John 20:1-9 (New International Version)
1Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. 2So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!"
3So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. 4Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, 7as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. 8Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. 9(They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)
Introduction:
On Easter Sunday, Rev. Jeff Sterling had two big letters at the altar of his church. The letter M and the letter T. It was a very nice visual to illustrate what Easter is all about. M-T. During his children’s sermon when he had all these kids up at the front of the church, he asked them, “What’s different about the church today, kids?” After a long moment while all their little minds were working, his own daughter piped up and throwing her hands in the air said, “It’s full, dad.”
It’s Easter. Church is supposed to be full. Church is supposed to be full all the time. We celebrate the day that Jesus resurrection took place but the fact is that there is a resurrected man, our Jesus, living in the presence of God. Did you ever think of that? If Jesus is alive and He is, He has to be living somewhere.
I think people intuitively, everyone knows how important this day really is. On Christmas, Jesus was born. That’s a natural thing. Babies are born all the time. On Easter though, on Easter, a man who had been dead for days, was brought back to life by the power of God.
It had been three days since Jesus had been crucified. By our reckoning, the crucifixion happened on a Friday because here in the scriptures, Mary Magdelene has come to the tomb, to the burial place of Jesus, on the first day of the week. That’s a Sunday according to the Jewish calendar. The Jewish Sabbath, the day of rest and worship meant to coincide with the seventh day of the Creation story, was on a Saturday and the first day of the week, would have been a Sunday. And so Mary comes to the tomb because she’s very sad. She cannot believe that Jesus is gone. All the hopes, all the dreams of the last three years she had spent with Him, gone. Buried in a rich man’s tomb. In Luke ch. 8, we read that this is the same Mary who had been freed by Jesus from severe demonic presence. We don’t really know what that is or what it looks like. What we do know for certain, is that Jesus made it stop and go away. Jesus gave her freedom. Jesus gave her hope. But now this man, this man who had done so much for her, when it came down to it, did nothing for himself. In the end, He had actually given himself over to death. And that was beyond her comprehension. As is a stage in all grief, she could not believe that Jesus was dead. She had to see the tomb where He was buried. She had to see the large wheel shaped rock that had been rolled in front of the tomb.
We know what she thought when she saw the stone rolled to the side. “They’ve taken His body. Those awful men who wanted Him dead in the first place have now desecrated his tomb and stolen His body.” That’s what she thought. That’s what she reports to Peter and John. It doesn’t say it but clearly Mary looked into the opening to the tomb. If you’ve seen pictures of them, you know that these tombs are little more than shallow caves carved out of solid rock. You really don’t have to go into them to see if there’s anything in them or not. And Jesus’ tomb, was empty. Empty. You can look all you want and He’s not there. One of the greatest arguments for the actual resurrection of Christ really is the missing body. One of the quickest ways to end Christianity before it even got started, would have been to produce the dead body of Jesus Christ. The Jewish leaders did not. The Romans did not. Jesus’ followers certainly couldn’t find His body because the tomb really was empty!! There’s nothing harder to find than a dead body that is no longer dead!
Do you remember Chuck Colson? Colson was special counsel to President Nixon and was involved in the infamous Watergate cover up. Colson was known as Nixon’s hatchet man as he was ruthless and willing to do whatever it took to move the administration’s agenda forward. Colson ended up in prison for his part in the conspiracy but that time in prison was used by God to make Colson a follower of Jesus Christ. Up to this point in his life, Colson maintained that the missing body was the result of a conspiracy, a huge conspiracy to hide the body of Jesus and to promote the lie of his resurrection. Colson obviously changed his mind. He writes these words:
. . .” it was, ironically, the Watergate cover-up that left me convinced that the biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus Christ are historically reliable.
"In my Watergate experience I saw the inability of men -- powerful, highly motivated professionals -- to hold together a conspiracy based on a lie. It was less than three weeks from the time that Mr. Nixon knew all the facts to the time that John Dean went to the prosecutors. . . The actual cover-up lasted less than a month. Yet Christ's powerless followers maintained to their deaths by execution that they had in fact seen Jesus Christ raised from the dead. There was no conspiracy, no passover plot. Men and women do not give up their comfort -- and certainly not their lives -- for what they know to be a lie."
(Source: Charles Colson, Kingdoms In Conflict (p. 99-101, 1990)
The tomb really is empty. Christ is risen! [He is risen, indeed]
And that changes everything. That changes everything. That confirms everything. The empty tomb puts the stamp of approval on everything that Jesus said and did when He walked among us.
C.S. Lewis said that we have three choices about Jesus. He is either a lunatic on a par with someone who thinks they are a poached egg. Or he is a pathological liar. Or He is everything he claimed to be. Because of the things Jesus claimed about himself, he cannot be a good man, a great moral teacher, someone who’s teachings are worthy of following. Jesus left no room for that. No, he is either a liar, a lunatic, or He is the Son of God, the Christ. The resurrection confirms the divine heritage of Jesus. The resurrection affirms everything he said and did.
The empty tomb is a reversal of all that was expected. Hundreds, if not thousands of people, had seen Jesus die. The expectation is that He would rot in the grave like everyone else. But that did not occur. The resurrection is the sign in history that God has begun the work of a new creation, ushered in by the resurrected Jesus Christ.
To those who first beheld it, the resurrection of Jesus would have inherently indicated that the end of time had begun. The claim of Christ that the kingdom of God was present was suddenly and unavoidably revealed as true. The stamp of approval of God the Father was upon this man. Witnesses were radically transformed by beholding the risen Christ, not merely because a resurrected man stood before them, but because the resurrection radically validated everything Jesus said and did among them.
In fact, the resurrection not only vindicated and verified Christ's teaching, it also provided the ground for interpreting Christ's life in light of the rest of the Bible, the Old Testament included. The resurrected Christ took the Psalms, the Law, and the prophets’ words to new dimensions. Phrases like this one from the prophet Hosea took on new meaning. “On the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence” (Hosea 6:2). Or read the 22nd Psalm sometime. You will be amazed. The Bible from beginning to end comes to life through the empty tomb. The Resurrection is the keystone that holds the entire word together.
A.N. Wilson writes: The Resurrection. . . is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story. J. S. Bach believed the story, and set it to music. Most of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past 1,500 years have believed it. But an even stronger argument for the resurrection is the way that Christian faith transforms individual lives—the lives of the men and women with whom you mingle on a daily basis.
When Chuck Colson got out of prison, practically the entire world doubted his conversion to Christianity because of who he was before he went to jail. Since that moment in 1973, when Colson first experienced the power of the resurrection, he has spent his life working with his non-profit organization devoted to prison ministry called "Prison Fellowship." He is founder and chairman of the Wilberforce Forum, which is the "Christian worldview thinking, teaching, and advocacy arm of" Prison Fellowship, and includes Colson's daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint, now heard on a thousand outlets. The ministry conducts justice reform efforts through Justice Fellowship.[3]
In 1993, Colson was awarded the Templeton Prize, the world's largest annual financial prize given for merit (over $1 million), which is given each year to the one person in the world who has done the most to advance the cause of religion. He donated this prize as he does all his speaking fees and royalties, to the work of his Prison Fellowship ministries. That is the power of the resurrection.
Ending: Wolfhart Pannenberg, a German theologian of the last century, said that “The evidence for Jesus' resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things: First, it is a very unusual event to say the least. And second, if you believe it happened, you have to change the way you live.” And there’s the rub. If the tomb really is empty, then it is a challenge to you, you must respond to it. The absence of a dead Jesus and the presence of a living one, absolutely demands it. If the tomb really is empty, then your heart never needs to be. The stone was rolled away not so Jesus could get out. He certainly didn’t need that. The stone was rolled away so that the witnesses could get in and see that Jesus was not there. The resurrection means new life, a new creation, a new kingdom. The kingdom of God has come.
Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies and he who believes in me will never die.”
In the death and resurrection of Jesus, human history became the setting in which God's assurance of victory over sin and death was once for all established. In this table today, we celebrate Jesus’ death but only so we can get to the empty tomb.
Well over three hundred verses are concerned with the subject of Jesus’ resurrection in the New Testament. We are told that this event is a sign for unbelievers (Matt. 12:38-40); cf. John 20:24-29) as well as the answer for the believer’s doubt (Luke 24:38-43). It serves as the guarantee that Jesus’ teachings are true (Acts 2:22-24; 1 Cor. 15:12-20) and is the center of the gospel itself (Rom. 4:24-25, 10:9; 1 Cor. 15:1-4). Further, the resurrection is the impetus for evangelism (Matt. 28:18-20; Acts 10:39-43), the key indication of the believer’s daily power to live the Christian life (Rom. 6:4-14, 8:9-11; Phil. 3:10) and the reason for the total commitment of our lives (Rom. 7:4; 1 Cor. 15:57-58). The resurrection even addresses the fear of death (John 11:25; 1 Cor. 15:54-58; cf. Heb. 2:14-15) and is related to the second coming of Jesus (Acts 1:11; Rev. 1:7). Lastly, this event is a model of the Christian’s resurrection from the dead (Acts 4:2; 1 Cor. 6:14; 1 Thess. 4:13-18) and provides a foretaste of heaven for the believer (Phil. 3:20-21; 1 Peter 1:3-5). For a popular treatment that addresses these and other aspects, see Gary R. Habermas, The Centrality of the Resurrection, forthcoming.
