04-24-11 Easter

JOH 20:1 Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came early to the tomb, while it was still dark, and saw the stone already taken away from the tomb.

JOH 20:2 So she ran and came to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and said to them, "They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid Him."

JOH 20:3 So Peter and the other disciple went forth, and they were going to the tomb.

JOH 20:4 The two were running together; and the other disciple ran ahead faster than Peter and came to the tomb first;

JOH 20:5 and stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings lying there; but he did not go in.

JOH 20:6 And so Simon Peter also came, following him, and entered the tomb; and he saw the linen wrappings lying there,

JOH 20:7 and the face-cloth which had been on His head, not lying with the linen wrappings, but rolled up in a place by itself.

JOH 20:8 So the other disciple who had first come to the tomb then also entered, and he saw and believed.

What I have just read

is the account of Peter and John’s first personal contact

with the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

It ends with the words, “...and he saw and believed.”

Whatever happened in those few minutes inside that tomb

resulted in John and Peter believing the impossible -

believing that the Man they had seen three days earlier

beaten until his flesh was literally shredded,

and then nailed to a cross until He was dead,

and then finally run through with a sword,

just so that there could be no question whatsoever about His being dead,

that this Man had now returned to life.

So, what was it they saw,

I mean really saw

that resulted in that belief?

I know we have a tendency to do some strange things with the disciples of Jesus,

and in fact with all of the first century Christians.

We tend to believe

that they were somehow uniquely gifted in this whole faith thing,

that “believing” just sort of came more easily to them.

Maybe they were less skeptical,

less sophisticated,

more willing to just trust and believe.

Well, in truth, if anything

they were exactly the opposite.

Our world today

is far more addicted to blind religious faith

than were those men surrounding Christ.

We live in a world today

in which someone can claim they have seen the face of Jesus in a tortilla

and thousands will come

and bow down,

and seek to draw strength from the great wonder and work of God.

Those disciples in the first century

had been way too close to the Man, Jesus,

both in His life and in His death

for them ever to be sucked into some kind of fuzzy faith

or mystical superstition.

And yet there was something that happened

inside that tomb that morning

that forever sealed both John and Peter

in their acceptance of the impossible-

that a man who had been dead 3 days

had somehow conquered death.

We are going to look more closely

at what that was in just a minute,

but let me say first that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not just

a very significant event in the Christian message,

it IS the Christian message.

Christianity, true Christianity,

is not a system of religious duties

and moral instructions on how to live better.

It is not a call to strive harder

and do better to make the world a nicer place for us to live.

It is not simply a moral force for good,

urging its adherents to be better people.

Christianity is nothing more,

and nothing less than our personal,

individual submission to Jesus Christ Himself.

Not submission to His teachings.

Not submission to His values.

Not submission to His memory.

But submission to Him,

a submission in which we trust Him to do two things for us

that we could never do on our own.

First,

we trust Him to take our sins,

our own personal moral failures and offenses against God,

all those things that cause us shame,

and fear,

and guilt,

and we trust Christ to take our sins

and place them onto His account,

literally making them HIS sins,

so that, as He died on that cross,

He was dying in our place,

paying the price for our sins,

so that we can now stand absolutely pure,

and righteous,

and holy before God.

I love the simplicity and clarity with which Paul puts it in II Corinthians:

2CO 5:21 He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

And then, the second part of true Christianity

is trusting this same Jesus Christ

to literally live within us,

and to live His life out through us on a daily basis,

making changes within us

from the inside out,

changes that we could never ever have made on our own.

Again, Paul says it with perfect clarity:

GAL 2:20 "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me...”

If you have ever found yourself thinking,

“You know, there’s no way I could ever be good enough to be a Christian.”,

it simply means you have completely misunderstood what God is offering.

Of course you can’t be good enough.

The truth is, you’re lousy at best,

just like I’m lousy.

He never did and never will ask us to be good.

What He asks

is that we allow Jesus Christ

to recreate us from the inside out.

But my point in all of this is simply

that Christ’s resurrection from the dead

is THE single foundation block

of the entire Christian message.

If there is no Jesus Christ

who is victorious over the grave,

then there is no Christ to live in you,

no Christ to take your sins upon Himself,

and no hope whatsoever for the human race to ever find true peace with God.

But the good news is

He’s alive!

And from the very beginning,

from the world’s first introduction to His victory over death,

God carefully provided the kind of proofs of Christ’s resurrection

that made it impossible for those who were there

to have any doubts whatsoever.

Which brings me back to John and Peter

and what happened to them inside that tomb.

But for that morning to make sense to us,

and for their basis for belief to make sense to us,

we need to back up three days

to the events that took place the evening of the crucifixion

following Christ’s death.

So let’s join them there, at the foot of the cross that day.

The sun is low on the horizon.

The Roman guards still stand watch over the now dead bodies of the three men hanging on their crosses.

Most of the spectators have gone home,

wanting to be sure they tend to the necessary household duties

before the sun sets

and brings the beginning of the Passover Sabbath

and the prohibition from work that comes with it.

Jesus’ body has now hung on the cross, lifeless for some time.

About the only onlookers left

are those who’s lives also ended

when Jesus took His last breath on that cross.

With Him now dead

there is simply no place else to go,

and no reason to be there,

and nothing worth doing once they arrive.

And so the little band of Jesus’ followers

remain in agonized silence at the foot of their Master’s cross.

Then they hear a cart being rolled up from behind

and turn to see two men, Joseph and Nicodemus, approaching the foot of the cross.

They have both been faithful followers of Jesus,

both men are of some considerable wealth and influence in Jerusalem.

The two men

pull Jesus’ cross from the hole in which it has been sitting,

lay it on the ground,

and, with great care,

remove the nails from the now dead flesh of Jesus’ hands and feet.

The body is then placed on a piece of clean, white linen,

and then laid onto the cart.

No one says anything.

There is nothing to say.

Nothing will alter what is.

Nothing can.

Joseph and Nicodemus roll Jesus’ dead body away from the cross,

and the little procession falls in line behind.

They take the body to Joseph’s home,

carry it inside and lay it out on a table.

Both Peter and John are in the group

that files into the room to watch...and mourn.

First the body of Jesus is carefully washed.

Nothing can be done with the jagged wounds on his back,

or with the chunks of flesh and skin

that were ripped off in His brutal beating prior to the crucifixion.

But at least the dried blood and filth can be removed.

Then the wrapping process begins.

First a single wrapping of white linen

is placed around the entire body

from the feet up to the neck.

Then a thin layer of a fragrant embalming resin paste

made from a mixture of myrrh and aloes

is spread over the linen wrap.

A second wrap of linen is applied,

followed by a second layer of myrrh and aloes,

followed by another wrap of linen,

and more mixture,

until more than a hundred pounds of paste

is combined with repeated linen wrappings,

creating a firm paste and linen cocoon encasing the body of Jesus.

The head is then wrapped tightly

in a separate, long, unbroken length of linen.

It is the burial ritual reserved for only the very wealthy,

a burial preparation fit for a King.

It will, of course,

take days for the cocoon to dry completely,

but when the process is complete

the body is preserved forever inside the rigid cast.

Once the body is fully prepared

Joseph and Nicodemus move the massive white linen form back onto the cart

and the procession starts to move once again.

Joseph leads the way to what was to have been his own tomb,

a burial sight that only the wealthiest could have afforded,

a vault chiseled out of a solid rock wall

with a stone bench inside

providing what everyone assumes

will be the final resting place for Jesus.

The door of the sepulcher

is formed by a massive, round slab of stone,

expertly crafted to seal off the entrance once it is rolled into place.

(Now, without that knowledge

of the handling of Jesus’ body the evening of the crucifixion,

there is no way we can understand

what happened in the minds of Peter and John

when they stood in that same tomb three days later.)

OK, lets rejoin them again.

For the next several days

the followers of Jesus live in a dismal swirl

of pain, and fear, and remorse.

Then, the first day of the week,

now three days following Jesus’ death,

before the sun is fully risen

Peter wakes up to John’s hoarse whisper in his ear.

“Simon! Simon, wake up!

Mary’s here.

She just came back from the tomb

and the stone is rolled away from the door.

The guards are gone,

and she’s afraid someone has taken the Master’s body.”

Peter flops out of bed,

dresses quickly,

and he and John set off to investigate.

It is an incredible morning,

with the sun just beginning to stream over the still quiet city.

They walk on in silence for several minutes,

and at that point

their minds begin recalling some of Jesus’ prophetic words.

‟The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men; and they will kill Him, and He will be raised on the third day.”

‟Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn Him to death, and will hand Him over to the Gentiles to mock and scourge and crucify Him, and on the third day He will be raised up.”

‟...for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

The more they think, the faster they walk

until John turns to Peter with a big grin on his face and says,

‟Three days!”

It’s all they need to cause them both

to break into a dead run.

It isn’t a fair race, of course,

because, well...let’s just say

Peter is built more for strength than for speed.

John arrives at the door to the open grave

a full minute ahead of Peter.

But what he sees when he gets there

causes him to stop and slump once again into despair.

From where he stands outside the door

he can see the white outline of the linen cocoon

still lying intact

exactly where it had been placed on the stone bench three days earlier.

When Peter finally comes puffing and blowing up to John’s side though,

he doesn’t stop at the door.

He blasts right on past John

and into the darken tomb,

and what he finds there

alters both the course his own life

and in fact the course of the history of the human race forever.

The first thing he notices

is that Jesus’ head is missing.

The linen cocoon surrounding His body

is still stretched out on the stone,

but the cloth binding for His head

is now folded neatly, sitting by itself at the end of the bench.

And where His head should have been there is nothing...nothing at all.

Then Peter looks more closely at the cocoon.

There is something wrong with it as well.

The chest and stomach are sunken in several inches

as if some heavy weight has been pressed down on them, crushing the chest cavity.

When the truth of what he is seeing

finally surges into Peter’s conscious mind

he lets out a sort of gasping bellow

that draws John to his side.

There is no body inside the wrappings!

It isn’t just that the head is missing.

The entire body is missing,

having passed through the layers of binding,

leaving the linen wrappings untouched,

undisturbed,

in the form of a hollow shell.

With the body removed,

the still moist linen and paste cocoon

is now sunken in slightly under its own weight.

What Peter and John are seeing

can, of course, not be true.

And yet it is.

Peter kneels down and slips his arm

through the neck hole,

feeling the emptiness within,

just to confirm what he now already knows - Jesus is alive!

And that is why,

when John wrote his account of that first encounter with the resurrection of Christ

he said, “... he saw and believed.”

It was no great, blind leap of faith.

It was simply the first

of what Luke described as, “ACT 1:3 ... many convincing proofs, ...over a period of forty days ...”

The accounts we have

of the evidence confirming the resurrection of Christ

are preserved for us first of all, of course,

because it is historical fact.

But our Creator has preserved them for us

for a far more personal reason as well.

With each of us there will be times in our lives

when we, like John and Peter,

run in search of our God.

Especially if we have been in some way

brutalized,

or terrorized by the man-made religions

being marketed under the banner of “Christianity” in our world today,

we, too, may be afraid of what we will find.

And so, to all of us He says

what He said to Israel so long ago,

DEU 4:29 "But from there you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul.”

And what we will find

is not a dead religion,

not a list of rules,

not a system we need to fulfill in order to please God,

but what we will find

is Jesus Christ,

very real indeed,

and very much alive,

and very willing

to take us just as we are

and then reshape us from inside out

by revealing to us His love for us

and by living through us

the kind of life we could never have even begun to live for Him in our own strength.

Have you heard the good news?