Sunday sermon: "The Center of Our Story"

As far as Jesus' followers knew, He was dead. The disciples were in hiding. The women who went to the tomb expected to find Jesus' body there. None of His followers expected Him to rise from the dead, despite His own teaching that He would. Thus, when they found the tomb empty, the women were as surprised as anyone. When they saw Jesus, it was no vision or hysterical hallucination based on their hopes. Their own grasp of His feet was evidence enough that He was truly alive, and had left the grave in bodily form.

One of the striking characteristics of the resurrection narratives in the gospels is that they give us no description of Jesus leaving the tomb. While later apocryphal gospels and other writings invent those details, the canonical gospels do not. In Matthew 28 we have the account of the angel descending and rolling the stone away, and of the fainting of the guards at the sight, but even they do not see Jesus leave the tomb. All they know is that when they come to, the tomb is empty. It is not the triumphal appearance of the glorious Lord that is left as evidence, but the stark fact of the empty tomb.

The transformation in Jesus' disciples was complete. In a matter of days, they would go from a group depressed and defeated to one which would literally change the world. They had a message which no other religion or philosophy could match: that in Jesus, sin and death were defeated and new life was possible. The message of the resurrection is that you don't need to earn your own way into heaven (in fact, Christianity teaches the opposite, that there is no way you can earn your own salvation), but that through faith in the risen and living Lord Jesus new life is freely given to all who believe.

Matthew's gospel records the one event that was the flip side of this message. Some of the guards at the tomb, who had seen what had happened and were witnesses that the tomb was empty, went and reported this to the chief priests. These priests were the religious elite of Israel, Jews who were well trained in the Scriptures and knew the prophecies. They had, in fact, asked for a guard to be posted precisely because they knew Jesus had predicted His resurrection. Yet faced with the reality of the empty tomb and the phenomena witnessed by the guards, they willfully refused to believe that Jesus was alive. They chose to create a ridiculous cover story (how did the guards know what happened while they slept?) rather than accept what the resurrection of Jesus meant for them and their religious empire.

Christianity means many things, and there are many teachings that we as Christians have to learn and follow. The center of our story, however, is that through the power of the resurrected Jesus God has shown us the way to new life and to becoming part of the family and the kingdom of God. This is what the church still has to offer the world, a message that can be found nowhere else. As long as we have this offer of salvation and life, we will never be irrelevant to the world in which we live, no matter how our culture changes.