Acts 10.34-43
Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed!
In a deed, the Father with their Spirit raised Jesus up from death.
What more am I to say?
This little word contains the whole world.
This little word— we call it the gospel— matters for all things that matter.
What else can I possibly say but to repeat it again?
Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed!
In a deed. In history. In time and space and place. At concrete coordinates on a map: approximately31°47′1.87″N 35°13′47.92″E. There and then, the Almighty God of the multiverse vindicated Pilate’s victim by raising him from the tomb.
How can I possibly come tagging along after this little word and add words of my own?
I suppose I could say what Jesus poses to Martha just before he summons her dead brother from the grave. Martha’s brother Lazarus has been dead for four days. Jesus should be holding his nose so near the tomb. Instead, before he summons Lazarus from death, Jesus says to his sister Martha, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in me, even though he dies, yet shall he live…Do you believe this?”
The question is contained in the Bible because the question is not meant for Martha alone.
Do you believe this?
I could add Christ’s question to this little word that contains the world.
Maybe I must.
After all, in the climactic chapter to his Epistle to the Corinthians the apostle Paul puts the stakes as bluntly as possible. “if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is in vain…if all we have is this life only, then we are of all people the most to be pitied.” Or as the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg paraphrased Paul near the end of the last century, “If the event of Easter did not take place, then all discussion of its meaning is a waste of time.” In which case, if the answer to Christ’s question is “No, no we don’t really believe it” then I should spare you both the sermon and the sacrament.
Instead I simply should hand over the benediction, “I bless you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Go in peace.”
Only—
I cannot bless you in the Triune NAME.
If it is not actual that God has raised Jesus from the dead, then we know not who the true God is; hence, I cannot bless you under his proper name. In fact, I cannot even truthfully bless you with a generic commendation like “Vaya con Dios” Because if God is not whoever raised Jesus from the dead, if God is not whoever committed that act, in deed, then I do not know if having “God be with you” would be good news of any sort at all. Indeed, given the many gods on offer in our culture, having any of them with you is likely bad news indeed.
In which case, it might be safest for all of us if I but say, “Good afternoon. Goodbye.”
But, but, but— before you go!
Even if I do not deliver a benediction, we all should offer a confession to God (whatever may be his true name). Because of course, if the Father has not raised Mary’s boy from the dead and if Mary’s boy is therefore not simultaneously the Father’s only Son, then we are all misrepresenting God. With the very first verse of “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” all of us have violated the first and most crucial commandment.
As far as the Living God is concerned, there is no more offensive idol to worship than a dead man. As Paul writes in that same passage to Corinth, “If Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins.” Not only is talking about the metaphorical meaning of Easter a waste of time, you are wasting your time.
To repent.
And turn to the true God (whomever it may be).
And one last item before you leave!
If Easter is untrue, in addition to a confession, we also should extend an apology.
To little Eloise.
We were all just accomplices to her baptism. We did not dedicate her like Baby Simba in the Lion King. We baptized her into Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection. But if the little word on the end of that string is not true, then all that remains is suffering and death and life has no meaning other than its own refutation.
In which case, we should teach Eloise to eat, drink, and be nihilistic— because, LOL, nothing else matters.
If Easter isn’t, we should not have baptized her.
If God has not repudiated the rejection of Jesus, if God has not contradicted the condemnation of Christ with an empty tomb, then all we have done is wash Eloise in stale water and saddle her with a call and commission that leads no further than Calvary and its cross.
“I am the Resurrection and the Life,” Jesus poses to Martha, “Do you believe this?”
On Holy Saturday six years ago, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof conducted an interview with the president of Union Theological Seminary, Serene Jones.
Kristof expressed his admiration for Jesus the Teacher, saying to Serene Jones, “For someone like myself, who is drawn to Jesus’ teaching but doesn’t believe in the resurrection, what am I? Am I a Christian?”
And the seminary president elaborated:
“For me, the message of Easter is that love is stronger than life or death. That’s a much more awesome claim than that they put Jesus in the tomb and three days later he wasn’t there. For Christians for whom the resurrection becomes a sort of obsession, that seems to me to be a pretty wobbly faith. What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb?
Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie?”
Serene Jones was roundly rebuked by church leaders for her interview.
Because, of course, yes!
Yes, it would be a lie!
What makes Christianity distinct from all other faiths is that Christianity is potentially falsifiable. Habeas corpus applies not only to Kilmar Garcia but to Jesus of Nazareth too. If someone produces the body, we are all wasting our time.
This is the premise of every apostolic sermon in the Book of Acts, including Peter’s sermon to the Gentiles in Acts 10. Peter does not preach to them a religious message but an historical record. Or as Paul preaches later in Acts to a pagan king, “These things did not happen in a corner.”
Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed!
In a deed.
If not in a deed, how else do you account for the preacher in this passage?
Peter thrice denied Jesus. Peter abandoned Jesus to his cross. Sometime on Holy Saturday Peter snuck away to resume his fishing business— that’s how cowardly and unimaginative was Peter.
But after Easter, Peter ventures all the way to Rome armed with only this little word. Peter would not have boldly accepted his own cross— he was crucified upside down in the year 64 AD— if all he believed about Christ’s death was what Captain Kirk says of Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, “He’s not really dead as long as we remember him.”
Maybe that’s good enough for a seminary president, but no! It’s not good enough for me, and it’s certainly not good enough for the Martys. The saints did not die for sentimentality.
Besides, the resurrection riddle only begins with Peter.
Jesus’ trial and execution wholly disenchanted and scattered his followers, on this both scripture and extra-biblical sources agree. A mere few days later, those same sources concur, a community of first commandment-obeying Jews had formed who believed Jesus lived as Israel’s LORD.
The question is unavoidable for believer and unbeliever alike.
What happened to make the difference?
“What if tomorrow someone found the body of Jesus still in the tomb? Would that then mean that Christianity was a lie?”
Yes.
Yes, it would.
The Romans understood the stakes of this little word better than many Christians today. The story the Romans put out was just what Mary Magdalene first thought upon encountering the empty tomb; someone stole his body. In fact, Pontius Pilate turned his little patch of the empire upside down in an attempt to find the dead body by which he could discredit the nascent movement. As Wolfhart Pannenberg comments, “The message of the resurrection that the disciples brought back to Jerusalem could not have a survived a single hour if the body could have been shown to be in the tomb.” And it’s not as if his tomb was in a Galilee far far away. I have been to Jerusalem and the Old City. It is a small, compact place. On a quiet day, you could have heard the nails being hammered into his flesh from the place where the cock crowed three times.
The distance from his cross to his tomb is shorter still.
This makes it all the more remarkable that there is no trace of any contention against Christians that the body was still in the tomb. There is no ancient argument— at all— that his body remained buried. We have ancient correspondence between Roman proconsuls ridiculing the very first Christians. We have the Jewish trial record for the prosecution of the apostle James, charged with blasphemy for worshipping the Risen Jesus as LORD. We know precisely where was the home in Capernaum of the mother-in-law of the apostle Peter. “These things did not happen in a corner.” Yet there is not a single record of Jew or Gentile contending that the body remained in the tomb. As Pannenberg notes, “The force of this fact is often underestimated.”
And do not forget.
If it was a lie, if God had not raised Jesus from the dead, then this little word is the last message his followers would have elected to concoct. The point of crucifixion was not the pain and the suffering but the shame and degradation. In crucifixion, Rome sought to render its victims less than human, to nail them into oblivion.
Jesus is nailed to a tree for sedition.
Jesus is crucified for pretending to be the messiah.
Consider the alleged lie.
If you were a member of a tiny insurrectionist movement whose leader just suffered a mode of execution so ghastly that polite Romans would not utter the name of it and if you were in hiding lest the same fate befall you, it would not occur to you to burst forth into public with this little word. You’d deny you ever knew him, lock yourself behind closed doors, and shutter the windows, which is exactly what John says the disciples do.
Only to an insane person would it occur to proclaim:
“The crucified is really alive! And therefore, the perceived threat to Pilate and the chief priests remain! And actually, it’s much worse now because not even the Bad Guys’ biggest weapon— Death— defeated him!”
This is not what you would think to announce.
Other than an a priori determination not to believe in the resurrection, there is no evidential basis for its denial.
As the theologian Robert Jenson presses this point:
“Here is where this alleged piece of news either grabs you or it does not. If it does grab you, if you believe Jesus was raised Christians will attribute this to the work of the Holy Spirit.”
This is true charismatic Christianity.
If you but desire to believe he is risen indeed, then the Holy Spirit has alighted upon you.
In his Letter to the Corinthians, Paul names over five hundred people encountered by the no-longer-dead Jesus. I cannot name that many names, but I can name a few only one whom is named Jason.
Diane was a member of my first congregation in New Jersey. The first funeral I ever preached was for Diane’s father. A Phillies fan, he came home from work one afternoon, went down to the basement, and, resorting to the deer rifle he’d used in the Pine Barrens, he remained in the basement until the police came to retrieve him. In that meantime, the Risen Jesus came to his daughter, Diane.
“He was standing in the kitchen, on the linoleum floor, in front of the microwave and toaster oven. I don’t know how I knew it was him, because he didn’t say anything at first, but I knew he wanted to comfort me for some reason. Jesus wanted to comfort me, and here I was embarrassed by all the dirty dishes in the sink.”
I laughed a nervous little laugh.
“And then he said to me— not with words exactly,” Diane told me, “He said, “All is forgiven, your Father and you both. Do not be afraid. Everything is going to be okay.”
“But…” I fumbled to find the thread, “But how do you know it was Jesus talking to you?”
She put her hands on her hips like I was the personification of institutional failure.
“Well, you tell me, preacher— does that not sound like something Jesus would say?”
Rome crucified approximately one hundred and fifty thousand victims across its vast empire, all of whose names are lost to history. Save one. I am convinced that we would not know the name of Jesus if God had not raised him from the dead.
But what is good about this news is not the fact of the empty grave. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in Discipleship, “The resurrection is not the solution to the problem of death.” Or as Pannenberg puts the same point, “In this event of Easter the appearance and possibility of eternal life is not the issue.” That is, more important than the truth of the empty tomb is the announcement of who occupies it no longer.
The subject of the sentence makes it good news: “Jesus is risen!”
Vladimir Putin has stolen twenty-thousand children from Ukraine. If the Easter message was “Vladimir is back from the dead!” Easter would not be a happy occasion. Indeed eternity would be a torment. The gospel is good news precisely because— only because— it is Jesus who now lives. A man with a history. A man who invited us to address his Father as our Father. A man who befriended outcasts, ate and drank and partied with sinners and showed them all to the front of the kingdom line. A man who wept for his friend Lazarus and went all the way to death to raise up a grieving father’s little girl. A man who insisted his Father is every bit the resemblance of the father ready to rejoice over the return of his lost son. The vacancy in the grave is the vindication of its particular former occupant. And the specific person who is indeed risen lived a life that the New Testament can sum up as sheer love.
The good news in “Jesus is risen!” is Jesus.
Jesus is what is gospel in the gospel, “Christ is risen!”
The good news is not a common noun: eternal life.
The good news is a proper name: Jesus.
Indeed because he lives, unlike the promises we make to one another, none of his promises are bounded by death. They are now unconditional; therefore, by his authority, every promise I can make to you on the basis of his words and work are unconditional.
Paul names over five hundred names.
I can’t name that many of you, but I do know many of you.
One of you is wandering in the wilderness of an unresolved divorce. In the name of the Jesus Christ, I promise you. There is hope for the future.
A couple among you here constantly fret they have not done enough— or perhaps done too much— for their troubled son. Jesus is risen; just so, I promise you. Every sad thing will come untrue.
Another set of parents here have a daughter recently admitted to a mental health hospital. I promise you. The LORD is with her. How can I be so certain? Because the one who said so is not dead.
I cannot name five hundred, but I do know more than a few of you.
One of you, just this year, had no choice but to commit a violent act. I promise you. Your ledger is as black as his tomb is empty. Your sins are forgiven.
Another of you was an agent-in-charge thirty years ago at the site of the bombing in Oklahoma City. Just yesterday you told me how you’re haunted by the memories still. I promise. You will be freed.
Someone else here must persistently justify his politics to others. I promise you. You are justified by faith because the one who gave his life as an act of faith to the Father is risen.
One family here lives in fear of their immigration status. Several families here anxiously await the future of their federal employment. I promise all of you. The poor will be lifted up. Strangers will be welcomed. The present evil age will end. How do I know? Because the one who so preached, lives. I promise you. Everything will be okay. And I can make that promise even as someone who self-administers chemotherapy twice a day.
There are not five hundred but there are more than a few of you who still mourn the loss of husbands you lost over a year ago, another who lost a wife too young and much too suddenly, another a son— Neil, another who grieves a father whose long life is nevertheless a sorrow.
I can promise you— without condition, no ifs ands or buts— not because the after life is natural or automatic but because Jesus is risen. Because he lives, so shall you live again with them.
One believer online with us this morning struggles with bipolar and one with addiction, another grieves for her alcoholic son and another rages at the injustices faced by the inmates to whom she ministers in prison. Still others with us online struggle with the diminishment of old age. I can promise you. Everything broken will be mended.
One day—
Every tear will be wiped from every eye.
Every prodigal will come home.
There will be no more mourning, no more crying— pain will be no more.
The persecuted will own the keys to the kingdom.
The peacemakers will be called sons and daughters of God.
The merciful will inherit everything.
Justice will roll down like many waters.
And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Swords will be beaten into plough shares.
Wolves and lambs will feast with one another not on another.
Lions will eat straw.
And the Serpent— the Accuser, the Devil, the voice in the back of your head— will be no more.
I promise you.
How can I make such a promise?
How can I promise you what only God can promise?
Because:
Christ is risen.
Common nouns— the after life, eternity, light at the end of the tunnel— can’t make you any promises.
The hereafter can’t say, “All your sins are forgiven.”
I’ve known several people who’ve seen the light at the end of the tunnel, but, thus far, that light hasn’t managed to say anything to a single one of them.
Heaven may be a “place” but it can’t make you a promise.
But I can.
And you can.
Because Jesus is risen indeed.
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