The past couple of Sundays we’ve been talking together about Jesus rising from the dead, and today it’s time to ask, “So what?” Two weeks ago we went with Mary, Peter and John to Jesus’s tomb to see the stone that had been removed from the entrance and the linen cloth left behind in two distinct neat piles. Last week we were with Mary Magdalene looking inside the tomb, where she saw two angels where Jesus’s body had been, and when she then turned around and wonderfully met Jesus himself, alive.
But as well as asking whether Jesus rose, we need to ask why it matters. So as Christians, why should we care so much that Jesus really did rise from the dead — with a body like yours and mine that breathes, that eats, that is as alive as we are, in fact more so? Why does it matter that that is true, and that it isn’t just a legendary story seeking to convey some spiritual truths? And if you’re not yet a Christian, if you’re still investigating the Christian faith, why should you spend precious time, energy and thoughts trying to figure out what happened? What actually hangs on this? Does it really matter?
Now we started to answer that last week. Last week we said that because Jesus rose we can see that his sacrifice for sin was successful. We also said that because Jesus rose he now welcomes all who follow him into God’s family.
Well, in today’s reading the first Easter day still continues. You’ll see from the opening verse of the reading we are still on that first day of the week — we’re still on day one after Jesus rose from the dead. The doors are locked and Jesus comes and stands among them. The one who stands among them is the same Jesus who died. We’re told that he showed them his hands and his side. There’s only ever been one crucified man who’s come back to life, and that is Jesus. But if theoretically there had been another man who had been crucified and come back to life, he too would have been able to show the disciples the holes in either his hands or his wrists where he’d been attached to the cross. But only Jesus would be able to demonstrate also the rather unusual hole in his side, where a Roman spear pierced him to make sure that he really was dead after so few hours on the cross.
This is the same Jesus who died. And yet the one who stands before them is somehow transformed. He’s just walked straight through a locked door — and that’s not because he’s a ghost. In other stories he eats food, he has a real physical hard body, and yet can just pass straight through a locked door, just as presumably a few hours before he passed straight through the grave clothes that bound him, unlike Lazarus, who came out from the grave still wearing his grave clothes. The Jesus who died is the Jesus who is alive — the same person, and yet wonderfully transformed.
And because the Jesus who died is alive, four wonderful things follow according to these verses.
We have peace
Number one: we have peace. We have peace. Jesus greets them with the words “Peace be with you.” Now, nothing unusual about that — let’s not read too much into it too quickly, because that was just a common greeting of the day. In fact it still is: in the Middle East, if you want to greet somebody in Arabic you say “peace” — nothing’s changed. Except that Jesus repeats it. Verse 21: again Jesus said, “Peace be with you.” Now this is getting a little unusual. You tend to say hello when you see somebody and you exchange greetings, but you don’t then say again “hello” — and if you were writing the account you wouldn’t necessarily record the fact that he said hello twice as though that was significant. This is becoming a pattern, and as we’ll see next week in verse 26, a week later he appears to them again and John takes the trouble to record a third time that Jesus says “Peace be with you.” In fact John quite likes recording things that get said three times after the resurrection. This is enough of a pattern developing, enough of a habit, that it may have got the disciples thinking — and if they were thinking, they would have remembered that twice on the night before Jesus died he promised them peace.
At John 14:27 he says: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” Or John 16:33: “I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, I have overcome the world.”
Peace is a rich concept in the Bible. It’s so much more than the absence of warfare; it can’t be reduced to a lovely calm inner feeling. It’s the idea that all is well, that everything is in harmony, everything is prosperous, everything is functioning as it should be, that relationships are in good shape. So it includes the idea that our broken relationship with God has been healed — we have peace with God. Our broken relationships with each other — well, the seeds have been sown for them to be healed. And so actually the absence of warfare is part of peace, it’s just not reduced to that. And even our relationship with the world is healed, because peace includes the idea that the world is no longer broken and no longer causes us pain and difficulty. This idea of peace is full and rich and includes every dimension of life. This is most definitely not, as Jesus says, as the world gives — it is altogether more wonderful than that, it’s on a different plane.
Just as Jesus cried out from the cross “It is finished” to articulate what he was achieving as he breathed his final breath and died, so now he’s risen he cries out “Peace be with you” to articulate what it is that he has achieved by rising from the dead. This is what Jesus’s resurrection means — it means we have peace. And what a wonderful thing that is.
We share Jesus’ mission
The second thing that Jesus’s resurrection means for us is that we share Jesus’s mission. We share Jesus’s mission. Verse 21: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” So God the Father sent Jesus to this world on a mission. His mission is accomplished, he’s going back home, but the disciples will carry on his work after he’s gone. As God the Father sent him, so now he sends them.
This is the same thing that Jesus said — or actually didn’t say to them, but said about them — in John 17, where he is praying to his Father. In verse 18 he says: “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.”
Now in the first place this is talking about Jesus’s first disciples, the eleven who were left after Judas left them — after all, the word “apostle” literally means “sent one,” so Jesus sends them into the world, they are apostles, literally, it’s what their title means. But whereas when we get to John 21 we will see that the eleven are commissioned in some ways that are unique to them, there’s nothing about what Jesus says here that is specifically limited to them. So it’s better, I think, to see John as intending all of his readers to see themselves as included in what is said here.
So in what way does Jesus send us? What does he want us to do for him in the world? Well, not to die for the sins of the world — that was why Jesus was sent into the world, but that job has been done and finished. It never needs to be added to, repeated, or topped up. That is not our job. Not to do miracles — Jesus fed the hungry, he healed the sick, he raised the dead, but if you’ve been with me at all when I’ve taught John in the past, you will know that in John’s Gospel the miracles are given a very specific title: they are called “signs,” because they point to who Jesus quite uniquely is. They point to the peace and new life that he came into this world definitively to bring. And it’s not our job to repeat that either — we don’t need signs that credit us as God’s Christ and Messiah and Son of God in the same way that he did. So that’s not what we’re there to do either.
So what is it? Well, it’s what all of this other stuff points to and is all about. It’s what Jesus is talking about in the context here as well. You’ll see in verse 23 there’s mention of the forgiveness of people’s sins. It’s the idea that forgiveness and new life are now possible because Jesus has come. Peace is possible. Jesus sends us to tell other people that because Jesus died and rose, forgiveness and new life are possible for all who turn to him and follow him. He’s done the hard bit — he died for sin, our sin crushed him — and all we have to do is share the good news that it’s been done.
We are empowered by the Holy Spirit
We share Jesus’s mission. We have peace. We share Jesus’s mission. Third: we are empowered by the Holy Spirit. We are empowered by the Holy Spirit.
As I talk about sharing the good news of Jesus with others, you might be wondering how on earth you are to do that. You think to yourself, “I’m glad to be a Christian, but telling others — that’s a scary thought. What words would I use? This is — you might say — it’s all very well for you, it’s your job, you stand up there every week and tell people about Jesus, but me — it’s not my job.” Well, now you mention it, one option is of course to bring your friends to church. You should by now know that every week I try to make sure that there is a message here for people who are still investigating the claims of Jesus. This isn’t just relevant for people who are already fully signed-up committed Christians. If you bring your friends here on a Sunday, they will hear things that will help them to investigate Jesus for themselves.
But actually it’s not as hard as you think. You just need to do two things. You need to pray — ask God for courage, for opportunities, and for the right words to say. Pray, and practise. Go home, get a bit of paper, and write down, if you can, one short paragraph that sums up: what is it that Christians believe? What do you believe, and why? And why do you believe this — what does it mean for you? It’s a mixture of the objective and the subjective. It’s your story — why do you believe this stuff, why does it matter to you — but it’s also objective: why have you chosen to believe in and follow the Jesus of history? And if you can get that down into a paragraph, however roughly, it’s your personal version of why you do this. Then the next time you get the opportunity to share something with somebody else, you’ve already thought through a little bit how you might put this into your own words.
But for all I can try and tell you it’s not quite as hard as you think, the reassuring thing in this chapter of John is that the disciples were feeling just the way you feel. They too were scared at the thought of telling other people that they were Christians. Remember where they are — they’re behind locked doors for fear of the Jewish leaders. They are in hiding; they’re playing a game of hide and seek, only they don’t want to be found. They are hidden away in the dark. Remember when Jesus was arrested in the garden — they fled. Remember that before Jesus died, Peter said to him, “I will always stand by you, Jesus, I’ll lay down my life for you” — and when the crunch came, he denied three times that he’d ever heard of Jesus. And yet this motley crew spread the Christian message such that it’s taken over the world. What changed?
Well, the answer is that having commissioned them in verse 21 — “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” — he then symbolically breathed on them. With that he breathed on them; this was a symbolic action to show what was happening. And he then said the words: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And fifty days later, on the day of Pentecost, they did. And they were transformed into bold speakers who did indeed literally lay down their lives for the Lord Jesus.
And when you become a Christian, you receive that same Spirit — the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit comes and lives within you to transform and equip you. We are empowered by the Holy Spirit.
We have forgiveness to accept or to reject
We have peace. We share in Jesus’s mission. We’re empowered by the Holy Spirit. And fourth: we have forgiveness to accept or to reject. We have forgiveness to accept or to reject.
Verse 23: “If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” Such power he gives them — to forgive or to withhold God’s forgiveness. What does Jesus mean, and how did they use that power? It turns out you too have that same power. You have the power to be forgiven by God or not to be forgiven. You have the power to grant God’s forgiveness to others or to withhold it. But I’d better explain what I mean — or more exactly, what Jesus means.
The best way to see what he means is to look at a similar passage in Luke. Luke 24, verses 46 and 47. This is also just after Jesus rose from the dead — indeed, on this same day, possibly the same conversation. Jesus told the eleven disciples that “this is what is written in the Old Testament: the Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations.” Repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached. So the disciples will go out with a message. That message says: you need to repent, you need to turn around, stop running away from God, stop defying God, and live his way instead. And it’s repent for the forgiveness of sins — whoever responds to this message will have all of their sins, past, present and future — forgiven.
There’s a negative side to it though as well, about being not forgiven, and to see Jesus explaining that side of it we need to go to Mark’s Gospel. We’re going to go to Mark 16, verses 15 and 16. Now, just to explain: this comes from what’s called the long ending of Mark. Mark’s Gospel as a whole is extremely well attested — there are loads of manuscripts that all agree with each other, that tell us exactly what Mark wrote, and they go back to not very long at all after he wrote it. But there are a few verses — twelve verses — on the end of Mark’s Gospel that have caused an awful lot of debate as to where they fit into Mark, and indeed whether they are part of Mark. Let’s not get into that. These are part of those verses, but if you just treat this as illustrating what Jesus is saying in John, then you won’t go far wrong, and we don’t have to worry. Mark 16:15–16 records Jesus saying this to the eleven: “He said to them, ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.’”
Hopefully by now what Jesus means is clear. The disciples will go out with a message that says: if you repent and trust Jesus, you are forgiven. And that message — if they were able to combine that with the insight that a particular individual has repented and trusted Jesus — would enable the disciples to say, “You personally are forgiven.” But they don’t have access to people’s hearts to make that next step, so they don’t know who has repented and trusted Jesus. But they can preach that if you repent and trust Jesus you are forgiven, and they can also say: if you don’t repent and trust Jesus, you are not forgiven.
And I can say the same thing this morning. I can tell you with absolute certainty: if you repent and trust Jesus, if you turn to him and follow him, you are forgiven — for everything you’ve ever done in the past, and everything you ever do that is wrong in the future, he will forgive. And I can also tell you with absolute certainty: if you do not do that, you will not be forgiven. But as soon as I say that, I have declared that some people are unforgiven. Now I don’t know who, because I can’t see who is refusing to repent and trust Jesus — but there are people in that category, and people in that category really are unforgiven.
So you have the power to be forgiven or to remain unforgiven — you either respond to Jesus in trust and repentance, or you don’t. And you have the power to pronounce people forgiven or unforgiven, because you can take them a message that says: if you turn to Jesus, trust him, and repent from your sins, he forgives you.
There’s a point in the service when, after we’ve confessed our sin to God, I’ll lead a prayer that reassures us all of God’s promise that those who bring their sin to God are forgiven and can be sure of that. We call it in our service “assurance of forgiveness” — the technical label for it is “the absolution.” Now some people might think that what that prayer is doing is saying, even generously, that even if you reject Jesus he still forgives you. That’s not what that prayer is doing. That prayer is doing exactly what we’re saying here. It’s saying: if you truly turn to him, he forgives you.
Let me show you that by turning again to the 1662 service — this is where it’s clearest of all — and show you how that prayer runs:
“Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and live, and hath given power and commandment to his ministers to declare and pronounce to his people, being penitent, the absolution and remission of their sins: he pardoneth and absolveth all them that truly repent and unfeignedly believe his holy gospel.”
It’s exactly what Jesus is talking about here.
So Jesus is risen from the dead — the same Jesus who died on the cross — which means that forgiveness of sins is on offer for every one of us to accept or to reject. We will all meet Jesus one day as our judge. You will, and I will. And whether we meet him forgiven or unforgiven is now entirely in our court.
Conclusion
But for all of you taking him up on this, the fact that he’s risen means that he brings us true peace and the enabling of his Spirit as we take that good news about Jesus — the risen Jesus — to everyone that we know.