. Torrance challenged him on this point, asking him why he denied the physical resurrection. The response was “Because you can’t talk like that in the modern scientific world.” Torrance, who was also a widely respected philosopher of science, and also just a little bit feisty, retorted, “The exact opposite is the case: only if you speak of the resurrection in terms of an empty tomb, of an event that is physical and a direct act of God can it scientifically be respectable, can you communicate about it.” At that, a physicist jumped up to support Torrance over the other theologian.

This just goes to show that God does not stand off and let our world just tumble on its own as deists have said both during the Enlightenment and today, but enters into it in a profound way. The resurrection is not just a way of talking about something that happens in our mind or something that makes us feel good, but something that has actually taken place in space and time. God presses up against our world, not only upholding it, but deeply impacting what happens in it. The resurrection was the raising of an actual human being who lived in an actual place at an actual time in history, who was buried in an actual tomb and was actually returned to life again, healed and transformed.

So, in order to understand the significance of the resurrection of Christ for our lives as individuals and as the church today, I want to try and paint the picture of what Christ has done. In the beginning, the Triune God of grace, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, created the heavens and the earth, crowning creation with human beings, both male and female. However, humanity rebelled against God, taking His authority for their own. This did not just affect humanity, but it worked itself out by making all of creation broken and not what it ought to be. Throughout the Old Testament times, God promised that He would so radically transform our world of space and time that the lion and the lamb would lie down together and that children could even play over the hole of venomous snakes without being in danger.

For years, the people of Israel yearned for this kind of transformation to take place but were disappointed. The world that God had promised seemed so far off that many have doubted whether it would ever happen at all. This is where we Christians, precisely as Christians, cling to a hope that we believe to rooted and grounded in God’s concrete act in Christ. In Christ, God came among us as a human, as one of us and one with us. God came to take our brokenness and alienation upon Himself, to truly and concretely recreate our human nature, to fully and finally undo the brokenness that human beings have inflicted on the world as we know it.

But this redemption did not come without a cost. By dealing decisively with our sin, God was not declaring that our sin really wasn’t that bad after all, but that it was so bad that it could only be dealt with at tremendous cost to God. The act of redemption is simultaneously an act of judgment. God passes judgment on our evil but endures the brunt of the punishment Himself, turning the power of the wrath of God, not against us, but against Christ, God in flesh. In the crucifixion, we have God opposed to God, in a sense, God negating God. It is a fearful thought, one that we may not want to think, but we have little choice but to take it very seriously because Jesus on the cross cried out, “Eloi eloi, lama sabachthani,” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

And yet the story does not end with the crucifixion. Jesus was not just a man who taught an idealistic lifestyle and then died a tragic death. In Christ, God endured the brokenness of this world, the brokenness that you and I endure every single day, and put it to death, but then was raised in glory on the third day.

What does this mean? It means that, God has not given up on our world of space and time. Even when we might wish that we could just escape out of our troubles, out of our bodies and just leave this world behind, God does no such thing. God did not just take on human flesh for a little while, but has entered in it once and for all. The Son of God is still incarnate, even to this day. It means that God does not want to save us out of the world, but in it. It means that, even though there are some things that need to be put to death before they can be healed, healing is indeed God’s final plan for you, for me, and for this world in which we live.

And so, since God thinks that this world is worth saving, since God has given so much to heal us, since God has implicated us in this saving and healing and has invited us to join with Him in this ministry (Jesus said in His high priestly prayer that, as the Father had sent Him, He sends His followers into the world), let us go boldly and with joy. Brothers and sisters, we are people who know the end of the story. Even though we do not know all the details of what God will do, we know that He is about recreating the world and bringing healing to the broken. Since we know what God is about and since we know that God has so deeply committed Himself to it that He was willing to die for it, how can we ignore the mission of God in the world around us? We are resurrection people, the people of God, so let us be about the business of God, the business of reconciliation and transformation through the power of the Holy Spirit. Let us pray.

AMEN