Easter Sunday

Matthew 28:1. After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning and His clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of Him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here. He has risen, just as He said. Come and see the place where He lay. Then go quickly and tell His disciples, 'He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee.'"

"There you will see Him. Now I have told you." So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell His disciples. Suddenly, Jesus met them. "Greetings," He said.

They came to Him, clasped His feet, and worshipped Him. Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee. There they will see me." While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened.

When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, "You are to say, 'His disciples came during the night and stole Him away while we were asleep.' If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble." So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day. Then the 11 disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go.

When they saw Him, they worshipped Him, but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." So we have this story that after Jesus had died, His disciples took His body.

And they did everything they could to bring Him back some dignity. This is the part we didn't read, but they brought Him down. They prepared His body. They put perfume on Him, spices to preserve the body, and they wrapped Him in linen as was their custom. The Pharisees, however, wanted to make sure that nothing would happen.

They knew the commotion that was about this. There was still a stir in the city of Jerusalem. They wanted to make sure nothing possibly could happen to Jesus after His crucifixion. So they went to the governor, to Pilate, who had condemned Jesus to die. And they said, "We ask that for at least three days"—which was sort of, again, a customary thing to stay watched, to look after a body for three days until the body started decomposing, to make sure that the person was well and truly dead.

"We want you to keep guards at the front of the grave and to seal the grave, to make sure that no one can get in there." A Roman custom was to seal a grave with wax, and then with a signet ring of a governor or an official, they would press it into the wax to show that it had been sealed and that it was officially off limits. And so that is what happened. Pilate said, "Very well," and did that. But then on Sunday morning, the women went to look at the tomb, our text says.

And when they arrived, they saw an angel or a man dressed in very good clothing. Must have had bleach or something. Shining, bright white, snow white, it says. And he was sitting on the big rock that was in front of the tomb that had been rolled away. The guards were kind of nearby.

They had passed out, seemingly afraid or something. They fainted. The man in the bright shining clothes said that Jesus wasn't there. In fact, He had been raised to life. But they were free to check the tomb for themselves if they didn't believe.

And so they did. Afterwards, they needed to go and tell the disciples what had happened, what they had seen. They looked at the tomb, saw that it was empty, saw the linen that Jesus was wrapped in, folded neatly. It wasn't some sort of shambolic taking away of a body and things lying everywhere—folded neatly. They ran back to Jerusalem to tell the disciples what had happened.

On their way there, Jesus appeared to them. "Greetings," He said to them, and they fell to His feet, worshipping Him. Remember, this was a man. They did not know that this was the Messiah before. It says they worshipped Him.

Something had changed within them. They were filled with both fear and joy, the Bible says. It was true. He was really alive. It was amazing news.

What a tremendous joy. "Jesus is risen. Jesus is risen," they cried as they burst through that door where the disciples were staying. "He's alive," they shouted. "You must go to Galilee to meet Him there."

"He needs to tell you something." The disciples can't believe it. But they do what has been asked of them. They make their week-long journey to Galilee. Then at the location where they had to go, Jesus meets them there too.

Incredible. They are astounded. And Jesus shares with them this: "All authority in heaven and on earth has now been given to me." All power. The words sound majestic.

It sounds kingly. It sounds as though Jesus has just been crowned a king. All power and authority are His now. That's the story of the resurrection. But sometimes people say to me, "I just can't believe it."

"I just cannot believe that someone can be raised from the dead. Someone who has been dead for that long, for three days. I really struggle with this aspect of Christian teaching." Or "I believe most of the Christian faith, but when it comes to this, I just can't believe this part." But the reality is, if Jesus rose from the dead, if Jesus really rose from the dead, you have to believe everything He said.

If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, and some people say, "I just cannot believe that He actually did." If He didn't rise from the dead, why believe anything that He said? He's just another Aristotle, just another Plato, just another John Lennon. The issue on which everything hangs is not whether you like His teaching, whether it sits well with you, but whether He rose from the dead. That's how the first listeners of the gospel of Jesus Christ felt when they first heard the resurrection account.

They knew that if it was true, it meant that their lives couldn't be lived in the way that they had been before. But it also meant that they don't have to be afraid of anything anymore. They don't have to be afraid of Roman swords, Jewish oppression, poverty or hunger. Nothing. If Jesus rose from the dead, it changes everything.

And for the followers of Jesus, it did. Friends, Christianity stands or falls on the resurrection. It stands or falls on the resurrection. Many people struggle with that concept. Some people argue that the resurrection of Jesus wasn't a historical truth.

It may be a spiritual thing of a bunch of followers that were so distraught that they sought comfort in the idea that Jesus was spiritually with them. That He had spiritually been raised. Perhaps even it could be suggested that it went further and that it was an elaborate hoax. Wishful thinking. The argument goes that people at the time did not have their scientific knowledge to be able to say, "Well, if a person is dead, they're dead."

And perhaps they were gullible, believing in magic, believing in all sorts of supernatural, superstitious things. They could easily have fallen prey to reports of a risen Jesus because they believed that resurrection from the dead was possible. So they were perhaps gullible. Jesus' followers were heartbroken when He was killed. They had believed the Messiah.

They may have sensed that in some way, He was still with them. That in some way, He was still leading them and guiding them and showing them what to believe and reminding them of what He taught. And then over the decades, as the disciples started dying out, they shared this sort of stuff and the story changed a little bit. And it changed from a spiritual presence of Jesus to a physical presence of Jesus. And so some people argue that perhaps that is what the resurrection really was.

However, the claim that the resurrection narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John say, the claim that while these things were fabrications or made-up stories, hits a huge snag when we come to one thing: the empty tomb where Jesus was buried. And not only that, but also the eyewitness accounts of His resurrection post-death. We read this morning in a letter that Paul wrote to the church in Corinth. He wrote a letter, First Corinthians, and he said in verses 3 to 6, perhaps we can get that up.

First Corinthians 15:3-6. Paul says, "For what I received I passed on to you, the Corinthian Christians, as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Peter, and then to the twelve. After that, He appeared to more than 500 of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living."

Though some have fallen asleep, meaning some have died. Here Paul is not speaking of an empty tomb alone, but he also speaks of eyewitnesses. And these eyewitnesses weren't just a few local people that were in on a big hoax. These were people that numbered more than 500. More than 500.

In fact, Jesus didn't appear to 500, you know, once off. You know, 10 here, 15 here or whatever. At one point, He appeared to 500 people at one time. More than this, he says, "Most of these guys are still alive. Go check for yourself," he says.

"Go check for yourself. Make sure of this. I give you all the names. James and Peter and the apostles and myself even, and then 500 others." Anyone who doubted could speak to any of these people to confirm Paul's statements regarding the resurrection.

Paul wouldn't have dared to make this statement if it wasn't true. Paul wouldn't have dared to make this challenge if there were no eyewitnesses that existed. A second problem arises when people want to discredit the resurrection, and that is the fact that the resurrection is a story that's too risky to make up. Each gospel, including our text in Matthew 28, states that the first eyewitnesses of the resurrection were women. Now, don't hate me.

This is what the Bible says. But it was women who saw this, and in their culture of the day, women and their eyewitness testimonies were not admissible in court. If someone committed a murder and there was a woman who saw you committing that murder, that woman would not be allowed to confess or testify against you because, well, you know, "Women are emotional," or "They cannot perceive things in a certain way," or whatever. Again, it's not me. This is the culture.

And so to actually say, and all the accounts say this, it was Mary and the other Mary who saw this. Women who saw it first. If you wanted to make up a story, you would not say there were women who saw it. It's too difficult to try and explain. It's too risky to say that.

So it was women who saw Jesus resurrected firstly. The only possible explanation for why women were depicted as meeting Jesus first is if they really had. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright argues that there must have been enormous pressure on the early preachers of the Christian message to remove the women from the accounts. But they would not have been able to. They wouldn't have been able to.

They didn't, probably, because the accounts were too well known already. And the final point that seriously undermines the argument that the resurrection was fictional, that it could not have happened, is the fact of the empty tomb. The truth is, no one argued that the tomb was empty. No one argued that the tomb was empty. The guards didn't say, "Well, he's still there."

Sorry. They just sort of rolled the stone back and said, "No, he's there." It was empty. Anyone could have gone there to see it. The empty tomb was a big deal as well because anyone who broke that Roman seal, anyone who broke that, faced the death penalty.

Anyone who was caught doing that was to be executed. It was empty. Two guards there. Matthew explains how the Roman soldiers who guarded the tomb were paid off by the Jewish religious leaders. This probably came out sometime later.

But they went around and they confessed to their bosses, "Hey, listen, he must have been stolen. We were asleep, and when we woke up, he was gone." But no one could deny that the body was gone. The tomb must have been empty. You see, the sceptics, and there were plenty of them then, they could have just produced the body of Jesus.

They could have just said, "Well, you guys believe that he's dead? Well, here he is. Looks pretty dead to me. Give him a kick." Because the tomb was empty, no one denied that it was gone.

And because over 500 people saw a living, breathing Jesus, because the tomb was empty, and because the eyewitness account was so numerous, I believe that Jesus was really raised to life from the dead. Okay. But so what? So what? If He was raised to life, that's great.

He gets His life back. He goes and has a nice—He lives out His life, you know, in the countryside, just chilling out, marries or whatever. Why is the resurrection important? Tim Keller, a pastor and an author, writes that each year at Easter, when he talks about the resurrection, he talks with his sceptical secular friends, and he says to them that even if they can't believe in the resurrection, they should want the resurrection to be true. Even if they can't believe it, they should want it to be true.

Most of them, he says, care deeply about justice for the poor. They care about alleviating hunger and disease. They care about the injustices around them. They care about caring for the environment. Yet many of them believe that the material world was caused by accident.

That we have life by chance, and that everything eventually will just burn up when the sun dies out. The irony, he says, is that while they care so much about justice and equality, they don't realise that their own worldview undermines any motivation to make this world a better place. It undermines any motivation to live life. Why sacrifice my needs for the needs of others if in the end nothing we do will make any difference? If life is just a random lucky chance, why give it any value at all?

But if the resurrection is true, if it really happened, it means that there is more to life than just here and now. Paul later writes in First Corinthians 15, the same chapter that we read before, that Jesus Christ is the first fruit of those who have died. He uses that word, the first fruit of those who have died. In other words, like a fruit tree produces its first fruit of the season, the first apples, the first lemons, you can judge the other fruit that's going to come upon those first few that arrive. If they are good fruit, the rest are more than likely going to be good fruit.

If they are bad first fruit, then the other fruit are going to be bad. Paul is saying that in Jesus' resurrection, we see God conquering death. Death is not how the story ends according to God. Jesus' first fruit, the resurrection, is first fruit of us who are going to follow Him. Eternal life is what God wants for humans.

Eternal life. On Easter Sunday, we remember Jesus' resurrection from the dead. In that moment, God showed that He is way more powerful than death. In that moment, He showed that He's way more powerful than sin. The death that we face is not part of His master plan.

In that moment of the resurrection, the message is this: this world matters. This world matters. Your life matters. Easter Sunday means that in a world today where injustice, where violence, where disease corrupt and destroy life, God is not prepared to tolerate such things forever.

If Jesus Christ is truly risen from the dead, Christianity becomes good news for the whole world. It shows that our life and what we do matters. It shows that death cannot conquer us. That is good news. Two days ago on Good Friday, we heard the message of Good Friday, which says that Jesus died on the cross, shows that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me.

Yet I am so loved that Jesus was glad to die for me. Today, when we come to Easter Sunday, we come to the message that says, because God so loved and valued Jesus, He raised Him from the dead to show everyone that what was accomplished on Friday was true. It was mission accomplished. This morning, we are once again invited to enter into this kingdom of God.

We are once again reminded of that amazing message. God is in the process of making all things new. And it started, first of all, with Jesus being raised from the dead. The first fruit. He is alive.

He is risen. He is not dead. He is here. It means that your life matters because it's not going to end in a disappointing death, in a sense where nothing we do matters.

The resurrection of Jesus means that your sin truly has been forgiven. Yes. Jesus did die for our sin, but Jesus came back to life to show that it was mission accomplished. That He was stronger than sin. That He was greater than death.

God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ. And now we are invited to belong to it. This morning, Jesus offers us again the chance to accept Him as Lord, as King. He said, "All authority on earth and heaven has come to me now." He invites us again to enter into His kingdom, the kingdom where death does not have the final say.

May we come to know the power of this resurrection. May we come to know and understand that our lives matter. May our thinking be influenced by an understanding that while we may suffer now, while we lose friends now, while disease still affects our bodies, a time is coming when everything will be made new. Friends, Jesus is risen this morning. Hallelujah.