Practical Resurrection - April 16 2017 sermon

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!

(Colossians 3:1-11)

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     After the darkness of Good Friday, it is wonderful to be welcomed by the light of Easter morning! After the sombreness of Good Friday it is wonderful to be greeted by the joy of Easter morning! After the death we commemorated on Good Friday, it is wonderful to celebrate the new life of Easter morning! The Easter story is one we know. It's the centrepiece of our faith as Christians. Lots of people believe that Jesus was born and died; only Christians believe he was resurrected. The events we celebrate today are what make us Christians. And the story that Pam shared with us earlier is really an account of the beginning of the Christian story. That passage is entitled "The Resurrection of Jesus" in the most common contemporary English translations of the Bible. But, even having noted how important - how central - the resurrection of Jesus is to the Christian faith, it's actually a misnomer to call this story (and any of the stories in the other Gospels) "The Resurrection of Jesus." When you read these stories you find that none of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John actually wrote anything about the resurrection of Jesus. Neither did Paul or Peter or James. What we read are accounts of what happened after the resurrection - of what Jesus did and of how his disciples responded and of how his opponents reacted. We read about the impact of the resurrection, but there's really nothing about the actual resurrection of Jesus. What's described in the Gospels is not the resurrection but rather the mysterious discovery of an empty tomb that should have had a body in it. That leaves a lot of open questions. We don't know exactly how Jesus was resurrected; we don't know what Jesus' first reaction was to being resurrected; we don't know how Jesus got out of the sealed tomb; we don't know exactly what Jesus did or where he went once he did. All open questions. The writers of the Gospels simply take for granted that Jesus was resurrected and somehow left the tomb. It's just presented as a given. That, to me, gives the story of the resurrection much more credibility - because if this had just been a made up story then surely more of the story would have been made up to fill in those gaps. But the Gospel writers simply knew that there were gaps; mysteries that they didn't have the answers to. And that didn't bother them. Jesus had been resurrected. That was all they cared about. But today there's all sorts of speculation about the resurrection - usually trying to deny it; to explain the resurrection away. There's all sorts of doubt about it. It's impossible. It couldn't have happened. It makes no sense. Dead people don't come back to life. Let me sketch for you briefly the four options that seem to be most widely accepted to explain the empty tomb without the resurrection.

     First, there's the argument that Jesus didn't really die on the cross; that he either wasn't crucified at all or that he was just unconscious and that he simply revived inside the tomb. I dismiss that one immediately - for one very simple reason: the Romans were experts at crucifixion, and the point of crucifixion was to kill. To those who would say that the crucifixion didn't happen at all because there's no Roman record of it I would say that ignores an important point - the crucifixion of Jesus was just one of among probably tens of thousands of crucifixions (and probably more than that) carried out by the Romans in all the far flung corners of the Empire. We have very few if any specific official records of who was crucified. And the crucifixion of a single man in a dusty backwater of the mighty Roman Empire certainly wouldn't have been seen as important enough to archive a record of it. It's only with the benefit of hindsight that we today might wonder why there was no record of Jesus being crucified. At the time, the Romans had far more important things to think about than an unknown itinerant preacher who was being executed in far off Jerusalem. It was one among many thousands - and the victims of crucifixion died, because the Romans knew what they were doing. A person did not survive crucifixion. So I set aside immediately the theory that Jesus wasn't crucified at all or that he simply revived from unconsciousness after being crucified.

     Then there's the argument that Jesus' body was stolen - either by the disciples so that they could make up this really exciting story of a dead man coming back to life, or by the authorities who could use it to prove that he hadn't come back to life. But neither option makes sense to me. Most of those original disciples were persecuted and died for believing in Jesus and for proclaiming that he had been raised from the dead. They would not back down in that assertion. I'll grant that some people might be willing to die in order to perpetuate a lie. But I find it unbelievable that in the face of the pressure and persecution that these people would eventually face for spreading this story not a single one of them would have cracked. But none did. If any of them had, you can be sure (given the way things evolved) that someone would have recorded somewhere that Peter or John or Andrew or Batholomew or Andrew or Thomas (one of them) had finally given in and confessed that it was all a lie or a hoax. But none of them ever did. They died - some gruesomely (Peter himself was crucified) - proclaiming Jesus - crucified AND RISEN. And the authorities? It's even more unbelievable that the authorities stole the body. If they had then surely, as this story of a dead man coming back to life spread they would have produced the remains and said "See - here he is - and he's dead. Don't believe this foolishness." But they didn't - simply because they had no body to produce.

     Some try to make the argument that Jesus' resurrection was simply a spiritual event and not a physical resurrection. By this way of looking at things, Jesus lived on as a spirit or a ghost (or possibly even just in the memories of his disciples) and so the experiences of those disciples were inner spiritual experiences rather than a physical reality. Except - well, there's the problem of that missing body. A disembodied spirit leaves its body behind - which is why it's called disembodied. And so does a memory of a dead man leave a body behind. But the empty tomb was a reality. It isn't challenged in any writing of the day. Josephus - the famous Jewish historian of the first century, who watched with great interest the rise of the Christian faith but who was not himself a Christian - never challenged the story of the empty tomb in his writings. None of the Roman historians of the period ever did either, even as the Christian faith became more and more of a nuisance and even a threat to the Empire. The point seems clear: the tomb really was empty; the body really was gone. The Gospel writers themselves went to great pains to make sure that their readers got the point that Jesus had really been physically raised. Thomas was invited to touch his wounds, the risen Jesus ate and drank with his disciples. Disembodied spirits and memories don't do those things. Jesus wasn't a ghost or a spirit or a memory. He was a real person, with a real body, raised from the dead.

     And that leaves the fourth possibility. The maxim of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes fits well here: "once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains - however improbable - must be true." We've eliminated the impossible: Jesus was crucified, he did not survive the crucifixion, his body was not stolen, he did not become a ghost and he wasn't a mere memory. So what then is that improbably truth that Sherlock Holmes would have been immediately led to? Simple: Jesus had been resurrected, body and all. There's no other explanation that fits.

     So it happened. Those who believe know that it happened, and those who don't aren't likely to be convinced even by Holmesian reasoning. Maybe the question this leads us to is a simple one: so what? If that sounds a bit disrespectful on Easter Sunday, well, I still have to ask it: so what? I ask it and I repeat it because it's an important question. It happened a long time ago and for many people it's nothing more than a story written a long time ago; words on a page. "Christ is risen!" the church cries out on Easter Sunday. "What's in it for me?" is the response of a largely disineterested world, which sees Easter Sunday as little more than a chance to bow down to the great god known as "Chocolate." Well, the resurrection is not just a story from the past that brings hope for the future to those who believe it. The resurrection makes a difference today. The resurrection tells us that our old lives (lived according to worldly values) have been crucified and that (even now) we have already been resurrected in a sense into a new life. We are not perfect. Our "resurrection" if you will is not complete. We will stumble and fall, we will do things we shouldn't do, we will say things we shouldn't say, we will think things we shouldn't think - and the world will see that and sneer at us and dismiss Christianity and Christians, because the world doesn't understand. We are not promised a perfect life in this world; we are promised a new life in this world, in which the power of the resurrected Jesus takes more and more control of our daily lives. We will be changed by the resurrection; if only by the knowledge that we must believe in this God who has wrought such a wonder by defeating death itself. Before faith in the risen Christ we lived in a world of selfishness, greed and materialism, consumed by the lust for money, power and position. No more. Christ is risen! He is now our priority! We are free to live for God and not the world; we are free to make a commitment to a new and transformed life: a practical resurrection in the here and now, in which we make a practical difference to the world around us!