Rev. James Tino
New Life Lutheran Church
Miramar, FL
April 2007
John 20:1-18
Easter Sunrise
Look for the Miracle!
Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father, and from our resurrected Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! Amen.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ;
(explain “Type A” and “Type B” personalities)
I think we can see a little of God’s sense of humor in the fact that He often puts Type A and Type B personalities together in marriage. This is often the cause of humorous and frustrating “encounters” – humorous for others to hear about, that is! (give an example from your experience)
The basic difference between the two personality types is that Type A’s do not do well when things are not as they should be – when life gets messed up. That difference holds true for little things – schedule changes, change of plans, etc. But, when life gets messed up in a big way, both A and B personality types have a hard time. Regardless of your personality type, all of us can get disoriented, depressed, and confused when the things that we counted on suddenly change. When change happens, we tend to keep on looking for what is no longer there. In our text for today, God is telling us that in the midst of change, look for the miracle!
Our text begins early in the morning on a Sunday, just like we are experiencing today. We read in vs. 1, "Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb…”
Mary knew what she would find when she went to the tomb. The Scriptures inform us that she was among those followers of Jesus who saw Him crucified, and then followed when He was taken to the tomb. Mary saw His body placed inside the cave, and she saw the stone rolled in front of the entrance to the tomb. She knew what she would find when she go to the place where Jesus was buried. there was no doubt in her mind.
But when she got there, she “saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance”! Wait a minute! This isn’t what she had expected! The stone was not supposed to be rolled away! Jesus was supposed to be in the tomb, with the stone in front of the entrance. In an instant, her world was turned upside down.
How many people have experienced a situation that turns their world upside down? I would say that sooner or later, most people have at least one experience that challenges people’s deeply held beliefs about who they are and about what is important in life. People begin their adult lives with an idea of what the “good life” looks like. They work hard, get married, purchase a home, have a family, and generally try to match their reality with the mental concept of what the good life looks like.
But many times, something happens along the way. Maybe one or the other loses a job. Maybe tragedy strikes, and a child dies or is handicapped. Maybe the couple finds that they cannot get along, and gets a divorce. Suddenly, things are no longer as they should be. The stone is rolled away – things are out of place. And we can easily find ourselves disoriented and confused, wondering if we can be certain of anything any more. Beliefs about ourselves, about what is important, and about how life is are suddenly called into question. We find ourselves, like Mary, wandering around in the garden.
When that happens, one thing that we can be sure of is that God is close at hand. God loves to roll away the stone and shake things up, especially when He sees that we are on the wrong track. Mary arrived at the gravesite, mentally convinced that Jesus Christ was dead and in the grave. And when she was faced with the undeniable evidence of a moved stone and an empty tomb, she came to the only logical conclusion – someone has stolen the body away!
As we look at Mary and the disciples on that first Easter morning, it seems a little unusual to us that they would have such a hard time arriving to the divine conclusion of God’s plan of salvation – the resurrection of Jesus from the grave. Instead of looking for the body, Mary should have been looking for the miracle!
I think that we often react in the same way. When things really get messed up in life, we should start looking for the miracle! When life makes an unexpected turn, look for the miracle! When our beliefs are being challenged, look for the miracle! When the stone is rolled away, look for the miracle! When life is turned upside down, look for the miracle!
Mary looked for the body, and she didn’t find it, so she ran and told Peter and John that the body had been taken from the grave. (READ vs. 2-5)
Peter and John took off at a dead run. I wonder what they thought they were going to do when they got there. I find it interesting that John, the author of this Gospel account, is not beyond mentioning that he beat Peter to the tomb – he was the faster runner.
But when John got there, he did not go inside the tomb. He just looked inside, and saw the linen cloths lying there.
John did not enter the tomb for a reason. He was Jewish – as was Peter and the other disciples – and according to Jewish law, graves are unclean places. In fact, even touching a corpse would make a person unclean. There were all sorts of laws and taboos against getting close to a dead body and against defiling a gravesite. As a Jew, John was not comfortable with the idea of entering the tomb, so he just looked in, the same way that Mary did.
Peter arrived a little later. On the way out to the tomb, he certainly must have been reflecting on the information that he had so far. Certainly he now expected to see the stone rolled away, but maybe Mary had been mistaken about the body being missing. And if it was missing, then he was probably already making a mental list of who could have taken it and where they would have put it and the reasons for taking it.
That’s what we do when things suddenly get messed up. We start to figure out reasons and explanations for why things are not going as we thought they should be going. We look to science for some answers, or to the doctors, or to the psychologist, or to Dr. Ruth or Dr. Phil. We blame the economy, we blame the politicians, we blame the liberals, we blame the conservatives, we blame our neighbors, we blame our parents, we blame our spouse, we blame ourselves. We figure out the answer according to the scientific method. We try to get things back under control.
But as John had observed, there were the linen burial cloths inside the tomb. The presence of the burial cloths totally dismantled all of their well-constructed explanations for the open tomb and the missing body. If someone had stolen the body, they certainly would not unwrap the body first, and leave behind the burial cloths! The cadaver would remain wrapped with the proper embalming spices to keep the smell down, and it would have to be transported wrapped in the shroud. Peter and John’s minds must have been reeling as they realized that the “logical” explanations would not work!
What happens when we realize that our well-thought-out explanations do not work? What do we do when we realize that this is not under our control any more? The answers to life’s situations are not so easy to come by. Science can leave you short. Psychologists can only go so far. At some point, people begin to say, “things are not the way that I thought they were. I need to start looking somewhere else for answers.”
Peter had reached the point where logic wasn’t working for him anymore. And so Peter did the unthinkable – he entered the tomb. He went way outside of his comfort zone; he broke with tradition and with Jewish law, and he entered the tomb to see for himself.
(READ vs. 6-8)
And John, embolded by Peter’s actions, also entered the tomb to see for himself.
There’s the first real miracle of this resurrection account. Peter and John were moved by God to step outside of their boundaries, to go outside of their comfort zones, to do things that they never would have imagined that they would be doing. They stepped into the grave.
I believe that their experience is very similar to the experience that non-Christian people have when they first attend a church. For a non-believer in Jesus to attend a church, they need to step way outside of their comfort zone. Maybe something happened to them recently in life that called into question all that they had previously believed about God and about themselves. Maybe they are being faced with a situation that is beyond their own experience. Maybe all of a sudden, they have found that their lives have been turned upside down. Whatever the situation, it has to be something really big that causes people to step outside of their usual boundaries.
And this applies not only to non-christians or to people who are seeking God for the first time. It also applies to those who consider themselves to be Christians. Because as we know, being a Christian does not exempt us from having our world rocked and our lives turned upside down. And when it happens, we can also find ourselves more willing to step outside of our own comfort zones. We suddenly are looking in places where we have not looked before.
Maybe we find ourselves longing for more time for prayer;
or enjoying and seeking out times of Bible study;
or suddenly we are not so afraid to speak to our friends or neighbors about our faith.
The time that we never had to serve God in the church suddenly becomes available.
The things that we once considered to be so important suddenly seem to be lees important.
Our priories get re-organized, our outlook on life shifts, and we find ourselves becoming not just Christians, but disciples of Jesus Christ!
That’s what happens when God rocks our world. We are moved to go places where we would never have gone before!
It is a wonderful image that Peter and John stepped into Jesus’ grave. That’s where Christian discipleship really begins – in the grave. As we come to Christ in faith, we die to ourselves and are buried with Him in baptism. Then just as He was raised from the dead, we are raised again to newness of life! We emerge from the tomb as different people – changed, transformed, looking for the miracle rather than looking for the body!
Their hearts must have been burning as they ran back to tell the other disciples about what they had seen, but Mary stayed behind, weeping in the garden.
(READ vs. 10 – 16a)
What was wrong with Mary? She sees the empty tomb; she gets a visit with the angels; and she even talks to Jesus without recognizing Him. Where was her head?
The problem with Mary is that she already had the answer figured out. She knew that someone had taken away the body of Jesus. Her preconceived notions filtered all of the information that her mind received and made it fit into her idea of what was happening. She was looking for a body. She was not expecting a miracle. She was not looking for the Lord.
It wasn’t until the Lord said her name, “Mary”, that her eyes were opened and she saw the truth of the Lord’s resurrection, and believed.
I don’t know the details of all of the problems that you are facing in your lives.
I don’t know what stone has been rolled away for you, how things have been changed, or in what direction your life is turning.
But I do know this -–if you are looking for the body, you are going to have a harder time seeing the Lord Jesus!
God has a plan! He’s got it all worked out! Our own logic and thinking and planning can take us only so far, and then it’s time to start looking for the miracle!
The empty tomb was the unexpected miracle of Easter.
Our risen Lord is the unexpected miracle of Christianity.
God’s forgiveness of all of our doubts and fears and control issues and sins is the unexpected miracle of His grace.
Just as we were looking the other way, God called out our name. “Mary”. He is there all the time, right beside us, and we didn’t even recognize him. He is there in love and forgiveness. He is not dead. He is risen!
So, stop looking for the body!
Stop hoping that scientists will come up with an explanation for the way life is!
Stop hoping that more things, or more time, or more work will make your life the way you thought it should be!
Stop looking for the body, and start looking for Jesus!
Look for the Miracle!
Look to the One who is risen from the grave!
Look to the One who calls you by name!
Look to the One who offers you forgiveness!
Look to the One who knew you even before you were born!
Look to One who has the power to defeat the enemy; to break the bonds of death, to roll away stones!
Look to the resurrected Lord Jesus!
He is the Miracle of Easter!
And now may the Easter miracle of our resurrected Lord be yours, as He calls you by name and leads you through the grave unto everlasting life! Amen.
