If you were here a fortnight ago, I let the cat out of the bag about the resurrection with the story of Lazarus. To be honest, I was a bit worried about what I would say today that I hadn’t said then! But in the end there’s plenty to say. And it doesn’t have to be new and ground-breaking stuff. It’s good to be reminded of the fundamentals of our story.
I must say, I love Passion Sunday, which we did last Sunday instead of Palm Sunday. Passion Sunday looks at all the events of Holy Week, from the triumphal entry on Palm Sunday to Jesus’ death on Good Friday. I find that if we do the Palm Sunday readings instead, and we don’t do the Passion Sunday readings, we tend to gloss over the death of Jesus too quickly, especially if we miss attending a Good Friday service. There’s so much to be pondered on about Jesus’ death, and it’s a shame that we don’t have a specific Sunday devoted to it in the Church Calendar.
But a very big thanks to Sarah for all her work to put on our Good Friday service this year. It was a great time to slow down and imagine and experience some of the grief and pain and loss of the events around Jesus’ death.
Death has a way of interrupting and disrupting our plans. Many a love story has been interrupted by death. Many people’s lives have ended before they could accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. Some tragically cut short in the prime of life, with so much potential ahead of them. Others late in life, when they still feel young on the inside but their bodies don’t agree anymore. There is a saying, ‘youth is wasted on the young’ – if only we could return to our youthful vigour knowing what we know now! How much we could accomplish! How much we would enjoy!
Death always hangs over us, as a fact of life. Some of us try not to think about it. Some of us obsess over it. I think that the reason death is so much of an affront to us is that most of us see that life can be beautiful. Life, at its purest, is something worth protecting, something worth celebrating, something worth experiencing. So when death pokes its head in, we identify it as an intruder – something unnatural and unwelcome.
Life is so unfair. Life does not offer us a level playing field. If you think about it, millions of people have lived their whole lives hardly knowing what it’s like to have a full belly, and millions more have died of starvation. Millions of people have lived in lower castes in India, or in slavery their whole lives. Accidents have cut countless lives short. Millions of people suffer debilitating diseases. Other people live and die in war zones. Even those who are ‘lucky’ enough to have been born into relative wealth don’t have an easy time of it. Some suffer through domestic abuse or feel the effects of generational trauma. Others feel the hopelessness of depression and anxiety. Life rarely lives up to its promise.
So where is the fairness? Where is God in the suffering? Can God really be called good and just and fair in the face of all the evil and injustice we experience in the world?
This, my friends, is why resurrection is so important for us. If death is not the end of life, then this life is only half the story. And that is exactly what Jesus’ resurrection means. As Paul explains in 1 Corinthians, Jesus was the first to be resurrected, out of a great harvest of all who have died (1 Cor 15:20, NLT).
Well before Jesus’ death, he wanted people to be absolutely sure that the afterlife was real. In Matthew 22 a group called the Sadducees came to Jesus to test and try to trick him with a question. It was a theoretical question about a woman who had had 7 husbands – whose husband would she be after the resurrection? The Sadducees asked it because they didn’t actually believe in the resurrection (that’s why they were sad, you see?). They thought this hypothetical question was unanswerable by someone who believed in the resurrection.
But Jesus had an answer. He said, “Your mistake is that you don’t know the Scriptures, and you don’t know the power of God. 30 For when the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage. In this respect they will be like the angels in heaven.” (Matt 22:29f, NLT)
Then he goes on to refute the underlying issue for the Sadducees, whether there even is a resurrection:
31 “as to whether there will be a resurrection of the dead—haven’t you ever read about this in the Scriptures? Long after Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had died, God said, 32 ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ So he is the God of the living, not the dead.” (22:31f)
Jesus is saying that the Bible talks about people who have died as still being alive in the presence of God.
As for other evidence that Jesus believed in the resurrection, we can look back to the story of Lazarus’ raising again. There he says to Martha, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying.’ (John 11:25, NLT).
Then, as he is dying on the cross, he says to the criminal beside him, ‘I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43, NLT). Paradise. This doesn’t sound like a blissful state of nothingness to me.
Why does this matter? Why does resurrection matter? As I mentioned earlier, not everyone has a great life. There is struggle. There is tragedy. In fact, Paul says in Corinthians again, ‘if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world’!
I’m not trying to minimize the beauty of life. There are glimpses of the beauty of life that are accessible to us even in dark circumstances.
And I’m not minimizing the hope and help that the good news of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit gives us in our day to day lives. There are many, many stories of people who find joy in hardship through their relationship with Jesus. Many stories of oppressed people holding onto hope because of their trust in God. God does help us in the trials of our lives.
But our hope extends beyond the help we receive in this life. Jesus has promised that he is renewing all things (rev 21:5).
We can also see a glimpse of this future in the letter to the Romans: ‘But with eager hope, 21 the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. 22 For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23 And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. 24 We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it. 25 But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.) (Rom 8:20-25)
And so we come back to today. The day when the first human came back to life and received a new body. Because of Jesus’ resurrection we can be sure that there is more to life than what we are experiencing right now. Because of Jesus’ resurrection we know that the best is yet to come. Because of Jesus’ resurrection we can know that God has the power to make all things right in the end.
Even death cannot thwart Jesus’ plan to restore the world. Jesus’ death couldn’t stop God’s rescue plan. Our deaths can’t stop God either. Death does not have the final say anymore. It may be an interruption, but it’s not a permanent one. We can and will be raised. As we often say in funeral services, ‘while death is the end of mortal life, it marks a new beginning in our relationship with God.’
Resurrection means that no matter what happens to us here in this life, we can look forward to everything being made right, made new, redeemed. If we truly believe in life after death, the unfairness of life can be addressed.
So that’s what I wanted to leave you with today. Jesus’ resurrection gives us a glimpse of the life to come. It turns the full stop of death into a dash – a ‘to be continued.’ And that is the hope we hold onto. A hope that extends throughout our lives, but also extends past our death.
