"He is not Here - He has Risen!" Easter Sunday

“He is not Here – He has Risen!” 080407SUam Easter Sunday

Reading: Luke 24: 1-12.

“He is not here – He has risen!”

Just over a week ago I was handing out invitations to the Venue as the children were coming out of the nursery to go home with their Mums and Dads. One little girl was standing in the entrance waiting while her mother was talking to the teachers. She saw the Easter Garden with the cave and the stone. She asked “Is Jesus in there?” Full marks for recognising the significance of the Garden in the Easter story! But actually Jesus is not there. He is risen!

“Jesus is alive!”

A very simple statement. It is the basis of our faith. And why is that? It’s because Paul writes that if Jesus is not alive, if he has not risen from the dead, then we can forget about the rest of the gospel. It isn’t worth the paper it is written on.

And many people have been naturally sceptical about Jesus rising from death. Many theories have been put forward to explain away the resurrection of Jesus. It has been suggested that he didn’t actually die – he revived in the tomb. But that ignores the brutal efficiency of Roman soldiers. The treatment he recived from them meant that he was critically injured before he was even crucified, and the spear thrust into his lungs and heart would have finished the job even if he hadn’t been already dead for some hours.

It has been suggested that the women lost their way, and went to the wrong tomb. But we are clearly told that they had been there to see Jesus’ body placed in the tomb. They knew exactly where it was. And if they had somehow got it wrong, it would have been simple for the authorities, faced with a rapidly growing horde of believers, to produce his body and say, “Stop spreading stories of a resurrection – he’s dead – here’s the body.” But they couldn’t. There was no body.

Another suggestion is that the disciples were suffering from wishful thinking and saw what they expected to see – an hallucination. But as we read this morning, the disciples were the original sceptics. When the women came and brought the news, the disciples didn’t believe them. They thought they were talking nonsense. They had heard what Jesus taught, but in the end they hadn’t taken it on board. It was only when Peter decided to go and check out the evidence for himself, and then when Jesus appeared to them, that they truly believed. And just in case people didn’t believe them, Paul writes that Jesus actually appeared to hundreds of people and he challenges his readers to go and ask them for themselves.

And it has been suggested that the disciples stole the body away. If they had managed to do that, would they really have gone out boldly proclaiming the resurrection, being willing to give their lives for something they knew to be a lie?

And another suggestion is that they simply made the whole thing up. But if they had, they would surely have made a better job of it. Women’s testimony didn’t carry much weight at all in 1^st century Judea. But every account, just as we have read this morning, tells of the women bringing the first report that Jesus has risen. The disciples themselves dismissed their report as women’s tales until they got first hand evidence for themselves.

Doctors, psychologists, lawyers, archaeologists have examined the evidence for the resurrection. And the evidence supports the account in the gospels.

Jesus is alive! That is the message the angel gave to the women to take back to the disciples. The disciples struggled to believe it at first, but when they were convinced, it transformed their lives. They lost their fear. They challenged the authorities by openly accusing them of unjustly putting Jesus to death and proclaiming that God had raised him to life.

And the Resurrection became the focus of their preaching. It was what really excited them. It was the key fact that they wanted to get across to people. In fact if you read the book of Acts, you will find many examples of the preaching of Peter and Paul. And the thing that struck me was the emphasis that they put on the resurrection.

And that to me was the big difference between their message and the way we usually preach the Gospel today.

We say to people, “You are a sinner. You have sinned against God. You need to be forgiven. But God loves you. He sent Jesus to die on the cross for you to take the penalty for your sin on himself. Come to the cross. Receive Jesus as your Saviour. Oh, and by the way, Jesus rose again.”

But the disciples preached, “Jesus died, but God raised him to life. He is alive! Repent and believe in him, and he will give you life.”

They don’t ignore the fact that Jesus died. But they don’t actually explain the connection between the cross and our being forgiven. In their letters, Paul and the other writers do explain the meaning of the cross, and how Jesus died as the sacrifice for our sin, demonstrating how the Old Testament introduces God’s plan of salvation through Jesus. But when speaking directly to people, their focus is on the fact that Jesus was raised from death to life and he is alive for ever and death has been defeated. For them it was the resurrection that gave the cross its significance. It was Easter that gave Good Friday its significance. For them the fact that Jesus had risen from death was the key to the Gospel – the Good News of Jesus.

And I think that maybe they knew something that we have tended to forget. That when we talk to people we need to start from where they are. We may understand that they are sinners in need of a Saviour, but their concern is about life and death and fear of what the future holds rather than how to be forgiven. And we have the answer. Jesus has conquered death. And that is what the disciples told everyone. And they flocked to hear this message of hope and freedom from fear. And Easter reminds us that we too have a positive message of life and hope.

Last Sunday morning, we went back to the day when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, and we thought about how he is calling us to respond to him as King. On Thursday evening we met around the communion table and thought about how Jesus is calling us to respond to the gift of his body and blood as the price of our salvation. On Friday morning we remembered how Jesus died for us, and we thought about how Jesus is calling us to respond to him as Saviour.

And today we have heard the message of the women who went to the tomb to discover that Jesus is alive. And the resurrection is not simply an interesting fact to lock away in our minds. It demands a response to our living Lord.

And the women give us some responses that we can follow. They came to the tomb and found it empty and they wondered. They wondered what had happened. They couldn’t understand it. It didn’t make sense to them. But they didn’t just go away and forget about it. They wondered what it meant. And they were given the explanation.

And it is so tempting for people today to be confronted by the message of the resurrection and think, “That doesn’t make sense to me,” and go away and forget about it. But if we stop and wonder what it means and examine the evidence, we will find that this is something that directly touches all our lives.

And the women were told to remember what Jesus had told them. We have the advantage of having the words of Jesus and the word of God in our Bibles that are so readily available to us. We can easily read for ourselves the significance of the events of that first Easter Day. We can discuss what Jesus has done together and consider how to respond.

The women passed the message on to the disciples, but at first they failed to respond. They didn’t believe. If we accept that the resurrection of Jesus is for real, then we need to respond by believing it. And that doesn’t mean simply believing that it happened. It means living as people for whom Jesus has died and risen again, people who have been forgiven and who have no fear of death because Jesus has overcome death and we can live with him for ever.

And the women went and told what they had found. If we have discovered the way to life through Jesus, how can we keep it to ourselves in a world that is so short of hope. We have a message of life and hope to pass on. And Easter reminds us that our first task is to tell people that Jesus is alive, that he has risen and that he has conquered death. And that through Jesus we have received eternal life. And that God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. And then we can explain to people who want to receive this life how they can come in repentance to Jesus who died for them and receive this life for themselves.

Jesus said, “I have come that they might have life and have it to the full.” He is offering that life to each of us now. We can know that this offer is genuine because Jesus himself defeated death and rose to life. Respond to that free offer this morning. Receive life from Jesus who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, live your life for Him, and then pass the good news on to a world that desperately needs to know that Jesus is alive and offers eternal life to everyone who will believe in him.

Let’s stand and sing our hymn of praise to the living Lord Jesus, “Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son.”