Easter
Luke • Sermon • Submitted
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Jesus died.
He actually died.
He died on a cross.
It looked like hope was lost.
And today, it feels like hope has been lost.
We are, hopefully, in the last leg of the world’s worst pandemic in a century.
We have seen people live in fear of sickness and death.
We have seen, at the height of the pandemic here in the San Joaquin county,
we have seen hospitals be overwhelmed.
We were looking for hope,
and many people have put their hope in the government or a vaccine,
and nothing against those things,
but it still feels like there is hopelessness.
Maybe there is a sense of hopelessness because we don’t know the full effects of the pandemic.
The pandemic brought more problems than just sickness.
There have been disruptions in all areas of life, in all sectors of society.
We worry whether there will be vast unemployment, the likes that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression.
We wonder whether businesses will survive.
There is a crisis in education.
There has been a social and economic price to being shut down.
Social isolation has brought depression and hopelessness to the masses.
Death,
pandemics,
injustice,
social breakdown
It looks like we need help.
It looks like we need hope.
...
And there is no greater hope than believing that Jesus was raised from the dead.
If you understand the resurrection of Jesus,
then,
even if everything is dark,
even if there seems to be no hope--
If you understand the resurrection of Jesus,
then you will have hope that will become a light when all the other lights go out.
During a dark time for most of the world, we all yearn for hope.
And there is no better place for hope than to look at the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ ” Then they remembered his words.
While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence.
Let’s pray,
Last year in our first preview service, we spent an extensive amount of time on what Luke has to say on the Resurrection.
Today, I really want to look at the Resurrection in light of everything that Luke had written,
what he shared about the central element to the Christian gospel,
how the Resurrection relates to the whole picture of the Bible.
And what the resurrection means to us,
and a lot of what I will say comes from the New York Pastor, Tim Keller,
in his new book, Hope in Times of Fear.
As I said earlier,
we need hope.
There has been a sense of hopelessness even before COVID-19 had hit the earth.
For several centuries,
it seemed like the human race was progressing.
There was greater safety, prosperity, and freedom.
And there was the belief that with each generation,
the world was getting better.
But that’s not the feeling anymore.
We live in what a 20th-century poet has called
The Age of Anxiety
You know,
we have advanced in health care.
Lives last longer now.
There are not that many wars anymore.
Violence has decreased,
and so has poverty.
But yet,
Most people look to the future,
not with optimism,
but with pessimism.
There is pessimism about the future.
We worry about the future for our children and for our society.
And we usually think that the future isn’t that great.
Why is there so much hopelessness?
There are so many reasons.
Maybe there is so much hopelessness because of political partisanship.
You look on social media,
especially on Twitter,
and it looks like we can’t live in peace with opposing opinions.
There is so much hate and demonization.
Can we even agree on a shared idea of common public good?
Sometimes, it feels like we can’t.
There is nothing we can agree on.
Scientific and technological progress seems to be a good thing.
Like, possibly traveling to Mars sounds kinda cool.
But technology has ironically contributed to the sense of hopelessness.
For example,
because of our developments in transportation,
because of airplanes and globalization,
it’s basically impossible to contain pandemics.
Also, the effects of social media have been largely negative.
It’s so easy to voice your opinion without seeing the repercussions of your words.
It’s so easy to start comparing yourself to everyone else.
Andrew Sullivan, a commentator of culture,
he noted,
As we slowly and surely attained more progress, we have lost something that undergirds all of it: meaning, cohesion, and a different, deeper kind of happiness than the satiation of all of our earthly needs.
sei·shee·ei·shn
We have progressed in all accounts.
We can virtually go anywhere.
We can learn about anything.
We have progressed, in one sense.
But yet, at the same time,
we have lost meaning, cohesion, and a deeper kind of happiness.
We do not know why we should keep moving.
We might lose motivation.
There is a rise in depression.
There is no hope.
Happiness comes and goes.
There was a time, when things weren’t like this.
It was when people turned to God for hope.
People think that people look to God to explain things we cannot understand from natural environment.
But really,
faith addresses something much deeper than that.
The human dilemma is not how do we deal with what’s out there.
Instead, the human dilemma is how do we deal with things in here
with things within us
with problems of human nature.
We are hungry for meaning and purpose.
We thought that technological progress would have brought us satisfaction.
But we were wrong.
We are shocked at how evil human beings—how humans killed Jesus.
We are shocked by the immorality of humans.
How can humans be so evil?
So many people want to leave faith,
leave believing in the Bible.
But there are things that only the Bible could give.
There are things that science cannot give,
but God can.
God can give meaning.
The resurrection can give hope.
Christians have been hopeful since the beginning.
In the beginning,
Christians faced the worst of urban pandemics.
One historian, Kyle Harper, noticed how Christianity kept thriving and growing in the bleakness of pandemics.
He said,
[For Christians], this life was always meant to be transitory, and just part of a larger story. What was important to the Christians was to orient one’s life towards the larger story, the cosmic story, the story of eternity.
They did live in this world, experience pain, and loved others. But the Christians of that time were called to see the story of this life as just one of the stories in which they lived. The hidden map was this larger picture.
Christians have something that goes beyond ordinary religious consolations.
You know, other religions speak of uncertain possibilities—of something better in the future,
if we do all the right things.
But Christian hope is so much different.
The biblical Greek word
elpida
which is the word we translate to hope,
does not mean wishful thinking.
No, it means profound certainty.
Christians see that even the most gruesome situations can work together for good.
God is guiding history at every turn.
And he is guiding history to a specific endpoint.
Not to some immaterial afterlife,
but to the resurrection of our bodies,
where our bodies are made new,
and the heavens and earth are remade.
And Christians have this certain hope because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ,
Christianity can offer hope to a world that has lost hope.
We need to believe that the resurrection of Jesus really happened.
It’s not a mere symbol.
It’s always been difficult to believe,
even in Jesus’ days.
No one in the ancient and modern world believed that the resurrection of the dead could be possible.
But yet, there is formidable evidence that supports that the resurrection actually happened.
We must understand not only that the resurrection happened, but also, what the resurrection means to us.
We must know the power of the resurrection.
The resurrection wasn’t just like a super cool magic trick that God did so we could be like,
“Woah God, that’s super cool.”
No, through the resurrection, God was invading death.
The movement from the cross to the resurrection saves us.
It remakes the lives of Christians from the inside out,
by the power of God’s spirit.
Through the cross and resurrection, God has brought the future new creation.
Through the cross and resurrection, God renews and heals the entire world.
He brings the future new creation into our present.
It is all because of the resurrection.
And it all depends on the resurrection.
If Jesus was raised from the dead, it changes everything:
how we relate to one another,
what our attitudes towards wealth and power should be,
how we work in our jobs and careers,
and how we understand and practice sexuality, race relations, and justice.
Through the resurrection, we can live as light.
As Christians, we believe that we have a story.
A story that brings light.
And it’s a story that is based on historical events.
Christianity does not start with,
“Here’s how you have to live.”
Instead, Christianity starts with,
“Here’s what Jesus did for you in history.”
Since December of last year,
we have been looking at what Jesus has done.
And we saw last week
that Jesus died on the cross.
And now we read that he was raised to life and appeared to many eyewitnesses.
But with the rise of skepticism and secularism, the belief that Jesus did actually rise seems like a myth, a tall tale, or a fairy tale.
Maybe we still celebrate Easter and Christmas, because the idea of renewal and joy is good.
I mean those are principles of Christmas and Easter, right?
But reducing Christianity to mere principles is not actually Christianity.
It’s an entire different religion altogether.
Christianity is not based on certain principles.
But as we have seen in Luke,
It’s based on what God has done through Jesus Christ.
Christianity preaches that God has acted in history through Jesus.
That Jesus did actually die.
That he actually resurrected.
And that in the age to come, we too will be resurrected
and every tear will be wiped.
Because Jesus actually died and resurrected, everything has changed.
However,
if Jesus didn’t resurrect,
then the world will eventually burn, as the philosophers and modern scientists agree.
If Jesus didn’t come back from the dead,
then no one will mourn for the world once everything burns up.
Nothing anyone does would matter in the end.
But the resurrection is a historical event.
John Updike, an American novelist said in a poem
Make no mistake: If He rose at all
It was as His body
If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh; ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty...
Christianity is a historical faith.
Let us not be ashamed of that.
And it is a reasonable faith.
You know,
one argument against the resurrection is that people just made it up.
It was a legend that was developed after the death of Jesus.
But the events that occurred after the death of Jesus just don’t make sense.
Jews, who only worshipped Yahweh, are now worshipping the Son of God...
It doesn’t make sense that it happened so soon after the death of Jesus.
And then we have Luke, and other authors,
who refer to eyewitnesses of the event.
During the time of Luke,
you could have gone to the eyewitnesses and ask them if Jesus really resurrected.
And hundreds of them would tell you that he did.
I’m not asking you to blindly believe in the resurrection--
to make a wild leap of faith in the dark.
No, look at the evidence,
and recognize that there is reason to believe that Jesus actually resurrected.
N. T. Wright, a graduate from Oxford, wrote a 700-page work on the resurrection, using historical sources.
I’ve heard that it’s one of the best books on the resurrection.
N. T. Wright explained that no one in the Greco-Roman culture and Judaism would have believed in an individual bodily resurrection.
This refutes the idea that the disciples of Jesus made up this story.
No one thought it was possible.
It would’ve been unimaginable for a Jew to think that somebody resurrected.
N. T. Wright wrote,
Any first-century historian should recognize… that whatever it was that the early Christians were expecting, wanting, hoping and praying for, this was not what they said, after Easter, had happened…
Something had happened, something which was not at all what they expected or hoped for, something around which they had to reconstruct their lives.
A lot of people confessed that they had seen Jesus in his body after the resurrection.
They were alive and accessible during the times of the early church.
They couldn’t have imagined making this up.
Something had to happen.
Something extraordinary must have happened,
something impossible-to-deny,
something powerful,
they needed evidence so that these first-century Jews could believe that Jesus actually resurrected.
Two hard-to-refute facts:
The tomb was empty.
Hundreds of people claimed to have seen the risen Christ.
It’s tough to refute that the tomb was empty and that hundreds of people claimed to have seen the risen Christ.
If you don’t accept the resurrection as a historical event,
you will have a hard time dealing with these two facts.
How could the tomb be empty?
And why would it be empty?
The Jews didn’t believe in an individual bodily resurrection.
No one did.
Yet, hundreds of people said that Jesus resurrected.
That he came back to life,
because he actually did.
N. T Wright said,
The early Christians did not invent the empty tomb and the meetings or sightings of the risen Jesus… Nobody was expecting this kind of thing; no kind of conversion experience would have invented it, no matter how guilty (or forgiven) they felt, no matter how many hours they pored over the scriptures. To suggest otherwise is to stop doing history and enter into a fantasy world of our own.
This resurrection is just strange.
I mean,
I get if they made up a story about a dazzling heavenly figure,
like a ghost.
Or if they said something like a zombie.
But as we read in Luke,
Jesus rose as a human being among human beings.
In Luke 24:36-43,
the disciples touched his body,
and Jesus ate a fish.
He is not a ghost or a dazzling apparition, like an orb.
He was human.
And he still is.
No one could have conceived this.
No one could have conceived that the Messiah would die and rise again.
Yet, the early Christians, most of them Jews, did believe just that.
N. T. Wright concluded,
[It is] impossible… to account for the early Christian belief in Jesus as Messiah without the resurrection.
I hope all of this helps you.
It helped me.
I am sometimes cynical and overly critical.
But it is rational to believe that Jesus rose.
People who had no business believing in the resurrection began to believe.
Does this prove beyond a shadow of rational doubt that the resurrection of Jesus actually happened?
Of course not.
But no event in past history can be proven without any rational doubt.
Still, we know that things in history happened because there is a great deal of historical evidence that it did happen.
The rational response to the rise of Christianity and the rise of the belief in the resurrection is due to the historical event that Jesus actually resurrected.
It is not a blind leap of faith.
It has historical evidence that reasonably leads thousands and millions and billions of people to follow Christ.
And it’s reasonable for you to conclude that the resurrection actually happened.
I say this to say that you can believe in the resurrection and be rational.
You could also reject it, but you would have problems explaining the rise of Christianity and the belief in the resurrection.
Knowing the power of the resurrection is not just an intellectual exercise.
It’s also seeing how it relates to our lives.
In the year of COVID-19,
the pandemic went against what modern people thought possible.
Death was at our doors in a time when we thought we were safe.
There have been a variety of responses to the threat.
Many, to prove that they are not sheep,
that they are fearless and free,
they refused to practice safety precautions of any kind.
Others have been super self-protective in that they don’t regard others.
They don’t understand other views.
There were fights between parents and teachers about when schools should reopen.
Each side accused the other side that they didn’t care.
Churches also fought with each other and went through a weird time of online gatherings.
What we all need in these times is faith and hope in the resurrection, a historical event.
One time, pastor Tim Keller had a sign that said,
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is intellectually credible and existentially satisfying.
And I hope that you could see that.
Well, one time, a student went up to him.
And said she doesn’t care whether the resurrection happened.
She doesn’t need a savior.
But let me tell you the implications of the resurrection.
It really did happen.
And it really does affect our hearts.
The resurrection, first of all, proves that Jesus is the Son of God.
What he said he would bring,
that he would bring the kingdom,
bring peace,
bring healing,
He will actually do that.
And the resurrection plays a large part in bringing that peace,
of bringing the kingdom.
The resurrection wasn’t just a sign of God’s miraculous power.
But it marked the beginning of the restoration of the natural order of the world, the world as God intended it to be.
When Jesus rose from the dead, he inaugurated the coming of God’s kingdom into the world to restore and heal all things.
We have seen the kingdom theme before.
The resurrection brought the future kingdom of God into the present.
As we have seen in the Old Testament,
God’s people hoped that a son of David would arise, filled with God’s Spirit.
This son would rule and bring justice for the poor and the oppressed.
And he would also unite the nations and rulers.
Maybe you remember this passage:
The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.
The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.
Remember,
the world was created by God,
by a good God.
He created the earth as a place of perfect harmony, under his rule.
There was shalom.
There was peace.
Everything was as it should be.
Everything was in harmony with one another.
No disharmony.
No disharmony between the body and the soul
between our feelings and our conscience.
No confusion.
No sin.
No death.
No pandemic.
Harmony between humans and animals.
And no broken relationships.
But then sin entered the world.
And there was chaos.—Tohu va bohu
There was resistance to God’s kingly authority.
No more harmony.
Unity between God and humanity broke.
Relationships broke.
And the creation began unraveling,
began decaying.
War and crime,
racism and poverty,
anger and despair,
famine and plague,
aging and death
are all the result of sin.
But yet, the Bible insists that one day,
God himself would return to the earth.
And he would bring the kingdom.
The kingdom means the renewal of the world.
The kingdom will heal the entire world and all the dimensions of human life.
From the king’s throne, new life and power flow.
No disease, decay, poverty, blemish, or pain can stand before it.
And Jesus is that king.
He was the Messiah,
the chosen one,
who would heal the world,
abolish all evil and suffering,
and resurrect all believers into the fullness of life.
You know,
during Jesus’s time, most people thought that the kingdom would come like
this.
Once Jesus comes, the new age would immediately arrive.
Jesus said that he had arrived as the new king.
Remember when he read from Isaiah in the synagogue,
he is the anointed one.
The reign of God has begun.
But yet at the same time,
Jesus tells us to pray to God,
that his kingdom would come.
So while people thought that the kingdom would come one way,—arrive right away.
Jesus taught that the kingdom would come another way.
It arrived, or it is arriving like
this.
According to Jesus,
the kingdom of God is already here.
But not in its fullness.
The kingdom is present partially but not fully.
We must expect substantial healing but not total healing in all areas of life.
Within the resurrection,
Jesus has brought the future kingdom to the present.
In the resurrection, we have the presence of the future.
We see the power of God demonstrated.
He demonstrated his power to destroy all suffering, evil, deformity, and death at the end of time.
And it is available now,
partially but substantially now.
When we unite with the risen Christ by faith,
that future power that is potent enough to remake the universe enters us.
We have the power that resurrected Jesus—that which brings life.
What that means is that we begin to live under God’s kingdom.
We are transferred from one kingdom to another.
We are freed from things that once controlled us.
We gain freedom from the fear of guilt and shame.
We are reminded that Jesus died on our behalf.
Tim Keller included a helpful illustration:
If you have committed a crime and the debt to society is two years in jail,
you go to jail or prison for two years.
And how would you know that the debt was fully paid?
When the doors that barred your way are open and you can walk out.
Well, the Bible says in Romans 6:23 that the wages of sin is death.
We have sinned and deserve death.
But Jesus took that penalty on the cross.
He took our place and paid the penalty in full.
And how do we know he actually paid the debt in full.
Just as we know that the jail sentence has been paid for when the prison doors open up,
we know that Jesus paid the debt in full because the door of death opened and he went out.
The empty tomb reminds us that Jesus has paid the debt of sin.
In the resurrection,
God has said that the payment of sin has been dealt with.
You never have to pay for these things again.
The door is open.
Jesus has paid the debt.
Look at the resurrection,
and recognize,
That’s God’s way of saying to me that I’ll never have to pay for any of these things again.
Through the resurrection, we know that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
And therefore,
we don’t have to fear death.
The resurrected body helps us see what will happen to those who are in Christ.
It guarantees and proves that the resurrection is also our future.
Death was at one point seen as an executioner,
but now death is a gardener who ushers us into a new age.
And death will one day be completely destroyed.
For those who believe in the resurrected Christ, death is defanged.
Death has lost its sting.
Not only are we free from death, but was are also free from other authorities.
As we saw last week,
The world looked at Jesus dying on the cross and saw only weakness and defeat.
But in reality, Jesus was paying our debt.
And then he had put to shame the world because while the world thought that Jesus was defeated,
he was actually winning.
And we know he was victorious because of his resurrection.
Jesus has defeated these powers and authorities,
whether they are comic or personal.
Before we came to Jesus,
we were under these false gods,
where we looked for security, identity, and meaning.
Humans have to live for something, and whatever it is that we live for to justify our existence,
that thing essentially controls us.
Rebecca Pippert, an international Christian speaker, said
Whatever controls us is really our god… The one who seeks power is controlled by power. The one who seeks acceptance is controlled by the people he or she wants to please. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the lord of our life.
Culturally, we have these false gods.
It could be military might and war,
material prosperity and comfort,
sexuality and romance,
technology and science, or state power.
Even ideologies could be gods.
Nationalism, capitalism, sexual liberation and socialism.
These things can be a power and authority in our lives.
And we may look for happiness in them.
For security,
for meaning.
But they enslave us.
The resurrection brings into our lives the power that we need to live in freedom from these powers.
The death and resurrection of Jesus free us from the the dominion of all other kingdoms.
We can experience freedom in Jesus’ kingdom.
Because of the future power of the resurrection,
we can be free from the shame, insecurity, and anxiety that leads us to serve the idols of money, sex, and power,
and from the fear of death and judgment day.
The resurrection also means that we do not follow the teachings of a dead leader.
But instead, we follow a living Lord, with whom we have a loving relationship.
Jesus is present with us.
And praying for us.
Interceding on our behalf.
...
You know,
everybody is serving something.
No one is free.
Who are you serving?
Are you serving the true King,
the king who forgives you and liberates you.
Or will you serve something that will never absolve you from your failures and will never fulfill your heart?
The king will return and take his throne.
We will see him face to face.
And everything sad will become untrue.
In God’s kingdom, the high will be brought low, and the low will be lifted up.
I hope that you decide to become free in Christ.
And once you become free,
you should be a freedom fighter who serves the king,
who brings the kingdom of heaven here on earth.
In the kingdom of heaven,
people lift up those at the margins.
We saw in our series of Luke that the Gentiles,
tax collectors, criminals,
all these people were exalted.
Jesus showed special concern for children.
He let people reach out to him,
he ate with people who he wasn’t supposed to eat with.
Jesus affirmed the identity of women.
And Jesus was deeply concerned for the poor.
We need to serve this Jesus by continuing to do his mission.
And we do this even in the face of suffering and death.
We do this in times of social unrest.
And we do this with hope,
with a type of hope that can help us overcome whatever comes our way,
because the resurrection reminds us that God can turn whatever comes our way for good.
We can do social good.
We can change relationships for good.
Our risen savior told us to befriend and serve people who could never open doors for you or invite you to their villas or bring you more clients and business.
We live differently
we don’t live transactionally because...
of the resurrection.
We do good,
not because people can repay us,
but because we are serving our risen king and because we will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.
Let’s show the world a taste of the future--
glimpses of God’s kingdom.
Let’s do this by treating everyone equally,
being radically generous,
by advocating for those without power,
by taking corporate and individual responsibility
The resurrection tells us that God has not given up on this world.
Christ cares about us.
This world matters.
I want to end with the words of N. T. Wright:
The message of the resurrection is that this world matters! That the injustices and pains of this present world must now be addressed with the news that healing, justice, and love have won....
Easter means that in a world where injustice, violence, and degradation are endemic, God is not prepared to tolerate such things—and that we will work and plan, with all the energy of God, to implement victory of Jesus over them all.
Here’s the Easter hope.
The resurrection happened,
Therefore, you won’t be in darkness forever.
This world will not be in darkness forever.
One chronically ill woman always answered whenever somebody asked about how she was doing,
People would say,
Oh you seem like you’re suffering so much; how do you feel?
And she would always say,
Nothing the resurrection won’t cure.
If you know the resurrection, it is impossible for you to be in utter darkness.