Early on the First Day

This morning we are to think about the resurrection of Jesus as we focus on our New Testament reading from John’s Gospel John 20.1-18. And after some words of introduction on John and the Resurrection, I have three headings: first, ITS TRUTH; secondly, ITS WIDER MEANING; thirdly, TWO PRATICAL LESSONS

By way of introduction let me just say this. The author of John’s Gospel doesn’t explicitly name himself. Rather he likes to call himself “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (see John 21.20,24). We know from simple deduction that that disciple was John, the son of Zebedee. But most importantly he claims to be an eyewitness of what he is writing about. He certainly claims to have witnessed the actual Crucifixion (John 19.35). And we can see from our passage for this morning that he claims to be an eyewitness to the Resurrection of Jesus as well. Look at verses 1-2

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!’”

Then we read – verses 3-5:

3…Peter and the other disciple [that is John] 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.

Our author claims to have been an eyewitness on that first Easter Day. And referring to what you read here in John 20, C.H.Dodd, a famous 20th century New Testament scholar, says this:

the story is told with dramatic realism of which this writer is master. It looks something as near first-hand evidence as we could hope to get.

But he then goes on to say:

If so, it becomes the sheet anchor of belief in a 'bodily resurrection'.

It is, indeed, very hard to deny the phenomena you read about in these verses. But that doesn’t stop people still asking the question: “can we really believe the truth of the Resurrection?” So our …

… first., heading is, ITS TRUTH

Let me begin with a warning and a reminder. The warning is this. The Pharisees in Jesus’ time were always asking for evidence but never open to conviction. Sadly there have been millions of successors to those early Pharisees. I trust no-one here is like that this morning.

And this is the reminder. The Jews in general in Jesus’ time were not naïve. They could distinguish fact from fiction. They did not believe the first thing they were told. They had courts of law where the goal was to discover who was speaking the truth. And they had a principle that is repeated many times in both the Old and New Testaments:

Every matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.

Interestingly with regard to the accounts of Jesus’ person and work including, of course, the Resurrection, we don’t have “two or three” Gospels as witnesses. We have four. Well, with that warning and reminder, back to our question: “can we really believe the truth of John’s Gospel regarding the resurrection of Jesus?”

The earliest attempt in the 1st century to deny the Resurrection was to say that the body of Jesus was stolen. We are told in Matthew 28.13 that the guard appointed to protect the tomb was bribed by the chief priests to say:

His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.

But the Christian movement gained momentum. And the early Christians were brutally opposed. They were beaten, imprisoned and executed for their faith in the risen Jesus. At that point no one could claim his body had been stolen or removed. The Christians wouldn’t die for a lie, had they stolen the body. Had their enemies removed the body, they could have produced Jesus’ remains to prove the Resurrection myth. Another attempt to deny the Resurrection came in the second century. One opponent of the Christian faith called Celsus denied not the significance of the empty tomb but of the appearances. He said that Mary Magdalene simply had a hallucination. But she had nothing of the kind. Certainly when Jesus appeared on one occasion to 500 together, they could not all have hallucinated. In the case of Mary, as we see in our passage, she didn’t see the gardener and then think she saw Jesus. It was quite the opposite. She was not expecting Jesus. She saw Jesus and was “thinking he was the gardener”, as we are told in verse 15.

Down the centuries there have been all sorts of attempts to explain away the hard reality of the empty tomb and the appearances, but without success. The appearances without the empty tomb could have been, with difficulty, dismissed as merely psychological phenomena. The empty tomb without the appearances could have been, with difficulty, dismissed as one of the great puzzles of history. But together the only satisfactory explanation is that Jesus rose from the dead into a new order of existence and with a transformed body. Similarly, the only satisfactory explanation of the early Christians meeting together on the first day of the week, Sunday, is an actual event on that first Easter Sunday, not a growing set of spiritual beliefs. And the only satisfactory explanation of the rise of Christianity to be the world’s largest religion is the real resurrection of Jesus. 50 days after the crucifixion, the disciples began their public proclamation of the good news. And their chief argument for their claims about Jesus was his rising from the dead. They said, “We are witnesses of this” – God having raised Jesus from the dead (Acts 3.15).

Well, so much for some of the evidence for the truth of the Resurrection.

Secondly, ITS WIDER MEANING

First, the Resurrection brings great hope to individual men and women. Verses 11, 13 and 15 make it clear how hopeless and miserable was Mary, now Jesus was dead. But when she discovers that Jesus is alive again in verses 16-18, she is totally changed and with a new hope. In Ephesians 2.12 Paul describes the pagan world as without hope because they are without the God of the Bible. So an atheist like the philosopher Bertrand Russell has to write (as you can read in the Coloured Supplement with your newsletter),

there is darkness without and when I die there is darkness within.

It was another philosopher Immanuel Kant, the German Enlightenment philosopher, who said there are three great questions a rational and reflective human being will ask. These are, one, “what can I know?”; two, “what ought I to do?”; and, three, “what may I hope?” But atheists simply have no real answer to that last question, nor do any of those not believing Jesus is alive.

Contrast that, however, with a believer – another German - Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a Christian leader who opposed Hitler and was imprisoned in World War II. He was executed exactly 65 years ago this coming Thursday in April 1945. But before being taken out to be hung, his fellow prisoners asked him to conduct a final service for them. He took as his text 1 Peter 1.3 which says:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

And as the guards were taking him out to die, he sent this last message to his friend the Bishop of Chichester: “This is the end – but for me the beginning of life.” The Bible says:

as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive (1 Cor 15.32).

Bonhoeffer knew that Christ not only had defeated sin and Satan on the Cross and there was now Resurrection power for this life. He also knew that on that first Easter Day Jesus had “destroyed death,” as the Bible says, “and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim 1.10). And Bonhoeffer died with that great hope.

So, first, for those individuals who trust in Christ there is new hope and that includes hope beyond death for Resurrection life. Secondly, there is hope for the material world.

The Bible also says that one day “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8.31). When Christ returns there will not only be spiritual transformation but material transformation. That is why it is so important to affirm the bodily resurrection. John understood the importance of “matter”. You can see that from his first epistle – (1 John 4.2-3). He there is warning against those who limit God to the spiritual world and even deny that Christ was truly human and had a physical body. You can see this conviction beginning here in John 20.6-9:

6Then Simon Peter, who was behind him [that is John], 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 [John] saw and believed. 9(They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)

John in this passage is implying that he came to believe the reality of a more than spiritual Resurrection by what he saw. He came to realise that Jesus had not come back to life with his old body, as had happened in the case of Lazarus. No! This was a true resurrection with a transformed body that was not subject to the conditions of space and time, as Jesus had been and we still are. What John saw that led to his belief was the grave clothes and how they lay. It seemed as though Jesus’ resurrection body had passed through “the strips of linen” wound round him. So no physical body remained. These “strips of linen” were now separated by the space where the neck had been from the special “burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head”. It was seeing this that seems to have had an affect on John. He came to believe that the tomb and the grave clothes were bodiless. And this was because of a transformation, not resuscitation, of Christ’s human body. As Archbishop William Temple wrote: “It is extraordinarily vivid, and such as no invention would devise, no freak imagination conjure up.”

So the Resurrection implies hope for the natural material order, as Romans 8.31 says. A distinguished Cambridge Professor of Physics and himself a clergyman, puts it like this: “If one believes that the tomb was empty as I do, certain consequences follow … [It] says to me is that matter has a destiny, a transformed and transmuted destiny no doubt, but a destiny nevertheless. The material creation is not a transient, even mistaken episode.”

The Resurrection, therefore, means hope for the individual in this life and after death. It also means hope for the created material order.

Thirdly, the Resurrection speaks of coming judgment. The Cross for Jesus, if I may put it this way, was judgment day brought forward. He there bore our sins, as the Bible says…

… in his body on the tree [the wooden Cross], so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness. (1 Peter 2.24).

The Resurrection, therefore, speaks of Christ’s sacrifice for sin being accepted, with the price having been paid. There is now freedom and a new beginning for all those who genuinely trust in him for forgiveness. And they prove that genuineness by living for righteousness with a Christian lifestyle, however imperfectly this side of heaven. So there need be no fear of God’s judgment in the future. Earlier in John’s Gospel you can read these words of Jesus:

28"Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his [the Son of God’s] voice 29and come out - those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned. (John 5.28-29).

Paul later had to teach about judgment and that the Resurrection means judgment to the sophisticated Athenians. Referring to their idolatry and ignorance of God, for all their famed wisdom, he said this (Acts 17.30-31):

30In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.

And Paul stopped his sermon at that point. As often happens when the gospel is preached there were three reactions. You read in Acts 17.32-34:

32When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject." 33At that, Paul left the Council. 34A few men became followers of Paul and believed.

As ever, there were those who sneered; those who wanted to hear more and those who started to believe. Of those three categories, which are you in this morning?

For those who have started to believe or want to hear more, do come to the Christianity Explored Taster session on April 29 – new groups will start after that. But for any who are “sneering”, let me be blunt. “Sneering” is a bit like back-packing in Afghanistan at the moment and hiring a local guide to get you into and around Helmand Province. You want to sight-see but you’ve ignored all the warnings on the Foreign Office web site. When you then find yourself mined, kidnapped or under fire from the Taliban, you can hardly blame the British Government. It will be like that, the Bible teaches, with God’s final judgment. No-one can then blame God for the consequences of now ignoring the good-news of the Resurrection and heaven, and also of ignoring the divine warnings, mostly from Jesus, regarding hell. So, thirdly, the Resurrection speaks of judgment.

Fourthly, it means salvation. Believing in the Resurrection whole heartedly and going public about your faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and God is the way to salvation. And that is a saving from the penalty of past sins and all our sins; a saving now in the present as you live a new life in the power of the Holy Spirit; and a saving in the future from God’s judgment and for a transformed life beyond death when Christ returns. Romans 10.9 is so clear. It says:

“if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

Who needs to start to believe like that this morning and then to tell others about your faith in Jesus as Lord?

So - the Resurrection means hope for the individual, hope for the created order, God’s judgment, but also God’s salvation in Jesus Christ.

Thirdly, and finally, TWO PRACTICAL LESSONS FOR TODAY

Two things stand out from our passage. First, it is noticeable how different all three disciples were. We know from the rest of the New Testament, and from here, how different temperamentally Peter and John were. John was more reflective and Peter was very active and impulsive. Here at the tomb John is cautious about going in. So verse 5 says at first he “did not go in”. But Peter, verse 6, “arrived and went [straight] into the tomb.” Mary again was quite different.

This is important to remember. It is not expected that Christians will all be clones of one another and all try to copy one personality type. Thank God he has made us all so different. The Bible says, “To each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it” (Eph 4.7). So where we have weaknesses others can help us put things right. Where we have strengths we can use them for God and for others. So, first, thank God that we are all so different and with different gifts.

Secondly, note that Mary’s fears were quite needless - verse 11:

“Mary stood outside the tomb crying.”

The angels, not unnaturally, asked about her crying and she answered (verse 13):

They have taken my Lord away … and I don't know where they have put him.

She was so wrong. All the time the risen Lord was right behind her. Her crying was needless. Who is like Mary this morning? So often believers are worried when they should be trusting. Because Jesus Christ is risen by his Spirit, he is always with us protecting us. And he can turn even our weaknesses and problems into strengths and opportunities. That, too, is a message of the Resurrection.

I must conclude. I do so by reminding you that Jesus’ Resurrection command was for us to make disciples. We are to tell others about him and the Resurrection and all it means. But he then added this wonderful promise, Matthew 28.30:

Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.