Easter Sermon

The Best Ending Ever!
Rockland Dr United Baptist Church
April 8, 2007


Surprises, Surprises

An episode of the television show Friends contained a scene in which three of its thirty-something characters ransacked their friend’s apartment trying to discover where their Christmas presents were hidden. It had become a game to them, but they also really wanted to know what she had gotten them. I can’t remember ever looking for my own Christmas gifts as a child, but remember my brother telling us that he once found his, and found Christmas morning to be much less fun that year than any others. The thrill of opening the gifts was gone, and as a child that mattered to him.

We might notice about our world today that we are a people who do everything we can to eliminate surprises from everyday life, planning intensely away all the uncertainties. We can now choose our own wedding gifts by making a gift registry; we can look at Call Display to know who’s calling us when the phone rings; we can even (in many places) find out if a pregnant woman is having a boy or a girl. We seem to have systematically removed the element of surprise from our lives.

But moving out of our “real” lives, and into, say, the life of a story, a book, or a movie, we find that our taste for the surprising, for the unknown, is still something we very much cling to. Surprises in these cases are the thing that keeps our interest held.

Twist endings may be the best: we enjoy a story on its own terms from start to finish, and then such a surprising conclusion comes that we are forced to reread or rewatch and see things all over again with a different and new perspective.

At the center of the Christian faith and at the heart of Easter is the greatest surprise ending of all time: Jesus Christ, raised from the dead and on through to life! What a twist to the end of that story!

This morning we will look at two stories in the Bible that tell of the change that is brought about by this twist ending, the resurrection of Jesus. The first is from Luke’s gospel, and is about two dejected disciples walking along the road. The second is from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, and it is about us. So let’s listen to the story of the two disciples of Jesus, and then listen to our story, addressed so clearly in Paul’s words to his troubled church.

Hopelessness and Hope on the Road to Emmaus

In this passage we meet two disciples walking along the road on Easter Sunday. In their minds, though, it is not Easter Sunday at all. To them, it’s day two since their leader and teacher died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.

These two disciples, Cleopas and his friend, are walking along when suddenly a third person comes alongside them. It’s Jesus, but for some reason, they don’t recognize him. We’re not told what exactly it was about Jesus’ body after the resurrection that made it possible for people to fail to recognize him sometimes, and yet to be able to look and see the wounds in his hands and feet from his crucifixion. Perhaps God closed their eyes for a time, perhaps his resurrection body actually looked different; either way, Jesus was able to join them and talk with them on this road without them knowing who he was.

Jesus notices the dejection in these two disciples. Just as he knows all of our feelings and thoughts, he knew the anguish of those two on that road. So he asks them, “What are you talking about?” And entering into their conversation, the two tell the story of all that had happened to Jesus in the last week.

They most expose their feelings when they say in verse 21, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” We had hoped. They had that hope before, but now it was gone. Now they were two dejected disciples, two followers of Jesus trying to come to grips with having been mistaken about everything they had devoted this last part of their lives to.

Many people in the years before and after Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, “the one to redeem Israel.” Their stories can be read in various history books; some of them are even mentioned in the Book of Acts, men like Theudas, Judas the Galilean, and “the Egyptian.” These men were leaders, revolutionaries claiming to be God’s anointed, gathering together a great crowd of followers. But each one of them in turn had died. Each one of them left behind followers who, like these disciples of Jesus, must have walked with their heads hanging low in the days after their demise, coming to grips with the fact that they had followed the wrong person. These two disciples feel like they’re joining the ranks of others who have “followed the wrong guy.”

Today they’ve heard a strange story, they tell Jesus. This story is a story “the women” have told them. “The women say that they went to Jesus’ tomb and that it was empty. They say he is alive.”

But Cleopas and his companion clearly don’t buy it. They are not convinced. After all, Jesus died. People don’t come back to life after they die. Everyone knows that. So they continue to carry on in their hopelessness and dejection.

Their story has a surprise ending, though, a twist that they have not believed and still don’t see coming. Jesus starts to tell them how the scriptures said these things were necessary. This is what they should have expected, he tells them, as he shares with them their own scriptures to show the destiny of the Messiah. They are intrigued as he starts to walk on, so they invite him to eat with them. While eating, the gospel account says, “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. Then he vanished.”

In that moment of recognition the two disciples know that their story has not ended in hopelessness, but that Jesus indeed was raised to life. “Were not our hearts burning within us as he spoke with us?” they ask each other. No longer hopeless, Cleopas and his friend are now filled with hope and joy and enthusiasm.

The story they’ve known leads them through to the end with certain emotions. The “twist” of the resurrection makes them have to rethink everything through a brand new lens. Everything looks differently the second time around.


Our Story in Paul’s Letter

In 1 Corinthians 15 we find ourselves faced with the chapter of the Bible that most focuses on the resurrection. This is the chapter where the meaning of the resurrection is most thoroughly pondered, and where we find ourselves face to face with our own condition as we read. As we read this passage, we are reading our own story.

Let’s remember our analogy of reading a story that has a twist at the end. Now let’s remind ourselves that the twist in the story of Jesus is the resurrection. Given those two facts, we find that Paul addresses both readings of the story of Jesus in this chapter. He asks two questions:

1. If the resurrection is not a real thing, what does that mean about the story of Jesus and the story of us?
2. If the resurrection is real, what are the implications for living?

If there is no resurrection…

This is a complicated chapter. For our purposes, we’re going to have to be satisfied to look at just a couple of representative verses.

Paul says in verse 17, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins.” Futile is a pretty strong word. In other words, Paul says, if the story ends with Jesus’ death on the cross, everything we hold onto as Christians is of no value. As one theologian put it, if Christ has not been raised,

“their faith is not only ‘empty,’ but ‘futile’… a waste of time; and the crucial point is not just that they are believing rubbish about the resurrection, and about Jesus, but that the new age in which sins are left behind has not after all been inaugurated.” (N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, p. 332.)

In other words, if we claim that there is no resurrection, that people don’t rise from the dead, that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, any faith we might claim would be useless, because it is in Jesus’ resurrection that God began the new age, the new way, the Kingdom itself! We are still mired in the old order, where evil and sin control us, if there is no resurrection.

There are those even in churches who will claim that Jesus did not rise from the dead. Just as Cleopas had heard the witness of the women but yet walked in hopelessness because of his denial of Jesus’ aliveness, so people today will claim, “I believe in God, but people don’t come back to life after they’ve died – that’s not how it works!” For these people Paul’s words are strong and direct.

What are the implications for living the resurrection?

But many do not have the problem of denying Jesus’ resurrection and the resurrection of the dead. After all, our strong hope in times of death is found in John 11:25: “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever lives and believes in me, even though he dies, yet shall he live.”

Our problem here, where Christian beliefs form the bedrock of our whole culture, is that we claim that the resurrection is real – even showing up dutifully in church to say so – and then try to prove by our lives that it doesn’t mean the slightest thing.

Paul has words for us too: in verse 34, he admonishes: “Come to a sober and right mind, and sin no more; for some people have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame.”

Paul says to us, you’ve heard the story, you’ve followed it through, and now you’ve seen the big surprise God had in store at the end of the story. The story cannot stay the same in your mind now that you’ve seen the end. Your life cannot be lived according to the story that ends in death and shame, but must be lived according to the story that ends in the resurrection.

The resurrection is the beginning of God’s new age, of God’s kingdom. “Sober up and think straight – stop sinning!” Live in the life you’ve been given by God, not some fantasy world that is only half the story.

“Some people have no knowledge of God.” Likely Paul said this because there were some who claimed to have special knowledge of God. Perhaps they thought themselves better than the others, even refusing to fellowship with them sometimes. To them Paul says, “You call yourselves ‘knowledge people’ – well, I say you actually have no knowledge of God at all. And you should be ashamed of yourselves that this is true.”

The Challenge of the Resurrection: Rereading our story

Paul makes it clear to us that if we say, “Jesus Christ is Risen,” it changes everything. We listen to the story of Jesus, and it seems to be the story of a good and special man. But when we say, “He was raised from the dead on the first Easter Sunday,” we throw down the challenge for ourselves.

The challenge says: If Jesus is risen, am I living as if that’s true? Have I let go of the sinful ways of the past? Have I embraced God’s Kingdom and the Lordship of Jesus in not just my life but over everything? Has the twist at the end of this story sent me back to the beginning of Jesus’ story and my own life, looking to reexamine everything in light of the resurrection?

Jesus Christ is risen today. That changes everything.