(Ezekiel 37:1-14; Luke 24:33-43, John 20:19-31)

Thomas has gotten a raw deal from the church over the years.  For centuries, in the Western church, he’s been remembered not as an apostle of stubborn faith and the man who first preached the gospel of Jesus Christ to India, but as “Doubting Thomas.”  For centuries, that phrase has been a byword for a skeptic, and particularly a foolishly unreasonable one.  He doesn’t deserve that.  The fact that we so often read John’s account as if he did says more about us than it does about either Thomas or John.

We don’t see a lot of Thomas in the gospels (only a few brief appearances in John), but I think we get a picture of an introverted man of deep emotions, with a definite pessimistic streak—perhaps the sort who used pessimism to protect himself against hope.  In John 11, when Jesus tells his disciples he’s going back to Jerusalem, they try to talk him out of it; when Jesus persists, Thomas says, “Let’s go with him so that we may die with him.”  Here, we’re not told why Thomas wasn’t with the rest of the group on the day of the resurrection, but I have a hunch he was off by himself trying to come to terms with the disaster of the crucifixion.  You may know people like that—when they’re hurting, they shut everyone out and process it by themselves, until they feel ready to deal with other people again.  I suspect that was Thomas all over.

As readers, we have the advantage of a bird’s-eye view of the events that followed Jesus’ resurrection.  We know the whole story, and we can see where everyone is and what they’re doing.  The disciples didn’t have that.  They hadn’t read the end of the book—they were living the story and trying to make sense of it.  We see this in John 20.  Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb, finds it open, and comes running to Peter and John to tell them someone’s stolen Jesus’ body.  They go running, look in the empty tomb, and think—what?  John tells us that “he saw and believed,” but in the next breath he says, “They still didn’t understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.”  So what, exactly, did John believe?

Then that evening, the disciples are all gathered—with the doors locked, because they’re afraid the Jewish leaders might come after them next.  Then, suddenly—there’s Jesus.  Never mind locked doors, never mind walls, there he is.  They’ve been telling each other he’s alive, but when he actually shows up, they think he’s a ghost.  That sounds bad, but we shouldn’t be too hard on them.  After all, it was one thing to believe that Jesus had come back to life; that was hard enough.  To have expected him to defy the laws of physics by suddenly appearing in locked rooms would have been quite something else again.  What else would you call someone who walks through walls, but a ghost?

Jesus doesn’t condemn them.  He gives them his peace, to calm their fear, and then he invites them to touch him and to see his wounds.  He even goes so far as to eat a piece of fish in their presence before they believe it’s really him; only then do they begin to rejoice.  They’ve been told Jesus is alive, and they say they believe it—but when he actually shows up, they need proof.

Then Thomas rejoins the group, having started to come to terms with Jesus’ death, no doubt expecting to spend some time mourning with his friends—and instead, he gets a cockeyed story about Jesus raised from the dead.  Put yourself in his place:  what would you have thought?  Yeah, you’d have thought they’d all cracked under the emo­tional strain and taken a group vacation from reality.  Thomas understandably refuses to believe a word of it unless—notice this—he gets the same proofs Jesus gave them.

The next Sunday, they’re all together again behind locked doors, and once again Jesus just shows up in the room.  Once again, he gives them his peace, and then he turns to Thomas and says, “Here I am, and here are my wounds; touch me, and believe.”  But Thomas doesn’t need it.  He doesn’t need to watch Jesus eat lunch.  He looks at Jesus and exclaims, “My Lord and my God!”

This is the central confession of this gospel, the point to which the whole book builds, because Thomas goes farther than any of the other disciples ever had.  To avoid accidentally taking God’s name in vain, no observant Jew would ever, or will ever, say it.  Instead, they substitute the word “Lord.”  For Thomas to call Jesus “My Lord and my God” can only mean one thing:  he understands that Jesus is the one true God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Notice how Jesus responds to Thomas’ great confession of faith.  He doesn’t praise Thomas for it, as he had earlier when Peter said, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God”; nor does he chastise Thomas for his doubt.  Instead, he prods him a little.  “Because you have seen me, you have believed,” Jesus says.  “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  He’s not comparing Thomas to the other disciples here—they had all had to see Jesus before they believed, and the others had had to see rather more of him.  He’s pointing Thomas beyond himself and beyond his own situation, to days yet to come.

It would not be long before Thomas would be proclaiming the news he had at first refused to believe—Jesus who was crucified has risen from the dead!—to people who wouldn’t see Jesus come popping in to prove it.  The Lord is pointing Thomas to those of us who would come later, who would have no choice but to believe without having the evidence right in front of us; and he’s speaking to us.  From the first readers of this gospel down to the present day, we’ve all believed in Jesus without seeing or touching him.  We’ve known doubt, just as Thomas did, but unlike him, we’ve had to go forward by faith; we haven’t been able to rest on personal proof the way he did.

When we dismiss Thomas as a doubter, we read this passage as if we stood above him, as if his doubt were somehow exceptional.  When we do that, we cut ourselves off from the comfort Jesus offers here.  We need to come into the story at Thomas’s level and stand beside him, as people who also have times when we struggle to believe, and maybe even are afraid to.  It can be hard to believe in Jesus.  We haven’t seen him, and we haven’t seen anyone who was embalmed and buried come alive again.  I suspect that many of us have wished once or twice that we could just see Jesus, and touch him, and have him tell us we’re doing okay.  The thing is, in his words to Thomas, we have his assurance that he knows how hard it is.  That’s why he pronounced a special blessing on us, and on our faith; and that’s why he sent us the Holy Spirit, to carry us through.

That’s also why John wrote this gospel, to carry that blessing.  He wrote to give us reason to overcome our doubt and fear and believe in Jesus Christ—and that isn’t a once-for-all struggle that we leave behind once we accept Jesus as Lord and Savior.  At least, for most of us it isn’t, and so we need John’s witness, we need to hear the promises Jesus made to all who follow him.  And we need the reassurance that in the times that we doubt, Jesus does not condemn us; rather, he comes gently to us as he did to Thomas and restores our faith, so that we can say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”

We are no less in Christ when we doubt than when our faith seems strong; and we are no weaker when we doubt, because it was never about our strength anyway.  Christ has risen from the dead by the power of his Holy Spirit, and he has breathed his Holy Spirit into us—the Spirit of resurrection, who makes the dead ones live and the dry bones dance.  The power is not in our faith, but in the one in whom we put our faith; and he holds our faith firm even when we can’t.  He holds us together even when we can’t.  He has given us his life, which has overcome death.  No matter how dark things may seem, he will bring us through, and in the end, we will see the Son rise.

(Isaiah 6; Matthew 27:62-28:15)

You have to feel a little sorry for Pontius Pilate.  He’s trying to work his way up the career ladder, and he’s been handed the most fractious, intractable province in the entire Empire to try to govern.  He’s on notice, because he’s already mishandled one incident and provoked an official complaint from the local leaders—which means he’s under their thumb to some degree, because they could easily wreck his career.  He brought it on himself (I only said a little sorry), but still—here he’s trying to do his job, and all of a sudden those local leaders come to him and demand he put some poor schmuck on trial because they don’t like his theology.  Rome didn’t give a hang about Jewish religious disputes, and neither did Pilate, but here these infuriating old men were insisting that if he didn’t do what they wanted, they were going to get him fired.

And was that the end of it?  No!  He’s washed his hands of the matter—literally (Mt. 27:24)—but no sooner does he think he’s done with it then they’re back in his office.  They got the execution, but that’s not enough for them—now they want him to guard the tomb!  Guard the tomb!  You might as well guard a manhole cover.  But he has to deal with them somehow, and he has to keep them happy.  A lot of our English transla­tions have Pilate saying, “You have a guard,” but I think the NIV has the right of it here:  from the context, I think it’s pretty clear he gives them what they want, a squad of Roman soldiers to seal and guard the tomb.

He gave them sixteen members of the greatest fighting force on the planet—four watches of four men each to secure the area through the night.  A Roman squad was supposed to be able to form a square, if cut off, and hold their ground against any opposing force indefinitely; they were well-trained, well-equipped, well-disciplined, and ruthless, far more than necessary to deal with anything Jesus’ disciples might try.  It was overkill.

And why?  What are the Jewish leaders afraid of?  They claim they want to prevent a hoax, but really?  To quote the Presbyterian pastor and author Frederick Buechner,

in the not so long run religious hoaxes always tend to burn themselves out—as the chief priests and Pharisees had good reason to know, living as they did in an age when would-be Messiahs were a dime a dozen. . . .  Even if the disciples were successful in their theft of the body, and even if for a time their claim of resurrection flourished, it could not really flourish long without something more substantial than merely rumor to feed upon.

The threat of a hoax wouldn’t have been worth their time.

No, there has to be something more here.  Their real fear has to be something else—something they aren’t telling Pilate, and probably aren’t really admitting even to themselves.  It’s ridiculous, but—Jesus had worked some powerful miracles; what if, somehow, he actually did come back to life?  What if even killing him wasn’t enough to stop him?  I doubt any of them had the courage to face that fear even for a moment, and I’m sure they would have laughed in the face of anyone who dared suggest it, but that had to be haunting the backs of their minds for them to go to such absurd lengths as this.  If you’re afraid of a miracle—how are you going to stop it?

The thing is, they were going about it all wrong.  As Buechner puts it in his sermon “The End Is Life,”

maybe it is not as hard as they feared. . . .  I suspect that many of us could tell them that all in all there is a lot one can do in defense against miracle, and, unless I badly miss my guess, there are thousands upon thousands of ministers doing precisely that at any given instant—making it as secure as they can, that is, which is really quite secure indeed. . . .  The point is not to try to prevent the thing from happening—like trying to stop the wind with a machine gun—but, every time it happens, somehow to explain it away, to deflect it, defuse it, in one way or another to dispose of it.  And there are at least as many ways of doing this as there are sermons preached on Easter Sunday.

He’s right.  As he goes on to say, you can spiritualize the Resurrection away with­out much effort at all.  It’s a metaphor, it’s poetry—it’s a way of saying that the wisdom of Jesus is immortal like the works of Shakespeare, or that his example lives on in our hearts, or it symbolizes the rebirth of hope in the despairing soul—all of which miss the brute fact that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, there’s no foundation for any of that stuff.  If he’s just one more great leader killed off by the establishment, then his story is just one more telling us that really, the sword is mightier than the pen after all.

All too often, we hear people reduce the Resurrection to a “miracle” of symbol and metaphor that leaves the substantial reality of our world untouched; and I’m with Buechner on this one.

If I believed that this or something like this was all that the Resurrection meant, then I would turn in my certificate of ordination and take up some other profession. . . .  If I thought that when you strip it right down to the bone, this whole religion business is really just an affirmation of the human spirit, an affirmation of moral values, an affirmation of Jesus of Nazareth as the Great Exemplar of all time and no more, then like Pilate I would wash my hands of it.  The human spirit just does not impress me that much, I am afraid.  And I have never been able to get very excited one way or the other about moral values.  And when I have the feeling that someone is trying to set me a good example, I start edging toward the door.

If the Resurrection is just a story, then it’s just what someone wants us to believe; it has no power to change the way things actually are.  That’s the tragedy of modern versions of Christianity:  but understand this, it’s also the reason for them.  The reason we seek in so many ways to defend ourselves against miracle, against the reality of the Resurrection, is that just like the Jewish leaders, we’re afraid of what it might mean.  If we can reduce it to an affirmation of the human spirit, or moral values, or the importance of hope, or the wisdom of Jesus, then we get to define what that means; it might not be able to do much for us, but it can’t do anything to us, either.  We’ve made it something we can control—we’ve made it safe, tame, the seed of a nice, domesticated religion.  Miracle pitches us right out of that; even uncontrollable joy is still out of our control.

That can be frightening enough; but if Jesus died and came back to life—not even was raised from the dead by another human being, amazing as that would be, but simply got up, by the direct power of God—then what is there that he can’t do?  And if he really did that for us, with all the horror of the cross, then what might he ask of us?  What he said about “anyone who would follow me must deny himself and take up his cross”—he might have meant that.  When he said, “Love your enemies and bless those who hurt you,” he might actually expect us to do that.  Jesus laid everything down for us, he turned everything inside out for us—how can we possibly accept that and take it seriously without our own lives being turned inside out and upside down?

Even if life is miserable, change is still frightening to most people; we know in our bones that however bad things might be, they could still get worse.  “Better the devil you know,” and all that.  Even when we know we don’t have much control over our lives, our egos tell us we need more control to make things better—not to give up what little we have.  If the problem with our faith is that our God is too small, as I and others have said often enough, it’s only fair to say that we shrink him out of self-protec­tion; Easter shows us a God untamed and untameable—we can’t possibly know what he might do.

The thing is, the desire for control of our lives is just another version of the primal temptation:  to be our own gods.  There’s no life in it; it is the road to death.  The gospel doesn’t offer us a tame, reasonable faith that lets us feel like we’re in control and we understand what’s going on; Jesus doesn’t promise us a safe religion with a god who makes perfect sense to us.  The gospel proclaims, and Jesus gives, life—life that has overcome death, and will overcome it.  Life that takes the thousand and one little deaths that we suffer in this world and transmutes them into seeds of growth.  Life that raises dead hopes, dead relationships, dead souls, not as they were before, but better—not merely earthly and human, but eternal and divine.  “Safe” and “reasonable” are limited to our imagination; Jesus is good beyond our ability to imagine, and alive beyond our experience of life.  Let go your grip on control, drop your defenses, and let the miracle of the Resurrection overwhelm you.  Let go, and live.

(Psalm 115:1-8; Luke 24:1-35)

The desire to feel superior to other people is one of the most basic, and base, of all human temptations. What we call racism is one expression of this, as is sexism; another is cultural chauvinism. The ancient Greeks, for instance, considered anyone who didn’t speak Greek inferior. We see prejudice related to economic and social class. Perhaps the most insidious form, however, is what C. S. Lewis dubbed “chronological snobbery”: the belief that our age is wiser and more enlightened than those that came before, and that we are better people just for living now rather than in some earlier time.

This attitude is deployed by many modern folk against the word of God, and particularly against the accounts of the Resurrection. You will hear it snidely suggested that people 2000 years ago were ignorant and gullible folks who believed in miracles because they were too dumb to know better, but that modern science has proven that miracles don’t happen. The assumption seems to be that the people of Jesus’ day would have found it much easier to believe he rose from the dead than we do, and thus that it wouldn’t have been hard to fool them. This assumption is completely ludicrous.

The fact of it is, the ancient world knew death far better than our clinical modern age, because they lived with it much more closely than we do; people didn’t die out of sight in big antiseptic buildings, they died in their homes, right in the middle of their communities—and when they died, they stayed dead. There were no resuscitations, and there was no life support; people didn’t wake up from comas, because if they didn’t eat and drink on their own, there was no way to keep them alive. Resurrection? They knew better. Dead was dead, and that was that.

We see this in Luke 24. No one sees the empty tomb and assumes that Jesus is alive again. The women see it and are at a loss for an explanation, until the angels show up and tell them Jesus has risen from the dead; they go back and tell the disciples, and most of the disciples dismiss them as a bunch of hysterical women.

And then we get this story that begins in verse 13, of two of the disciples walking back from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus. They’re talking about everything that has happened, trying to make sense of all of it—without much success—when Jesus comes up from behind. And here’s the reason this story has always fascinated me: they don’t recognize him. In fact, Luke tells us, they were kept from recognizing him.

Why? And kept by whom? The second question is easier to answer: this is probably what we call a divine passive, a way the Old Testament writers developed of saying that God did something without using the name of God, and thus avoiding any risk of using his name in vain. But why would God keep them from recognizing Jesus?

I can’t say for sure, but I think Luke suggests a reason. I think God kept them from recognizing Jesus because they weren’t ready to see him—it was because of the blindness of their hearts. He had to open their minds and hearts to understand him before their eyes could be opened to see him. And so, rather than declaring himself at the beginning, he leaves their eyes blind and begins to teach them from the word of God, showing them all the ways in which the Hebrew Scriptures pointed to him and prepared the way for his coming.

Why were their hearts blind? Because they were too much of the world. They had hoped Jesus was the Messiah, the one who would redeem Israel, but like everyone else, they understood that in worldly terms; and more than that, their faith was limited by the world’s horizon. Luke tells us that when Peter heard the news, he ran to the tomb and looked in, and went home amazed at what had happened; we know from John’s gospel that he went with Peter, that he also looked in the tomb, and that he came away believing the women’s report. But all Cleopas and his friend seem to have taken away from their stories is “they went to the tomb and it was empty, but they didn’t see Jesus.” Whether Jesus is in the tomb or not, they still believe he’s dead, because that’s the way the world works; that’s how things go, and the word of a few overly excitable women isn’t enough to convince them otherwise.

The reality here is the same that we talked about as we worked through the letters in Revelation: idolatry leaves us spiritually blind, deaf, and dumb. The nations worship things made by human hands, things which cannot see or hear, which cannot speak, or walk, or feel, and all who put their trust in those things become like them. If our attention is focused on this world and the things of this world, then we fail to understand that our God is in the heavens, and he does all that he pleases; we end up with a shrunken faith, confined and circumscribed by the limited possibilities of this world as we know it.

We end up, as you might say, with just another world religion. I don’t want to beat up on the word “religion” or pose some sort of false antithesis between religion and faith, but at the same time, Christianity is not religion the way anything else is. It isn’t about making our way to God or making the best of this world; those things definitely are religion, but they are not the gospel. It isn’t about being morally good people or finding fulfillment in life; those are good things, but they are not the gospel. It isn’t about making our country strong or building healthy families; those are certainly desirable things that tend to come when the church is strong, but they are not the gospel. They are not enough. They can give you a goal and a purpose through the ordinary times, but when you come up against the brute fact of death, they are silent.

Any religion that depends on life going well is going to fail you when you need it most; any religion that is primarily about making you happy is insufficient. Any faith you can accept without straining your sense of the possible, any faith that makes sense to you because it plays by the rules of this world, is ultimately no faith at all. I find it rather ironic when I see a church named “Emmaus” or “Emmaus Road,” not because I don’t understand, but because a lot of people have an Emmaus Road faith—it goes no farther than Cleopas’ faith did. It’s easy to see Christ when he looks like we expect, and when he does what we want him to do; but too often, when he departs from that, we can’t see him. Too often, if we’re honest, our churches don’t teach us to.

Which is a crying shame, because we have been given a mighty word to declare to the nations, a word to bring hope to the hopeless and deliverance to the captives, a word to make the blind see and the lame walk, a word even to raise the dead: we have been given to proclaim a God who is in the heavens and who does all that he pleases. All that he pleases, even beyond the limits of our feeble possibilities. We have been given the word that there is no failure that is final, no grief that cannot be healed, no enemy that cannot be overcome, no shame that cannot be restored, no sinner who cannot find forgiveness, because God has overcome every enemy and broken down every obstacle. We have been given the good news that in this world of sorrow and failure and pain and death, sorrow does not have the last word, and failure does not have the last word, and pain does not have the last word, and even death does not have the last word, because God has spoken the last word, and that word is: resurrection.

The task of the church is to clear out our ears so we can hear that, and to be the servants of God to one another to help each other learn to see—to see Christ, not as someone who lived a long time ago and said some interesting stuff, but as the one who is risen and is here among us now. The ministry of the church is to proclaim, over and over, at the top of our lungs, to all who come and anyone who will listen, that there is a resurrection. Christ is risen from the dead, and with him we are risen from the dead—we are no longer merely human, and we are no longer slaves to ourselves and our sin: sin has been defeated, and death itself has been put to death. Our lives are no longer up to us, and we do not have to figure out our own way through this world, because wherever we go, Jesus goes with us—even when we don’t recognize him. We only need to open our ears to hear him speaking to us, and let him open our eyes, that we may see.

(Job 19:23-27; John 20:1-9, 1 Corinthians 15:12-27a)

Some of you are probably familiar with the novelist and memoirist Frederick Buechner; if you’re not and you like good writing, you really ought to check out his work. He’s a luminous writer, whether he’s telling the difficult story of his childhood or recasting the legend of St. Brendan’s voyage to America, which is why he’s so widely praised. He’s also a Presbyterian minister; and of all the things he’s written, I think I value his sermons the most. I appreciate him because he has a wonderful way of sliding his words sideways through our pretensions and our comfortable assumptions, puncturing them before we even see the needle coming; and I appreciate him because while he’s not necessarily straightforward, he’s always unflinchingly honest about our human condition. Take, for instance, this observation from his sermon “The Magnificent Defeat”:

When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to hear read. And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring. So that is exactly what very often they do hear. Only that is too bad because if you really listen—and maybe you have to forget that it is the Bible being read and a minister who is reading it—there is no telling what you might hear.

He’s right: we tend to hear what we expect to hear; and that’s because what we expect to hear is, at some level, what we want to hear. After all, while “something elevating, obvious, and boring” obviously isn’t going to excite us much, it won’t threaten us, either; it’s safe and comfortable and allows us to walk out of here with our spirits raised a little, feeling a little better about ourselves. That’s understandable, given the ways that the world in which we live tends to beat us up and wear us down; a lot of the time, I think that all that many folks really want out of their faith is just to be able to feel a little better.

The problem is, though, that that isn’t all our faith is about, nor is it all God is trying to do with us; to settle for something safe and inoffensive when he’s offering us infinite joy is to do both God and ourselves a vast disservice, because he’s about something far, far bigger. You see, if we unshackle the word of God from our expectations and assumptions about what God is saying to us, there really is no telling what we might hear. We might hear about a God who does things we don’t believe can happen, who explodes all our comfortable certainties and upsettles all our fixed ideas about possible and impossible and how the world works, and how it ought to work. We might even, if we really listen carefully, find that we have to change.

And so instead of listening, we often try not to; and we build defenses against having to. In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, that’s a process that began right at the beginning—look over to Matthew 27, and you can see that, as the Jewish leaders go to Pilate and ask him for a squad of his soldiers to make the tomb secure. Secure against what? Against Jesus’ disciples coming and stealing the body? Well, that’s what they tell Pilate, and I’m sure they meant it, that they were afraid someone would try to hoax the public. But you know, I think Buechner’s right when he suggests in another sermon that in the back of their minds, nagging at them though they refused to think about it, was another fear: the fear that Jesus might actually, somehow, come alive again. He’d done enough other unbelievable things—could they be quite, quite sure he wouldn’t do this one, too? And so I think, at some level, they were trying to make the tomb secure against—miracle. Against being wrong, against losing control—really, against God.

And of course, it didn’t work; no band of soldiers, however capable, can stop a miracle of God any more than they can stop the sun from rising. The problem was, they were going about it the wrong way. As Buechner goes on to note, “all in all there is a lot one can do in defense against miracle, and, unless I badly miss my guess, there are thousands upon thousands of ministers doing precisely that at any given instant . . . there are at least as many ways of doing this as there are sermons preached on Easter Sunday.” If you don’t believe that, just take a look at history for a while, and you’ll see how many ways people can come up with to try to defuse the resurrection of Jesus, to try to turn it into something safe, something they can live with; the endless creativity of human beings on this point is truly staggering.

Perhaps the most popular approach is to try to spiritualize it in some way. For instance, some people say that the story of the Resurrection means that the teachings of Jesus are immortal, that their wisdom and truth conquered death and will live on forever. This is the same sort of thing we mean when we say “The pen is mightier than the sword,” which is complete balderdash; when it comes to a direct contest of pen vs. sword, the latter wins every time. Others will tell you that the story of the Resurrection means that the spirit of Jesus lives on among us in the lives of all who follow his great example. Which begs the question: why would anyone would follow the example of a failed Messiah who got himself butchered by the authorities? There were a lot of those back then, and nobody follows any of the others; why this one? Yet others have written that the story of the Resurrection is a metaphor, that it means the rebirth of hope in the despairing soul; which still leaves one asking if there’s any actual reason for the rebirth of hope if it’s all just a nice story, not something that actually happened.

These are all attempts to make the Resurrection “an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring”; and the Scriptures just don’t go there. There are lots of stories in the Bible, of which many come with moral lessons attached, and there are lots of metaphors, and lots of poetry of one sort or another, but we find none of them here. What we find, instead, is the Bible proclaiming a brute physical historical fact: this Jesus whom you crucified didn’t stay dead. He lay there in the tomb three days, and then his eyes opened, and he sat up—through the bands of cloth which had been wrapped tightly around him—and he got off the stone slab on which he had been laid, and he walked out of the tomb—through the half-ton stone covering the entrance; Jesus’ resurrected body was a little different from ours—and went on his way, no mere ghost or spirit or metaphor, but alive in the body once again.

Of course, even if you accept that, even if you accept the real miracle of the Resurrection, you can still defuse it, defend yourself against it, make it something safe, without too much trouble; all you have to do is treat it as something that happened long ago—not quite “long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” but something of that sort. Yes, Jesus died and rose again, and yes, that’s a good thing, because it means we get to go to heaven when we die, and yes, I believe all that, and can I get on with my life now? It’s something that happened so we could be saved, and so we celebrate and sing songs, but in the last analysis, it’s something that happened 2000 years ago, and not anything that we really need to think about all that much as we go about our daily lives; after all, it is, as we might say, ancient history.

Except that to say that is to miss half the story, because it isn’t just ancient history, it isn’t just something that happened once long ago; it’s not just that one man who was God came back from the dead, but that because he rose from the dead, so we, too, have been raised from the dead and will rise from the dead. The New Testament hammers this point home, that the death and resurrection of Christ isn’t only something that happened to him, it’s something that happened to us, by the power and grace of God. At the point of our conversion, in his death, our old selves died; in his resurrection, we were raised again to new life. Because Christ is risen, when he comes again, we will receive new, perfected bodies, and we will live forever with him; and for now, though we still have the same old bodies, we have new spiritual power, from the Spirit of God. We were enslaved to sin, under the power of death, but no more, for those old selves are gone, and in Christ we have been given new life—his life—the life which triumphed over sin and broke the power of death. We are free from sin, free to live for God, free to be more than we have been, free to be the people we were meant to be. We do still sin, for old habits die hard, but we are no longer bound to it; our chains have been broken.

This is the power of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. It’s not merely something Jesus did so that we could choose to be saved if we wanted to; it’s our resurrection—our re-creation as people. It’s the beginning of our transformation, not into new people, but into the people God created us to be. It’s about being set free, completely free, from all the things that haunt us and weigh us down—free to go forward in the power and the grace of God to live as his new creation, for we are no longer who we once were; we are no longer “only human,” we are no longer bound to what is “only natural,” for that life is dead, and the life we now live, we live by the Spirit of God.

This means that we can’t reduce the Resurrection to merely an edifying story or an uplifting thought; it isn’t a metaphor, or an image, or a poetic expression; indeed, it isn’t about anything else, whether hope, or faith, or how wonderful Jesus was—it simply is, this utterly new thing God has done for the healing and the recreation of the world. The Resurrection isn’t about anything else at all; rather, everything else we do and say and know and live as Christians is about the Resurrection, and if we’re not talking and living that way, we’re missing the point.

This is why Paul says that if Christ hasn’t been raised, if our hope in him is in this life only, that we are of all people most to be pitied; which says something about what our lives ought to look like. If this world and this life are all there is, then we might as well devote our lives to maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, because there’s really nothing more to life than that; pleasure is the best this world can give, and suffering doesn’t get you anything worth having. For each of us, death comes as the end, and that’s that. From that point of view, living for the hope of another life that isn’t there, giving up pleasures and accepting suffering for the sake of another world that doesn’t exist, is simply pitiable, the dedication of life to a delusion.

But in fact, Paul says, Christ has been raised from the dead; yes, in Adam, all die, but in Christ, we have been made alive. In him, we have been given new life that is stronger than this world and new sight that sees farther than its bounds; we can see beyond death, we can see through this world to the new world coming. We don’t have to settle for what this world has to offer, because we don’t have to bow to the powers that rule it; this world tells us that death is final and pain has no answer, it tells us to come to terms with our sin because we cannot defeat it, and in Jesus Christ we know better.

In Jesus Christ we know that none of these things has the last word—we know that pain doesn’t have the last word, sin doesn’t have the last word, grief doesn’t have the last word, loss doesn’t have the last word, even death itself doesn’t have the last word, because there is a resurrection. If your hopes have failed and your plans gone awry, there is a resurrection. If you’re grieving the death of someone you love, there is a resurrection. If you’re suffering, if you’re in pain, there is a resurrection. If you’re worn down and beaten down by guilt for something you’ve done, there is a resurrection. If you’re alone and lonely, there is a resurrection. If those you love have hurt you and let you down, there is a resurrection. Whatever you have done, whatever this world has done to you, whatever is wrong in your life, take heart, for there is a resurrection.

Christ is risen, and with him we are risen; this world is not all there is. We don’t have to settle for what it can offer, nor do we have to let our circumstances determine our lives. We can rest in the assurance that in the hard times, God is always with us, and that in time, there will come an end to all hard times and all pain; when Jesus returns, all his faithful ones who have died will be raised from the dead, just as he was raised—in resurrection bodies, perfected bodies, free from sin and all its effects, free from the power of death, free from all the things that go wrong—and we will live with him forever in his kingdom, all the heavens and earth made new. “See,” Revelation 21 declares, “the home of God is among human beings. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” That’s the promise of God to us because Jesus rose from the dead. In his death, we died; in his resurrection, we are risen; in his kingdom, we will live forever.

(Psalm 117; Mark 16:1-8, Romans 6:1-11)

I saw a quote a while back from an older pastor, his spirit clearly broken, who had come to believe that funerals were the only worthwhile thing he did. He said, “The first couple I married is now divorced; the first person I led to Christ has left the church. But the first person I buried is still dead.” My first thought when I read that was, “How sad!” That’s someone who’s lost faith. There’s no resurrection there, no Easter hope, only the wisdom of the modern world: people die, and they stay dead, and that’s it. That’s why you see cars with the bumper sticker, “The one who dies with the most toys wins”—because what’s to play for except to make life as fun as you can while it lasts? That’s why you see T-shirts that say, “No one gets out of here alive,” or, “Life is a terminal condition.” For many people, the future fact of death overshadows the present fact of life, and anything that can be done to stave it off or deny its approach is worth doing.

However people choose to deal with death, most agree that it’s one of only two certain things in life: when someone’s dead, they’re dead, and that’s it. The great Christian writer G. K. Chesterton has one of his characters, a Prussian general, say this to explain why he had ordered the execution of a poet: “Highness, . . . he would be deified, but he would be dead. Whatever he means to do, he would never do it. Whatever he is doing, he would do no more. Death is the fact of all facts; and I am rather fond of facts.” And because it is the fact of all facts, the fact which can silence all other facts, it’s the fact to which tyrants and brutes have always resorted in order to keep the upper hand. If someone becomes too much of a problem, you can always kill them; and then whatever they are doing, they will do no more.

And so the Pharisees saw the crowds following Jesus, then looked at each other and said, “This isn’t doing any good—see, the whole world has gone after him.” But they had one more hammer to use; and a few days later, they and the chief priests had manipulated the Roman who ruled Israel into sentencing Jesus to death. Whatever Jesus meant to do, he would not do it; what he was doing, he would do no more. Death was the fact of all facts; and they were very fond of facts.

Along with that fact came a few more. Jesus was buried in a rich man’s tomb; the stone used to close that tomb was a giant disc, a great stone wheel, perhaps six feet across and a foot or two thick. Once the body was inside, the stone was rolled down into a slot in front of the door that held it firmly in place against the rock wall of the tomb. You can imagine the horrible grinding noise that must have made, a sound like the death of all hopes; you can imagine how that sound must have echoed in the ears of Mary, Mary Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea, and the others gathered there, and how they must have felt it in their very souls, as if the stone were rolling within them, crushing their hearts.

Still, there was nothing to do but go on, somehow; and as Jesus’ burial had been hurried, his body had not been properly anointed, so that needed to be done. That was something they could still do for Jesus, small as it was. And so after sundown brought the Sabbath to an end, they went out and bought the spices, and early the next morning, Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Salome went down to the tomb. They left home while it was still dark, so they could be sure to arrive at the tomb at first light. As they walked, they fretted about the stone; after all, it weighed thousands of pounds, and would have to be rolled uphill to get it out of the way, and it all seemed too much for them to do. Plus there were those Roman soldiers set around the mouth of the tomb, who might be willing to help, or—not . . . you never could tell with Romans.

When they got there, though, they found the stone already rolled away, and no one there except an angel sitting in the tomb. Mark doesn’t use the word “angel,” but that’s what he means; you can tell from the clothes that shone white in the dark tomb, and from the women’s reaction: they were terrified. We have this Victorian image of angels in the back of our minds, of pretty young men and women in soft focus with beautiful golden wings and gentle expressions on their faces, but real angels aren’t like that. God’s angels live in his presence, they’re saturated in his glory and his holiness, and when they show up undisguised, they radiate that glory; it’s as if a small sun suddenly started burning right here in this sanctuary. Their presence is stunning, blinding, awe-inspiring, overpowering . . . terrifying. God is not safe, he isn’t tame, he isn’t comfortable, and neither are his servants. That’s why the first thing angels always say is, “Don’t be afraid.”

If the angel’s appearance is staggering, however, that’s nothing compared to his message. He tells them, “You’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He’s been raised; he isn’t here. Look, there’s the place where they laid him. Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” And how do the women respond? They run. They’re beside themselves with some crazy combination of fear, and joy, and disbelief, and awe; this is just too big, too much, too far beyond their experience for them to handle. Their emotions overwhelm them, and they run; they don’t know what else to do.

And here, Mark stops, creating incredible heartburn for generations of Christians, including the writer of the extended ending you have there in your Bibles. He doesn’t give us a resurrection appearance, he doesn’t show the women telling the disciples Jesus had risen, he doesn’t give us any of that; instead, he leaves us with the women running away in fear, saying nothing at all. Mark knows that they did in fact tell the disciples, that the word did get out; why doesn’t he tell that story, too? Why stop here?

It’s hard to say for sure, but it seems to me that this ending does something important: it drops the whole question in our laps. The other gospels end with Jesus appearing to his disciples and teaching them, and those accounts are important; but in wrapping up the story, bringing it to a conclusion, they allow us to stay outside it, if we choose. When Mark leaves us hanging, with no resolution, with the command to go tell the others still unfulfilled, it pulls us in and leaves us to finish the story. We don’t know, from Mark, what the women make of what has just happened to them, or what they’re going to do with it; as we wrestle with that fact, it brings us smack up against the question of what we make of it, what we’re going to do with it.

Which, for our lives, is the question that matters. I’ve known people who believed intellectually that the stone was rolled away and Jesus rose from the dead—they considered it to be the only historically plausible conclusion—but it didn’t matter to them; they saw it as just another odd historical fact that had nothing at all to do with their lives. And that’s not the Resurrection the Scriptures proclaim. Yes, they teach the Resurrection as an historical fact—Jesus physically died, then physically came back to life, got up, left the tomb, and went on about his work—but not only as an historical fact. It’s not just that the stone was rolled away from the tomb, but that the stone is still rolling; it’s not just that one man who was God came back from the dead, but that because he rose from the dead, so we, too, have risen from the dead and will rise from the dead.

The question is, do you believe that? Do you believe that this is your resurrection? Do you believe that in Jesus, you have risen from spiritual death to new life in Christ? Paul tells us that “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death . . . so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” In other words, our old selves, enslaved to sin, under the power of death, died on the cross, and in Christ we have been given new life—his life—the life which triumphed over sin and broke the power of death. We are free from sin, free to live for God, free to be the people we were meant to be. Do you believe that? Do you live like your chains have been broken?

And do you believe that in Jesus, death is not the end? Do you know in your gut that just as you have risen from the dead spiritually, so you will rise from the dead physically? Yes, in this broken creation, on this marred earth, death is still a reality, and people who die do usually stay dead—yesterday when we buried my wife’s grandmother, it was something like the sixth funeral in her extended family in the last six months, and they’re all definitely still dead—but that’s not the end of the story, because Jesus Christ has shattered the power of death. As Paul says, “If we have been united with him in his death, we will certainly be united with him in his resurrection.” Death is only temporary. Funerals are only temporary. When Jesus returns, all his faithful ones who have died will be raised from the dead just as he was raised—in resurrection bodies, perfected bodies, free from sin and all its effects, free from the power of death, free from all the things that go wrong—and we will live with him forever in the new heavens and the new earth. “See,” Revelation 21 declares, “the home of God is among human beings. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

What matters is that we understand, not just that there was a resurrection in a tomb outside Jerusalem nearly 2000 years ago, but that there is a resurrection for us. Yes, in this world, we suffer death, and pain, and grief, and loss, but there’s a new world coming; if you are in Christ, then you have the promise of God that pain doesn’t have the last word, sin doesn’t have the last word, grief doesn’t have the last word, loss doesn’t have the last word, even death itself doesn’t have the last word, because there is a resurrection. If your hopes have failed and your plans gone awry, there is a resurrection. If you’re grieving the death of someone you love, there is a resurrection. If you’re suffering, if you’re in pain, there is a resurrection. If you’re worn down and beaten down by guilt for something you’ve done, there is a resurrection. If you’re alone and lonely, there is a resurrection. If those you love have hurt you and let you down, there is a resurrection. Whatever this world has done to you, whatever is wrong in your life, take heart, for there is a resurrection. In Jesus’ death, we died; in his resurrection, we are risen; in his kingdom, we will live forever with him and with each other.