Easter Sermon for MHBC (17 April 2022). You can watch on our website or on Facebook or YouTube. Live at 11:00am on Sundays.
“We who must die demand a miracle.” That’s a line from W. H. Auden’s Christmas Oratorio. But it captures the human struggle. “We who must die demand a miracle.” Religions and philosophies have suggested answers since the beginning of human history.
We do everything we can to forget about death. One of the first visits I ever made as a pastor was to a terminal man. I was surprised by his unwillingness to consider the inevitable.
The Christian answer to the problem of death is Easter. The answer is the resurrection of Christ. This is the miracle that changes everything.
Here is the core claim of Christianity: I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended to the dead. The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead.
The Christian claim—what we call the gospel, which is an announcement—is that God became human and was crucified. But death did not hold Him. Indeed, it could not hold Him. Why? Because this was no mere man who went into the grave. Though He was fully man, He was fully God. A mortal blow was struck in the grave. The enemies of sin, Satan, and death are disarmed by the resurrection of Christ Jesus.
This Holy Season, we’ve been in the Gospel of John. John’s Gospel is all about faith. That’s a bit of a squishy word today. We are all familiar with it, but faith in the Bible refers to confidence in God’s action—trust that God will do what God promises to do. Even more precisely, Christian faith is confidence that God has acted in Christ.
We see this in John 20:31: These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
In John’s telling of the resurrection, we see Mary Magdalene arriving at Jesus’s tomb early on Sunday morning. She finds the stone removed. This creates despair. She tells Peter and John. They run to the tomb. When they look in, they see nothing but burial clothes. They don’t know how to handle this evidence, but John does tell us one of the disciples believed.
Mary stays outside the tomb, weeping in despair. Then a man, whom she mistakes for the gardener, asks her why she’s weeping. She wants to know where Jesus’s body is. The gardener says her name and her eyes are opened. And she recognizes Jesus—not dead but alive. And she becomes the first person to proclaim the resurrection.
Jesus appears to more disciples later, but one of them wasn’t there, one named Thomas. Look at v. 25: So the other disciples told [Thomas], “We have seen the Lord.” But [Thomas] said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”
Thomas gets his chance on the next Sunday. Look at vv. 26–28:
Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.”Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”
Thomas’s confession is the high point of John’s Gospel—everything is culminating in Thomas’s words: “My Lord and my God.” John’s Gospel opens with these famous words: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Thomas has grasped the core belief that Jesus is both Lord and God. Jesus rules over the universe. Jesus is no mere man. Jesus is not just a great teacher. Jesus is God incarnate and His resurrection proves it. And by including the word my, Thomas has moved from knowledge to faith. He has put in His confidence in Jesus.
The earliest Christian interpreters saw Thomas as an example for all of us. Here we see Thomas not coming to faith easily, not accepting things blindly. But being met with the evidence of the risen Christ, he confesses my Lord and my God. As one commentator puts it, “Evidence invites verdicts.”[1]
The gospel announcement, that God has acted in the death and resurrection of Christ, invites verdicts from each of us. How will you respond to this news?
We see the blessing for us if we will respond to Jesus. Look at the next verse (29): Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” You and I have the witness of the apostles. We see here in these sacred words that Christ is risen. But it may not always be easy. We still must struggle and muddle through this world. Christ offers a blessing to those who will believe on the basis of this testimony. Let me put it this way. Easter does not let us maintain neutrality. It forces us to decide what we will do with the claim that Christ is alive.
When I was a kid, I recall going to a couple of theatrical productions of Jesus’s death and resurrection. Now, by far the most memorable moment of those productions for me was the fireworks they set off when Jesus came out of the tomb. Those plays only told the story of the events—a lot like a history lesson. I’m not sure anyone explained why those fireworks were so important. I’m not sure anyone ever explained why the resurrection was so critical.
So, let me say it clearly. If the resurrection of Christ did not happen, the entirety of Christianity is a sham. And because the Christian faith hinges on the resurrection, we must talk about the significance of the resurrection.
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is addressing a church that has been shaken by some doubts. They’ve been led astray from the core of the Christian faith. They have begun doubting that there’s any hope for a resurrection. Now, to be clear, Christians do not believe we all float off to some disembodied life in the sky forever. We believe that when Christ returns, the body will be raised. And this body will be a resurrected body like Christ’s, not bound by the same limitations we know today. So it’s the idea of the new resurrected body that the Corinthians are doubting.
Paul says it bluntly from the outset: If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain (1 Cor 15:14). If Christ is not alive, all we have is some sort of spiritual teacher who was tortured and killed. Paul highlights the consequences: If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins (v. 17). If Christ is not alive, faith is nothing more than positive thinking. And if Christ is not alive, you’re left to struggle for yourself about what is right and wrong, what it might mean to be a good person, and, ultimately, how we might have right standing before a holy God, which means we still have this problem of sin.
We can’t spend a lot of time talking about the problem of sin this morning, but I’ll say something brief. Scripture teaches that the problem lies here inside of us. And it’s such a powerful force that we can’t break it’s hold. It’s driven by a rebellion against God—a refusal to worship God as God. We see this illustrated in our first parents, Adam and Eve, who being made in the image of God, still desired the knowledge from the tree that would give them independence from God. Remember the serpent’s enticing words? “You will not die. You will be like gods.”
So if Christ is not alive, we are stuck in that mess. Why? Because the resurrection of Jesus proves that He has conquered sin—that sin has no claim on Him; that He is perfectly righteous and holy, which means that He is, in the confession of Thomas, both “Lord and God.”
Paul lays out the significance of the resurrection. We heard this in our second reading. I’ll repeat the high points. Start in v. 22: For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
Here is the significance. If Christ is alive, we, who belong to Him, will be raised. How do we belong to Him? By confessing with Thomas: “my Lord and my God”; by doing what John’s Gospel says: by faith; by believing upon Him; by confidence in God’s action in Christ; by believing that Christ is God incarnate, and He defeated the grave. In this way, we are confessing with Thomas that Jesus is “our God.”
Why is faith so critical? Because the universe is deeply mysterious. There are powers and authorities in unseen realms. There is more going on than meets the eye. Only the most adamant materialists would deny this. But through His death and resurrection, Christ has struck down those powers and authorities that hold the world in the grip of sin and death. When we see this, we come to grasp Thomas’s confession that Jesus is “our Lord.” He is King over all things. Faith is positioning ourself with Jesus as these powers and authorities line up against Him (see Ps 2). It is taking a side in a great cosmic battle.
As Philippians 2 puts it, Christ now is seated as the supreme ruler of the universe. Every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth will bow to Him. That is precisely what Easter is about. It is the day when we see that the King of Glory has been among us. It is the day when the unbreakable love of God was proved to every eye on heaven and earth. It is the day when the power of death was vanquished.
These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
[1] Bruner, The Gospel of John.