Easter Day Sermon, Witnesses To The Resurrection

Luke 24:1-12

Introduction
Around this time every year it seems like the media publicises a so-called
discovery that ‘disproves’ the Christian faith. Last year it was the National
Geographic nonsense about the Gospel
of Judas. This year the Discovery
Channel claims that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and that their
tomb – complete with suggestions they may have had a son called Judah – has
been found in Jerusalem. If this were true, we would be practising a fraud in
celebrating the Resurrection today.

However, the claim is nonsense, for many reasons. The names
‘Jesus’, ‘Joseph’ (the tomb refers to ‘Jesus son of Joseph’), ‘Mary’ and
‘Judah’ were all common in the first century. In
addition, Jesus was not generally referred to as ‘son of Joseph’. The
inscription for Jesus is in Aramaic but for Mary it’s in Greek: curious for a
married couple. The alleged tomb is ornamented, giving the lie to any
suggestion it was secret, and it probably means it belonged to a priestly
family. The executive producer of this TV ‘documentary’ (if we can even grace
it with that word) was James
Cameron, more famous for the film Titanic, and his theory
deserves the same fate as the Titanic itself.

No, we can continue in humble but confident faith that
Christ is risen. But what did it mean for the first disciples and what does it
mean for us? God wants to say many things to us about the meaning of the
resurrection, but for this morning let’s confine ourselves to Luke’s witnesses
at the empty tomb.

1. Evidence
Suppose you are a charged with an offence. You know you are in the wrong
but you enter a plea of ‘not guilty’. You are determined to secure an acquittal.
What would you do? You hire the best defence barrister you can afford and you
seek expert witnesses whose testimony the court will respect.

That, however, is nothing like what Luke and the Gospel
writers do in writing about the Resurrection. If they wanted to defend a
fraudulent event, why did they picture women as witnesses? A woman’s evidence
was inadmissible. Yet here are the first witnesses arriving at the empty tomb,
and they are female. In its way, it’s a silent testimony to the honesty and
integrity of the account. This is not a made-up tale. Inadmissible witnesses
bring the first evidence.

Later, Paul was to say that witnessing the Resurrection was a
qualification for apostleship – which poses a problem for those who limit
church leadership to men. Again, apparently inadmissible witnesses encounter
the Resurrection.

The evidence of these inadmissible female witnesses is a
prime way in which the Resurrection turns all our human values upside down. God
has made a habit of choosing unlikely witnesses to give testimony to his risen
Son. I once had someone in a church tell me how many talented and wealthy
people there were in his congregation, but the only thing that impressed me
about what he said was the fact that these gifted people were down to earth and
ordinary in their attitudes. It’s not the famous and it’s not the celebrities
whom God generally chooses to bring the testimony of the Resurrection to the
world, it’s average and obscure people. Nobodies in the sight of the world are
God’s choice as witnesses. Nobodies who can say to fellow nobodies that Jesus
is alive; nobodies who can live before their neighbours in the power of the
Resurrection.

So what does this mean for us? Two things occur to me:

The first is that this is good news for us. If the female
witnesses to the Resurrection lived in a society with warped values, where a
Jewish man prayed every morning, ‘Blessèd art thou, King of the universe, that
I was not born a slave, or a heathen, or a woman’, then so do we. Our society
values fame, wealth, celebrity, good looks and other vapid categories. As well
as youth tribes where you’re not ‘in’ unless you wear the right brand of
trainers there are adult tribes where you’ve not made it unless you’ve bought a
certain make of car or a house in a particular neighbourhood. The Resurrection
puts the lie to all this shallow living. The risen Christ did not first seek
out those who had ‘made it’: he appeared to nobodies, to people without status.
Like (most of) us.

The second is that the nobodies were the witnesses. Ours is
the privilege of sharing in the risen Christ’s mission. It is not primarily for
the famous or the gifted but for the regular, everyday Christian who will never
make the pages of the tabloids or celebrity rags, and who will never be big
fish in the small pond of the Church. The honour of telling the world that the
Lord is risen falls not in the first instance to a Billy Graham, an Archbishop
of Canterbury or a Pope: that privilege comes to obscure Christians whose fame
is not on earth but is intact in heaven.

2. Expectation
There was once a man who was convinced he was dead. He told his wife he was
dead, his friends he was dead and his work colleagues he was dead.

Unsurprisingly, his family and friends became rather worried
about him. They clubbed together so he could see a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist showed the man medical textbooks that
established one simple fact: dead men don’t bleed.

Eventually the man gave in: ‘All right, you’ve convinced me
– dead men don’t bleed.’

At which point the psychiatrist jabbed the man’s arm with a
lancet. As he watched blood spurt out he said with horror, ‘Good Lord, dead men
do bleed after all!’

Sometimes our expectations, our prior beliefs, blind us to
the truth. And that is what happened at first with the women: they are
perplexed by the absence of the body from the tomb (verse 4) and it takes the
two dazzling strangers to remind them that Jesus had foretold both his death
and his resurrection (verses 5-7). The women, as good first century Jews,
believed that God would raise the righteous from the dead at the end of
history. They had no expectation of any resurrection happening in the middle of
history, and so they had filtered out Jesus’ prophecies of his death and
resurrection. But in raising Jesus from the dead God busts human expectations.

He busts the expectation of the atheist. Committed to a view
that miracles don’t happen it’s disconcerting to find that while there isn’t
proof for the resurrection there is strong evidence. I shared some at the
Easter breakfast last year. People object that Jesus didn’t really die; he just
swooned on the Cross and came round in the cool of the tomb. However, a Roman
centurion had to ensure that the prisoners given a capital sentence died, or
his own life was on the line. Besides, after the torture before the execution
it’s hard to believe someone would survive the cruelty of crucifixion.

Others say the disciples went to the wrong tomb, but someone
could have easily gone to the right tomb and produced the body. The early
church had enemies within weeks of the resurrection, and it would have just
taken one opponent in Jerusalem to go to the right tomb and produce the body
and there would have been no Christian church.

Soon after the Resurrection God broke through the
well-defended expectations of a learned and passionate Pharisee named Saul,
turning him into Paul, the greatest missionary and apologist for Jesus Christ.

In the twentieth century C
S Lewis, self-styled ‘most reluctant convert in Christendom’, was
‘surprised by joy’, as he put it. Frank Morison, who set out to disprove the
Resurrection, found himself writing instead a book called ‘Who
Moved The Stone?’ with an opening chapter entitled ‘The book that refused
to be written.’

But God also breaks open the expectations of seasoned
believers. He bust the expectations of a loyal Church of England clergyman who
thought it were a sin to preach anywhere other than in a church building and
led him to preach outside, in the fields. I refer, of course, to John Wesley.

When in the nineteenth century Methodism became increasingly
respectable and middle-class God broke those cultural expectations in
resurrection power by raising up William Booth and the Salvation Army.

When black Christians were at best on the margins of the
church in 1906 God started the Pentecostal movement through them, and not
through established channels. It’s resurrection stuff.

The late David Watson
used to tell a story about how when you entered a certain part of the Australian
outback where proper roads ended, only to be replaced by crude ruts, you would
find a sign saying, ‘Choose your rut carefully: you’ll be in it for the next
forty miles.’ He commented that many Christians had chosen their ruts
carefully, only to be in them for the next forty years.

And our ruts become comfortable. But they are not God’s
highway. Moreover, the Easter faith is one where God knocks us out of our
familiar ruts that may be reassuring but are only leading to decay. Instead, he
does something unfamiliar and unsettling, to the point that we wonder at first
whether it can truly be God. Nevertheless, it is God, and he is breaking us out
of our ruts to give us new life again. Where might he be doing it today?

One thing is for sure, it won’t look like what we’re used
to. Someone once said the definition of insanity was to continue doing the same
things but expecting a different result. The mode of church we have inherited
seems to be about a building plus a minister plus a stipend. But where green
shoots of resurrection are growing in the church today, the new ways break out
of these old expectations. The new church is often community plus faith plus
action. These are more important than the building, the minister and paying a
stipend![1]

3. Experience
The evidence comes from unlikely witnesses. Its content shatters existing
expectations. What are you going to do?

If your name is Peter, you run to the tomb (verse 12). It wasn’t
enough for Peter to hear second-hand testimony. It wasn’t enough for him to
tick the box beside some doctrinal statement that said, ‘I believe in the
Resurrection.’ Peter had to know for himself. It had to be personal. So he
rushes to the tomb, stoops, looks in and sees the linen cloths all by
themselves. A grave robber would have kept the stolen body in the grave clothes.[2]

Peter has to experience it for himself – and so do we. It’s
possible even in a lifetime of church affiliation to applaud the testimony of
others, to assent to the right doctrines and still miss the experience of the
risen Christ. We can read our Bibles and accumulate all sorts of religious
information whilst it remains a matter of the intellect but not of the
experience. It’s like reading about marriage without being married.

Or it’s equally possible to have a genuine faith but our
prayer life has reduced to a shopping list or

more like a series of e-mails or instant messages than
hanging out together.[3]

The early days when the relationship with the risen Christ
seemed as vivid as Technicolor has changed to monochrome and routine.

So how might we ‘run to the tomb’ like Peter and experience
the Resurrection for ourselves? One of my favourite spiritual authors, David
Benner, suggests an approach to Bible reading that to my mind prevents us from
gulping down the Bible like a snack on the run. He recommends us taking time to
quiet ourselves in the presence of God, and then to ask the Holy Spirit to make
the word come alive for us. We slowly read a Gospel passage several times – and
Benner says it’s best to do this aloud. Then we daydream on the situation in
the story. We watch like a spectator. But we particularly pay attention to
Jesus rather than the other characters. Rather than trying to analyse the story
we concentrate on Jesus and our reactions to him.[4]
It’s biblical meditation, not Bible study.

It’s similar to the approach developed by Ignatius of
Loyola. He also said Christians need to quiet themselves in the presence of God
and then read a Bible passage repeatedly, slowly. During one reading of the passage,
it’s good to imagine what our five senses would tell us if we were there. During
other readings, we imagine ourselves as one of the people in the story. Therefore,
it’s not an exercise restricted to intellectuals; it’s open to all who are
willing to use their imaginations in the holy pursuit of Christ. They are ways
in which we stoop and look in, and find not a dead body but the living Christ.

Conclusion
The risen Christ meets and challenges us in different ways. You may have
thought yourself an unlikely witness, but the only qualification is to have met
the risen Christ. And to meet him means he will break through our existing
expectations, for the Resurrection is beyond our limited human thinking and
systems. Yet it counts for nothing until and unless we meet the risen Christ
ourselves. Is that our testimony? If so we’ve come full circle – and we are
Christ’s witnesses.

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