Christ has died …… Christ is risen ……… Christ will come again.
Do you believe it? {Extract a strong affirmation from the congregation.}
In that case, you are a step ahead of the original disciples in those early hours and days after the first Good Friday and Easter morning. They found it very hard to believe.
Christ had died – they had no trouble believing that. They’d seen it happen – even more clearly than Mel Gibson has! The crucifixion of Jesus had become the hot topic of conversation during that Passover weekend, when visitors from far and wide had come to Jerusalem for the festival. Not even David Beckham could have knocked Jesus off the front pages of the Jerusalem Times back then!
Yes, Christ had died – they could say that. Of course, the initial reaction of the disciples was to see the death of Jesus as the death of His mission. They had held high hopes that He would ‘redeem Israel’, that He was the long promised saviour who would free His people from oppression. But, well, now He had been lain in Joseph’s tomb and those hopes had gone.
How do we know that this is how they felt? They’ve admitted it! We read in Luke 24 about how 2 of the disciples spent the first Easter Sunday afternoon. They were walking to a village called Emmaus, 11 kilometres from Jerusalem. Along the way they met someone they did not recognise and Luke records their conversation.
When asked what they were talking about, Luke says, “they stood still, their faces downcast.” They were really gloomy. “We had hoped that Jesus was the one who was going to redeem Israel,” they said to the stranger, “but our priests handed Him over to the Romans for crucifixion and nothing happened to stop it. Our hopes died with Him.”
“Furthermore,” they continued, “to make matters worse, His body has gone missing from the tomb where He was placed. To be sure, some of our companions reckon they’ve seen angels who told them He was alive – but they were only women, so what would they know.”
I’m loosely paraphrasing, of course, but this is the gist of what they were saying. Even though the evidence was already beginning to mount that Christ had risen, they didn’t believe it – to the point that they didn’t recognise that the person to whom they were saying these things was in fact Jesus.
It’s tempting for us, isn’t it, to shake our heads and think, “what dodos those guys were! Not recognising Jesus – they must have been blind.” If we thought that, we’d be in good company. It’s what Jesus thought. He rebukes them for being “foolish and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.” The word for “foolish” in the original Greek is related to the source of our word “nous”, as in using your nous to figure something out. They weren’t doing this, showing a theological stupidity that Jesus says was unworthy of them. They should have known better.
So, yes, it is tempting to scoff at those 2 disciples for their lack of nous.
However, I’d caution against being too hasty to give in to that temptation. For one thing, the passage indicates that “they were kept” from recognising Him, that God was not yet ready for them to realise that it was Jesus. Only later were their eyes opened, but first they had a lesson to learn.
For another, if the truth be known, I have to identify with them, rather than judge them. I acknowledge that I, too, need God to open my eyes to the truth, as He did for them later that evening. I know, for instance, how slow I was to believe in Christ when I was young, and even in the 29 years since becoming a Christian I know how slow I’ve been to understand things God’s been trying to teach me. Like those early disciples I should know differently, I ought to grasp the resurrection power of God in my life, but the reality is that like them I too am slow to believe all that the Bible tells me.
I suspect that most of us are, too, if we are honest with ourselves.
Christ is risen! For the first disciples this was a slowly made, though joyous, new discovery. But because they have shared with us the story of their discovery – even including the embarrassing details such as not recognising Jesus – we have a great deal of teaching in the Bible about the reality and meaning of Christ’s resurrection.
It seems to me that there are 3 key themes in the many passages of the New Testament that refer to the resurrection – themes that are present in Luke 24 as well.
First, there is the historical reality of the resurrection:
- it really did happen!
Second, there is the prophetic reality of the resurrection:
- it happened to fulfil God’s plan, as predicted in the Old Testament and by Jesus Himself during His earthly life.
And third, there is the evangelistic reality of the resurrection:
- because it happened, we can be sure that Jesus is Lord and Saviour, that He is the King of Kings and that we too can look forward to being raised unto eternal life through Him.
I’m going to talk briefly about each of these 3 themes.
Historical Reality of the Resurrection
Luke was an historian. It mattered to him that the Christian faith was based in sure knowledge of events that actually happened, as reported by people who were witnesses. This is true of all that he wrote about the life of Jesus in his gospel and about the early church in his other book, The Acts of the Apostles. You only have to look at the opening verses of his gospel to see that what I am saying is true of Luke – theologian and historian.
And so it is with his account of the resurrection. He relays the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus because it actually happened. The fact that it is the story of two “fools” who didn’t recognise Jesus when they saw Him surely adds credibility to the account. If I were making something up about something like this, I don’t think I’d include such an embarrassing version of the experience of the eyewitnesses!
Similarly with Luke’s story of when Jesus appeared to the disciples later that first Easter Sunday evening. They were startled, they were frightened, they didn’t believe what they saw, at first. OK, it would be startling if you were in a room and suddenly someone appeared without coming through the door! But Jesus confirmed that He wasn’t a ghost, that He had a physical body, by eating some fish. It really was Him – in a new body, but a real body. The whole account reads, not like a made up story designed to impress us, but simply as an accurate account of what happened.
Christ is risen – it really happened. It is an established fact of history.
The Prophetic Reality of the Resurrection
In Luke 24 we twice read Jesus saying to the disciples, “why are you so surprised? This is what the Bible said was going to happen.”
Both to the two on the road and to all the disciples gathered, Jesus gives a Bible study that I would love to have heard. He goes through all of the Old Testament and shows them how the suffering, death and resurrection of the Christ, the promised Saviour, was predicted; it was all part of God’s plan.
Some of you have heard my sermons in recent years on passages like Isaiah 7-9 and the sacrificial system in Leviticus, where I’ve talked about how those parts of the Old Testament teach us about Christ. There are many, many more passages of course – as it says here in Luke, Jesus included references from all three sections: the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. He would have included Psalm 16, which we read today, as well as Psalm 22 – from which comes His words on the cross, “My God, why have your forsaken me?”, but which ends up resoundingly positive.
Just to pick one more – He might have included a reference to Joseph. The youngest son of Jacob was sold into slavery by his treacherous brothers – he “died” in a sense – but was protected by God - “raised again” if you like. Eventually those brothers bowed down before Joseph, who says that what they intended for evil, God had intended for good.
This is the way God does things! He turns seeming disaster into victory, so that His plans come to fruition. It is all through the Bible, and is fulfilled in Christ’s death and resurrection. Jesus knew that, which is why all through the latter part of His ministry on earth He kept telling His followers, “I’m going to die and then rise again – it will happen.”
Christ is risen – it really happened because God planned it to happen, it’s His way of bringing salvation to His people.
The Evangelistic Reality of the Resurrection
Which brings me to the third and final theme, the evangelistic implications of the resurrection. It is not just an historical event, as important as it is to grasp that fact. It is not merely an intellectual curiosity that the death and resurrection of Jesus were foretold long before they happened. No, it has on-going significance for us.
Jesus is alive! Think of it. Death did not hold Him; He has overcome it and lives even now. And because He lives, we too can have eternal life. His resurrection, His victory over sin and death, have paved the way for us to share in that same victory. Because Jesus has been raised, we who trust in Him can look beyond our deaths and have the confident expectation of dwelling with God for ever. We too will be raised with Christ.
When the incarnate Son of God emerged from the tomb, He was still a man. He had a real body, as we discussed earlier. That means that as a man – the perfect man – He has gone before us into heaven. The first man has already gone to heaven! We who have faith in Him will follow in His footsteps.
As the apostle Peter was later to write:
“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 into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade – kept in heaven for you.” (1 Peter 1:3-4)
This is GOOD NEWS. That is what the term ‘evangelistic’ means – it refers to good news. It is good news for us to hear, good news for us to believe, and good news for us to live out and proclaim with our lips and in our lives.
Luke 24 brings this out as well. Jesus said to the disciples that because of His death and resurrection:
“Repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in His name to all nations. When you are clothed with power from above, you will be my witnesses.”
Christ is risen – this is life changing news, if we believe it. This is good news to tell to all nations.
Conclusion
I don’t know where each of you stand in relation to this good news. For all who do believe it I praise God. My message to you is this: let us encourage each other to really believe it. If Christ is the risen Lord, then our lives cannot any longer be tied down to the things of this world. As Paul said to the Colossians, “since you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” Put to death in your life things like immorality, greed, malice, selfishness, etc replacing them instead with compassion, forgiveness and love.
The great thing is that in this struggle we have the power of God to help us. The same power that raised Christ from death is available to us through God’s Spirit to change us from what we have been to what God intends us to be. Living for Christ is not meant to be a burden, but a blessing – the blessing of friendship with the living God. That’s why Luke records Jesus as raising His arms to bless the disciples just before He went back to heaven – the priestly blessing of grace and peace. (I preached about this a few months ago – refer my sermon on Numbers 6:22.)
Some of you here today/tonight may not have accepted this good news yet. Can I encourage you to do so? Jesus died and rose again so that you can be born anew and have eternal life. His resurrection proves that He is the Lord of all things. It proves that He has overcome all of our spiritual enemies – the guilt, the loneliness, the hurt, the fears that come from the fact that we are all by nature rebels against God, destined to die cut off from Him. He has overcome sin and death, and has gone before us into the very presence of God to prepare a place there for all His people.
You, too, can be one of His people. It’s a gift, a free gift that God offers to you. Christ has done it all for us – we don’t have to pay for our rebellious ways, because Christ has paid for us; we don’t have to do anything to earn our way into God’s favour, because Christ has earned it for us. All we have to do is to say to Jesus, “thank you. I accept your gift.”
All we have to do is to believe, to believe that:
Christ has died …… Christ is risen ……. And that Christ will come again to take us into the full experience of all that we now hope for.
Lord God, open our eyes to see the full reality of the resurrection of Christ. Enable us to embrace with all our hearts the truth that He is Lord, He is Lord, He is risen from the dead and He is Lord. Let every one of our knees bow and our tongues confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Amen.
