He Is Living

Preliminary draft for a sermon at North Hill Adventist Fellowship. Sabbath, April 7, 2012.

Jesus was dead. That much was clear. He had been crucified, hung on a cross until dead. His death was certified by the supervising Roman centurion. Then, to make doubly sure, the soldiers stabbed him. He was dead all right.

So they buried him. It was a hurried burial. He died late in the day. Usually preparations for burial took some time, but they pushed and got it done before sundown.

They spent Sabbath grieving.

They – the eleven disciples.

They – women so captivated by the dignity, purity, power and gentleness of Jesus that they broke with millennia of tradition and left the households controlled by their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons or uncles and formed a sorority devoted to serving Jesus. They had traveled with Jesus up and down Palestine. They had walked with him to Jerusalem. They had been there on Friday afternoon through the torment of the crucifixion.

They – blacksmiths and carpenters, farmers and sheep herders, spinners and weavers, doctors and lawyers, teachers, rabbis, priests, widows and teenagers, life-long citizens of Jerusalem and visitors – dozens, scores, hundreds, (thousands?) of men and women who had been persuaded Jesus was the answer to two thousand years of theological dreaming and prophesying.

Some of these people saw Jesus as the distillation of the entire religion of Yahweh. What he said about God connected with their deepest convictions. The way he interacted with people was their model of the way people are supposed to interact with one another. Jesus acted like God would act if he suddenly appeared in the temple bearing his name. The hope and sweetness Jesus preached had become the light of their lives.

Now, as the scraped with infuriating slowness across the Sabbath sky, they tormented themselves with questions. How was that the man who embodied the best and brightest of religion and spirituality was now in a cave carved into the side of a limestone cliff and closed with a massive rolling rock?

It was a dark day. Made worse by the forced inactivity of the Sabbath.

Then it was Sunday morning. Mary and several other women headed out to the tomb. Because of the quick burial on Friday, they felt there was more to be done to fully prepare Jesus' body for its sojourn in the grave. And more than that, they were coming to the grave to grieve. Friday, they had been hurried. Now they would have time to just sit and grieve. Time to remember Jesus with woman-talk and with silence. Time to rehearse the dreams they had dreamed. To recount stories from their months of traveling with Jesus. They were going to grieve his death and remember his life. And there was so much to remember.

While they were on their way, but before they came within sight of the tomb, there was a terrifying earthquake. Perhaps they cowered as the ground shook. Most of us would have. Then they were walking up the path toward the tomb itself. The grave was open! The stone had been moved!

What did that mean? Who could have done such a thing? Why? Was it the earthquake?

They didn't have to play detective. At the tomb, an angel was waiting for them. "Don't be afraid!” he said. “I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He isn't here! He is risen from the dead, just as he said would happen. Come, see where his body was lying.” Matthew 28:5-6.

I imagine the women went and looked. They saw the bench where Jesus' body had been laid on Friday. They saw the folded grave clothes. Yes, Jesus had been there. This was the right tomb. And No, he wasn't there. The place was empty. Risen, according to the angel. Jesus was alive!

The angel did not need to add the next sentence. But he did say it. And the women remembered it and told it every time they repeated the story. The angel said, “Now, go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and he is going ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there. Mark my words!” (Matthew 28:7).

The women ran quickly from the tomb. They were very frightened but also filled with great joy, and they rushed to give the disciples the angel's message. And as they went, Jesus met them and greeted them. And they ran to him, grasped his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, "Don't be afraid! Go tell my brothers to leave for Galilee, and they will see me there." Matthew 28:8-10

The first Christians—the first people to believe that Jesus was risen from the dead, the first people to believe that Jesus was not a tragic failure but a glorious success—were women.

They saw the empty tomb and were instructed by the angel, “Go tell his disciples he is risen.” They raced away with the news, “The grave is empty and an angel told us . . .” Then while they were racing away from the empty tomb, they met HIM. They met Jesus. And Jesus, too, gave them a message for his disciples. “Go tell my brothers to leave for Galilee, and they will see me there.”

(Paul ran into some problem that he thought he could solve by prohibiting women from speaking God's message to men. Silly Paul, Jesus himself chose women to be his first witnesses. Jesus spoke to his church first through women. Why would Paul think he could improve on Jesus' example?)

The women delivered the message. The book of Matthew ends with Jesus appearing to his disciples. Unlike the unanimous, joyous belief of the women, this group included skeptics, doubtful believers. Their skepticism did not stop Jesus from commissioning all of them to carry forward his work.

We, too, a mixed group of believers and skeptics, saints and sinners, sweet hearts and jerks—we are called by Jesus to live in the light of the resurrection. Jesus is alive. His teachings are relevant. He asks us to teach the world everything he commanded us.

Hundreds of years after Jesus, the Christian world developed a tradition called Lent. It was a forty day period for self-examination and self-denial. It invited us to participate deeply in the sufferings of Jesus. I'd like to propose a different forty day practice. Forty days of contemplation of the Risen Jesus.

What does it mean for us, today, that Jesus is alive?

First, the prophets of doom are wrong. When we give undue attention to the prophets of doom—whether they are religious or secular—whether they are Adventist evangelists distorting crime statistics or talk radio hosts of the left and right rubbing our faces in the mud of social and political dysfunction—when we surrender ourselves to the charisma of doomsayers we are denying the central truth of the resurrection. Jesus is alive. Truth, justice, goodness, and mercy will win. They are winning, even now. Jesus is marching toward victory.

Which brings us to a second key ingredient in the teachings of Jesus: we have a job to do. We are to bring the influence of the kingdom of heaven to our space in the world. To our own homes and families, to our neighbors, our co-workers, our classmates. When we engage in political discourse, we are to heed Jesus' counsels to avoid judging and to do to others what we would have them do to us. I'm not even hinting that Jesus' words or the words of the OT provide a formula for fixing the problems of the world. They don't.

Rather Jesus voiced grand principles that should permeate all areas of our of lives.

Jesus lives. This is the central conviction of Christianity. Saying it, especially in our world is easy. The test of our faith is our lives. Jesus invites us to live with the joy, confidence and compassion that naturally arises from our confidence that Jesus lives and is winning the great struggle against evil.

The Devil will not win. Evil will not win. Chaos will not triumph. Jesus will.

2000 years ago, Jesus turned an apparent tragedy into the greatest demonstration ever of the power of God. They killed him. They buried him in a hole carved in limestone and sealed the grave with a stone. But he rose. He lives.  Every thing we do to advance goodness, compassion, justice, mercy, generosity and benevolence is a an affirmation of that truth.

He is risen indeed.