Let me ask you a question: what do you make of the story of Jesus rising from the dead? This is the central reality of the Christian faith. It is the most important reality of the Christian faith. The Christian faith is grounded not in theories and ideas but in historical events that took place in real space and real time. You can put a date in the calendar; you can put GPS coordinates on the map where these things took place. And of all the events of history around which our faith revolves, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the central one.
There is no other religion in the world like the religion to follow the Lord Jesus. Every religion has feasts and festivals, but no other religion gets together to celebrate the day when the person they worship actually rose from his tomb and came back to life from the dead. No other religion has got that. No other religion can look to the day when the first followers of the person we worship got up that day in tears because they thought they had lost that person forever, and their tears were just turned on their head because they met alive the person they had buried two days previously. No other religion has that.
What we have here is extraordinary and unique, and it all revolves around the story of Jesus of Nazareth rising from the dead round about two thousand years ago. So if you're here this morning as somebody who is not yet a Christian, who is still investigating the Christian faith, let me say to you how welcome you are. You are always welcome here. We welcome people who are very much early in the stage of asking questions and trying to work out what to think.
But if that's you, let me say that of all the weeks that you would be welcome here, you've come on the right week. Because if Jesus really did rise from the dead, suddenly he becomes the one that you can't ignore. All the other questions that you might have been asking about Jesus and what it would mean to follow him— they just kind of melt away. Because if we have somebody who was dead and is now alive, well, that just changes everything.
But equally, if it did not happen, everything else that we say, everything else that we do, is utterly irrelevant. So forget it. See, it all hinges on this. So you've come any week, but this is a really good week to come if you're trying to get answers for your questions.
If, as many of us, though, you're here as a Christian, a follower of the Lord Jesus, let me just say I think we so easily take the resurrection for granted. It becomes a story that we yawn through. It's in the creed, isn't it? "On the third day he rose again." Did you stop and think, or did those words just trip off the tongue as if Jesus rising from the dead happens as easily as the flakes fall out of the box into the bowl in the morning?
This is the most wonderful thing in the whole of human history. This is an opportunity for us to praise our God, to look with fresh eyes, to wonder, to be amazed, to worship the Lord Jesus who was dead but now is alive forevermore.
So if you're here as a Christian, this is the right week to be here, because if you're anything like me, at least once a year you need bringing back to the story of the resurrection, to be reminded what it's all about, and to have your life and your heart lit up once again.
So what we're going to do is just— we're going to look at the story again. We're going to look at Luke's account of it. There are things that happened that Luke doesn't tell us, questions you might have that Luke does not answer. We're going to stick to what Luke has to say because he's got plenty for us, and we're going to allow the story to sink in once again.
And as we come to look at these words, let me ask you another question, which is this: who is missing from the reading? Who would you expect to meet in this story, but he's not actually there anywhere?
The answer is Jesus.
How can you have an account of the story of Jesus rising from the dead in which you don't actually meet Jesus? It'll be a little bit like watching on the television some documentary in which they seek to re-enact famous scenes from the life of William Shakespeare, and they've cast lots of characters who were contemporaries of Shakespeare's, but the one person you don't meet at any point in this television drama is anybody playing the role of Shakespeare. It would be bizarre.
And yet here is the story of Jesus rising from the dead— an account of the first Easter— in which we do not actually meet Jesus alive. Now, there is a really good reason why the account is told this way. It's really simple. Two things:
Number one, they did not meet Jesus alive. Not yet. But they will. Come back next week for the rest of Luke 24. They will. But not yet.
And number two, we won't meet Jesus alive. Not yet. Not today. Unless he comes back today. I mean, the day will come when Jesus will return from heaven and come to this earth. He will stand before each one of us, bodily, in person, as a living human being. And yes, you will. You will see him alive. I promise you that. It may not be— it might be— today, because he hasn't told us when it's going to be. But unless it happens today, you won't see him alive today either.
So this is a realistic story. We have to decide what to make of the events of the first Easter, and we have to decide what to make of them without meeting Jesus alive to make our mind up. And so Luke records people who are trying to make sense of what happened, and they had to make sense of what happened without meeting Jesus alive.
You see how Luke has helped us by giving a story in which Jesus is physically and bodily absent? It means that these people are in the same boat that we are. We have to go off the words of other people. Now, that might bother you, but actually we do this all the time, do we not?
Imagine that there's one more week of the school holidays left. You've booked a holiday to one of the Spanish islands and you're heading off tomorrow. Little flight for a week. I can dream, can't I? I'm going to Scarborough for my holidays next week.
But there you head off to Leeds Bradford to get your flight. You want to know if your flight is departing, and departing on time. How do you know that that's going to happen? Well, what you don't actually do— probably you're too busy packing— so you don't follow the flight radar website to watch the plane coming in (that's the one you're going to get on), and you're there on the tarmac with the binoculars watching it land and taxi to make sure, you're checking they're putting the fuel in. You're making— no. What do you do? You look on the website. Yep, flight on time. Head to the airport. Gate 65. Off you go. No, it's the other end of the airport. There you go.
You come through and you just rely on all the people whose job it is to make sure it's happening. They tell you that your flight's on time. You just take that word for it. You don't check everything out for yourself.
We are used to taking the word of it from other people who are in a position to know and to tell us. And that's what happened here. The characters in this story had to work out what to make of the events that were unfolding, not because they saw Jesus alive, but because they had words spoken to them that told them what happened. And they had to process those words.
So we are going to hear the words of three different people. And the characters in the story heard those words, and they had to respond. And so do we.
The men in shining clothes
So, set of words number one, spoken by two men in shining clothes. Verse five: "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen."
So the women got up that morning looking for the body of Jesus. They got up intending to complete the burial rites that the arrival of the Jewish Sabbath had cut short the day that Jesus died. So they go looking for the body of Jesus. But they don't find him. They don't find his body. They don't find it because it's not there. And it's not there because he's not dead. He's not here; he has risen.
Do not look for Jesus in a graveyard, say the angels. It's not the right place to look. Many people today look for Jesus among the dead.
So you know that kids' game Guess Who— little faces up, down, trying to work— so here's the thing. You have to try and work out— person playing the game has a particular person in mind, and the other person has to try and guess who you're talking about. You ask the kind of questions that chop the human race in half to try and work out which per— try and narrow the field. So: are they English or from another country? Okay, they're not English— down go all the possibilities of the English people. Are they male or female? Okay. Are they a child or an adult? Okay. Are they alive or dead?
Okay, there was a joke going around on some social media things a while ago that said: "Who would you most like to have dinner with (brackets, alive or dead, it's up to you)?" And the joke reply is to name your favourite unpopular politician of the day and then put "comma, dead."
Okay, you could divide the human race into alive and dead. Which category do you think that Jesus is in? Don't look for him in the history books. If you go to the library, I'm sure you will find a book entitled something like Great Figures of the Past, and in there, there will be a chapter on Jesus of Nazareth. Don't go and look for him there.
Don't go and look for him in Jerusalem. By the way, there are two possible sites for where Jesus was buried in the city of Jerusalem. There's the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre, on which several ornate churches have been built. They share the site. Or just to the northwest of the city, outside the old walls, there is a beautiful spot called the Garden Tomb.
I have no idea which is the right one. There are strong arguments in favour of both. The people who run the Garden Tomb are lovely Christian people, and they see their mission as to help the huge number of tourists who stream through that site to realise that this may or may not be the spot where Jesus was buried— but regardless of that, this is not where you will find him. They see their mission to present the evidence of the resurrection to the tourists who come through. It's a lovely talk, send them away to look for Jesus, who is alive and risen from the dead. So if you're looking to discover Jesus of Nazareth, and if you're looking anywhere other than for a living person — somebody who wishes to know you, and you to know him, someone who wants you to trust him and to follow him — then you are looking in the wrong place, and you won't find him, because that is who he is, and that is what he is.
Jesus
The men in shining clothes — the second voice that we hear in this reading is the voice of Jesus, because the men in shining clothes remind the women of some words that Jesus spoke previously. So we may not meet Jesus alive in this story, but his voice is still one of the voices that we do meet. It comes in verse 7:
"Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 'The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified, and on the third day be raised again.'"
And then they remembered his words. Doesn't mean they remember they understood at the time what he meant when he said that — in fact, we know they didn't. Doesn't mean even now they fully understood what those words meant. But they do remember that he had said that — "Yes, I've got it, he said it, I remember."
We can remember too, actually. By the way — Luke chapter 9:21–22:
Jesus warned them not to tell anyone what Peter had just said — that Jesus is God's Messiah. And he said:
"The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life."
Luke chapter 9:44–45:
"Listen carefully to what I'm about to tell you: the Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men." But they don't understand what this meant. It was hidden from them, so they did not grasp it, and they were afraid to ask him about it.
Or Luke 18:31–33:
Jesus took the twelve aside and said to them:
"We are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written by the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled. He will be handed over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him and spit on him; they will flog him and kill him. On the third day he will rise again."
The crowds of Jesus' day loved his teaching. They swarmed in their thousands to hear him teach. Remember the feeding of the 5,000 — which, by the way, was the number of men. Women and children extra, so probably more like fifteen to twenty thousand that day were fed with bread and fish.
Why were they all gathered that day? To hear Jesus teach. And they were so spellbound, they missed the fact that it was teatime, about to get dark — which is why he had to feed them. Crowds, 20,000 strong, streaming to hear his teaching.
And many people today love Jesus' teaching. Perhaps you love Jesus' teaching. Many people I meet say, "I love the teaching of Jesus. I'm particularly fond of the Sermon on the Mount." Well, why not? Who does not like things like, "Ask and it shall be given to you"? Who does not like things like, "Do to others what you would have them do to you"? Beautiful sayings.
There are other bits in the Sermon on the Mount that people conveniently forget are there. They're a little bit selective in their memory of Jesus' teaching.
And so it is at this point as well. You see, if people love the teaching of Jesus — well, if the crowds had loved the teaching of Jesus and been paying attention, then they would have expected the tomb to be empty that day. And if you love Jesus' teaching, you would expect the tomb to be empty. If your friends love Jesus' teaching, they would expect that Jesus rose from the dead — because that's what he taught.
Which means, if you have a Jesus whose teaching you love, but that Jesus is not risen and alive, you don't actually trust his teaching. You're being, instead, rather selective with his teaching.
There's voice number two: the voice of Jesus.
The men in shining clothes. Jesus.
The women
Finally, we have the women.
The women were told — told all these things to the eleven and to all the others. So they told what they had seen. They had seen that the stone was rolled back. They had seen that there was no body of Jesus. And they had seen two men in shining clothes.
Then they tell what they heard. They heard the words of those two shining men, who reminded them of the words of Jesus.
And what did the eleven and the others make of all of this? Verse 11: "They did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense."
Stuff and nonsense. Load of old tosh. Most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. You're having a — as we say in the south of England — laugh, and so on.
Now I can think of at least two reasons why these men should have taken the women more seriously, and another one why we should take them seriously.
Number — reason number one is that the women concerned were women that they knew. These were not faceless individuals. This was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James. These were people they knew and spent all day, every day with. It's like your best friend tells you this.
Reason number two — there were at least five of them. So Mary, Joanna, Mary, and the "others" — plural — at least five. So this was not just one slightly crazy individual concocting a slightly silly tale. This was a group of five or more known and trusted women, who were dear friends of these people. You believe them any other time.
And the third reason why we should believe it is that Luke put it in his book.
Now the thing back then was — in a court of law, the testimony of a woman would not be accepted as admissible evidence. You had to find a man who witnessed something. Now in our modern day, you might think that's unbelievable and really strange and old-fashioned. It is un-strange and old-fashioned. And it is actually a really poor standard of the way they treated women back then. We've learned a lot since then in that regard. But that was what it was.
Which means — if Luke wanted to invent a story in which there were some witnesses on the scene who saw the tomb was empty, he would have been really thick to make the people in the story the people that no one would have believed. But he did — and even then wrote the fact that no one believed them.
So he's invented this story really badly, if it's made up.
So there are at least three reasons why we should take them more seriously than these first people did.
Three voices: two men in shining clothes, Jesus himself, the women.
Respond
The question is: how will you respond to the account of the resurrection?
People often say, "If only I had been alive at the time to see these events for myself, I would have been able to reach a proper conclusion."
Well, at this point — they were alive at the time. But they hadn't met Jesus alive either. And they had to reach their conclusion.
So we've got to make our mind up without meeting him for ourselves. What are we going to make of all this?
We've got the same thing to go off that they had — these three voices: the men in shining clothes, Jesus himself, five or more women.
With those three voices ringing in our ears, we have to decide how we will respond — each of us. Each of you. Me. We must all decide what we're going to do with this.
And often in the Gospels, we see the different responses we might make mapped out in the way the characters in the story respond. And this is the case here.
So let me start by saying — don't be like the ten disciples who dismissed this as utter nonsense. Don't. Please do not make that your response.
I'm not asking you to believe this automatically and cheaply. I'm not asking you to throw your brain away. I'm not asking you to treat this like this is old news — "This happens every day, of course it happened." No. That's not what I'm asking.
And Christians — I'm not asking you to get so used to this that it ceases to amaze you.
But I am observing that ten out of eleven disciples dismissed the whole thing as utter nonsense. And many people today do exactly the same thing. "Utter nonsense. Never happened. Course didn't. Fairy tale. Made up."
Please don't make that your response.
Instead — be like Simon Peter.
Peter did two things.
First thing he did: he got up, he ran, he bent over, he saw. He went to look into it more fully for himself.
So if you're here as somebody who is still investigating the claims of Jesus — will you do what Simon Peter did? Will you get up, run, bend over, see? Will you look into this more fully for yourself? Will you investigate? Ask further. Ask the questions. Study. Think. Ask other people. Come back next week or another week when we'll talk more about Jesus. Come and hear the teaching here week by week.
And at some point — we don't know when — we'll run a little course for people who want to look into the claims of Jesus, so that you can do that with some other people at the same stage in that exploration.
Why not grab — if you've got a Christian friend in this church, here's what you can do — grab them and say, "I would love to look more into Jesus. Can we read the Bible together for 15 minutes and do that once a week for a while until I get tired of it?"
They would love to be asked to do that with you. Invite them. And look at Jesus. Do what Peter did. Look further.
If you're here as a Christian — keep doing what Peter did. Keep looking further. Keep being more amazed, more impressed, more stunned by it every day. Keep looking.
That's the first thing Peter did. He got up, he ran, he bent over, he saw.
The second thing he did was he went away wondering.
Now, depending on how you think the English word "wondering" works, that could leave you thinking he went away going, "Eh? What was that? Nah."
That's not what this means. What this means is — he was amazed. He was bowled over. This is the same word when the crowd saw Jesus do amazing miracles and they said, "We have never seen anything like this."
This was Simon Peter in belief — but he just could not believe it was real. He was pinching himself. Just stunned.
So let me ask — would you be like Simon Peter in that regard?
Will you be amazed? Will you, as the hymn goes, stand amazed — "How marvellous, how wonderful"? Will you just smile? Will you allow your jaw to drop? Will you wonder and worship this Jesus?