It
was a real delight for me to have Bishop Jane preach here last weekend, but the
downside was that I didn’t get to preach my Easter sermon! Still, I will take
consolation in the fact that in the Christian year Easter lasts for fifty days,
from Easter Sunday until the Day of Pentecost! The resurrection of Jesus is
such a joyful event that we shouldn’t just celebrate it for one day; we
continue to celebrate it for seven weeks, and this year I hope we stay on that
theme and explore it together in our hymns, our prayers, and our preaching.
One
of my favourite movies about the life of Jesus is Franco Zeffirelli’s ‘Jesus of
Nazareth’, which was first shown on TV on Easter weekend of 1977. Near the end
of the movie, there’s a wonderful scene in which one of the Jewish religious
leaders – the people who have been Jesus’ enemies – goes down into the empty tomb
where the body of Jesus had been laid. He looks around him, shakes his head,
and says to himself, “Now it begins! It all begins!”
At
first that may seem a very strange thing to say at the end of the movie, and at the end
of the story of Jesus. But the scribe was right. He and his colleagues had
tried hard to stop Jesus and to stamp out his message, but the empty tomb
spelled disaster for their efforts. He knew that once the word got out about
this, the movement would spread like wildfire; hence his words: “Now it
begins!”
And
so it’s true, you see, that although the story of the resurrection of Jesus
comes at the end of each of the four
gospels, it’s really not the end, but the beginning. We Christians read the
stories of the things Jesus did and said long ago, but those aren’t the only
stories about Jesus we celebrate. We believe that Jesus has been raised from
the dead and is seated in power at the right hand of God the Father, and that
he continues to work in the lives of men and women and children by his Holy
Spirit. Those stories began on the day of Resurrection, Easter Sunday, and have
continued right through to today.
And
those stories will continue in the lives of Cian, Gabriella, and Spencer, who
are going to be baptized today. Our risen Lord Jesus Christ is in the business
of transforming lives, bringing us forgiveness of sins, a living relationship
with God the Father, and the power of his Holy Spirit to change us from the
inside out. Baptism and faith is how all that comes into our lives, and so
today as Cian, Gabriella, and Spencer are baptized they are at the beginning of
a brand new adventure of learning to know and love and follow Jesus. What a
great day for them!
Let’s
take a moment to go back in our minds to the evening of Good Friday; let’s
think about those scattered and shattered followers of Jesus, Peter and John
and James and Mary Magdalene and the rest. They had firmly believed that Jesus
was the Messiah – that is, the King like David who God was going to send, the
one who would drive out the Romans and the corrupt Jewish leaders and set up
God’s kingdom on earth, his kingdom of justice and peace. The old prophecies
had said that the Messiah would defeat his enemies through the power of God,
but something had gone horribly wrong with that picture: Jesus had not defeated
his enemies, but had been crucified by them. This was not something that the disciples
had been expecting. In their minds, this could only mean one thing: they had
been wrong about Jesus, and he was not God’s promised Messiah after all. They
had wasted the last three years of their lives on an imposter. The best thing
for them to do was to keep their heads down in the city until the dust settled,
and then slip off quietly back to Galilee and resume their former lives.
But
then the stories began to come in. Some of the women went to the tomb on the
Sunday morning to finish the job of anointing the body. Tombs in those days
were not like graves today – they were family affairs, usually caves in which
the bodies were kept until they had decayed and all that was left were bones.
Then the bones would be collected and placed in an ossuary for posterity, and
that particular place in the tomb would then be available for another family
member when it was needed. That’s why John makes a point of telling us that
Jesus was laid in a new tomb, which
had never been used before.
But
when the women got to the tomb they had a shock; the huge stone across the
entrance had been rolled away, and when they looked in, they saw that the body
was gone. So they ran to the place where the disciples were hiding and told
them about it. Peter and John decided to investigate; they ran back to the
garden, and one of the women, Mary Magdalene, followed them. Peter and John
found everything as Mary had said – the body gone, the linen cloths lying where
it had been, with the turban for the head lying a little way away, neatly
folded. Puzzled, not knowing what was going on, but beginning to hope, Peter
and John slipped away.
Mary,
however, stayed at the tomb, and so became the first person to actually see Jesus
alive after his resurrection, as we heard in last week’s gospel reading. I want
to point out to you that if a fiction writer in first century Jerusalem had
been making this story up, there are two details he would definitely have left
out. First, in the culture of that day women were considered to be unreliable witnesses;
their evidence was inadmissible in a court of law. So if you were making this
story up and wanting to convince people that it was true, you definitely
wouldn’t have a woman as the first witness of Jesus’ resurrection. Secondly,
you definitely wouldn’t include a story about how sometimes people didn’t
recognize Jesus at first; you would want to get across the idea that there was
absolutely no doubt about his identity.
The
gospel writers, however, were not quite so creative with the truth as some modern
skeptical scholars would have us believe. They tell us that a woman was the
first witness of the resurrection because they knew that that is, in fact, what
happened. And the fact is that there was
something very mysterious about the risen Jesus, and people didn’t always grasp
right at the beginning that it was him. This was the story that the witnesses
remembered, and because they were honest, they told the truth.
So
Jesus appeared first of all to Mary by the tomb early on Easter morning. Later
in the afternoon two followers of Jesus were walking from Jerusalem to the
village of Emmaus, seven miles away; they were talking sadly about what had
happened, but then a stranger came and joined them as they walked along the
road. He asked them what they were talking about, and out came the whole story.
“How dull you are!” the stranger said: “Don’t you know the scriptures predicted
this?” And he proceeded to give them a guided tour through all the prophecies
and explained how they had been fulfilled in Jesus.
Eventually
they reached their destination and invited him in for a meal. There he took
bread, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them, and their eyes were opened
and they realized it had been Jesus all the time. He vanished from their sight,
but they ran all the way back to Jerusalem, went to the upper room and told the
disciples “We’ve seen him!” The others said, “Yes, we know – he’s appeared to
Peter as well!” – a meeting we know nothing about. But as they were talking
together, Jesus appeared among them! They were afraid and some found it hard to
believe, but when he invited them to touch him and asked them for something to
eat, they realized it was true.
And
so it continued for the next six weeks. Sometimes Jesus appeared to
individuals, sometimes to groups; at one time, to a group of more than five
hundred of his followers. Sometimes the appearances were in Jerusalem,
sometimes back in Galilee. Sometimes people recognized him right away, at other
times it took longer. It was wild and unpredictable and scary and exciting; the
disciples knew that God’s power had broken into their world as never before.
The story of Jesus wasn’t over after all: the adventure had just begun!
If
it’s true, what difference does it make for you and me?
First,
it means that Jesus was right. Jesus,
you know, wasn’t just a nice mild-mannered person who had gone about helping
people everywhere. He had also said and done some pretty puzzling things that
seemed rather bigheaded and even blasphemous at first glance. What sort of
humble and godly preacher says to his followers, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve
seen God the Father?” and “I and the Father are one?” What sort of genuine
religious leader tells people that if they believe in him he will give them
eternal life? What kind of a crank assumes that he has the power to forgive
people’s sins, and makes a habit of doing it on a regular basis? Or claims to
be the one who had been sending the prophets and preachers to Jerusalem for the
last few centuries? Or, when one of his followers kneels before him and
exclaims, “My Lord and my God!” accepts it and says, “You believe because you
have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet still believe!”
When
I read about some of the words and actions of Jesus, I can’t avoid the
impression that if he had appeared today, we would have seen him as a cult
leader or a candidate for permanent residence in a psychiatric ward. Certainly
that is the way that some of the people in his day saw him – the religious
establishment thought he was a dangerous charlatan, and at one point his family
tried to take him home because they thought he was off his rocker!
But
then came the resurrection, and suddenly Jesus’ followers realized that in fact
God had vindicated him. He is the Son
of God; he is the way, the truth, and
the life. His death wasn’t just a cruel travesty of justice, but was somehow a
fulfillment of God’s purposes as the blood of the lamb of God was shed for the
sins of the whole world. And now God had raised him from the dead and exalted
him to the highest place, higher even than Caesar off in Rome – because
everyone knew that Caesars lived and died, but only Jesus had been raised from
the dead. And so, they said, God had made him ‘Lord of all’ – an amazing title
for a Galilean carpenter, and only possible because of the resurrection.
So
the resurrection means that Jesus was right – that he is the Son of God, the
Lord of all, the one who died and rose again for us and now calls for us to
give him our allegiance and follow him. Second, it means that Jesus is on the loose! You can’t nail
him down any more! The world will never be safe from him again; you never know
where he is going to show up.
A
few weeks ago a group of us met together here at the church to think about the
subject of sharing our faith stories with others. One of the exercises we did
involved the creation of a time line of our lives. We each drew a line down the
centre of our paper, representing the story of our lives. On the left hand side
of the line we noted the events – birth, school, marriage, childbirth and so on
– including some of the times of stress and difficulty that we went through.
Then on the right we noted times when we were particularly aware of the help of
God and the presence of Christ in our lives. I think that all of us were
surprised at how frequent those times were.
They’re
not dramatic stories, of course, like the New Testament resurrection stories,
but in a sense they are resurrection
stories nonetheless, because it was the living Christ who was making himself
known to us when we needed his touch and a sense of his presence. Millions of
Christians around the world can tell those stories, stories of how the presence
of the risen Jesus has brought them forgiveness and peace, and a strength
beyond their own. I would not be standing in front of you as a preacher this
morning if I could not tell a story like that about my own life.
The resurrection means that Jesus was right – he is the Son of God, the Saviour of the
world. It means that he is on the loose, doing real things in the lives of real
people, not just long ago in Bible times, but even today too. And thirdly, it
means that Jesus is calling for our
allegiance. He said to his disciples: “All authority in heaven and on earth
has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing
them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and
teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:18-20a).
That’s what baptism is, you see – it’s a transfer of our
allegiance. From now on, we acknowledge that our lives don’t belong to
ourselves, and they certainly don’t belong to our employers or to the leaders
of our country. Above all other rulers, Jesus Christ is Lord of all. To be
baptized is to acknowledge him for who he is and to commit ourselves to serving
and following him as our Lord. To bring a child for baptism is to say, “Yes,
Jesus is our Lord, and we want our child to grow up to follow him too”.
And what about the rest of us? Have we given him our allegiance? One of the pitfalls of formal
liturgical worship is that it’s easy to mouth written words without really
meaning them. Many people have come for baptism and confirmation, or brought
children for baptism, without really meaning what they are saying. But today,
perhaps, is an opportunity for us to really mean it. Perhaps the risen Jesus is
speaking to you this morning as you listen to the message of the scriptures.
Perhaps you realize, maybe for the first time, that he really is alive and is
calling you to believe in him and follow him. If that’s so, don’t put him off;
rather, turn to him in your heart and respond to his invitation. The exact form
of words isn’t important; simply put your life in his hands and ask him to
forgive you your sins and help you to follow him from this day forward. And
then step out in the joy of his resurrection and begin to live the Christian
adventure!
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