The Risen Lord (30/03/1997)

"You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. {7} But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.'"

So said the young man in white to the women at the tomb of Jesus on that first Easter morning, as we heard in our New Testament reading. That remarkable fact is right at the heart of the Christian faith. Christianity is a religion of "resurrection". Without the resurrection of Jesus Christianity collapses. St Paul said:

if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith (1 Cor 15.13).

We now come to the end of our studies in Mark's Gospel. Over the past two or three months at Jesmond Parish Church we have been studying Jesus and his teaching according to Mark. And on this Easter Day we are looking at Mark 16.1-8. But is the resurrection true? That is the vital question. Today many people are not interested in truth. That is so serious. Relativism is in vogue - that is to say, people claim that there is nothing absolutely true; it is just "true for me". What nonsense! It is either true that today is 31 March or it is false. It is either true that tomorrow is a Bank Holiday (and actually 31 March) or it is false. Matters of fact are either true or false. And they are objective. The Bible says that the devil is the father of lies. In the late 20th century the devil is having a field day. This past week there was the Heaven's Gate cult in San Diego in America. It is quite appalling what people can believe when facts go out the window and truth has ceased to be important. Here were people living and working in the most sophisticated part of the world, but believing that there was a UFO in the wake of the Hale Bopp Comet. And they could join it by killing themselves. This past week, heterosexually, there were lies in the case of Piers Merchant the MP accused of an affair with a seventeen year old. Either he is lying or the Sun newspaper is lying. This past week, homosexually, there were lies relating to the Boy Scouts Association opening its leadership to men who have sex with other men. On a BBC programme on the subject it was repeatedly said that opposition was prejudice as homosexuality and paedophilia were not connected. But that is just false. Studies now show that non-celibate homosexuals are at least 3 times, and some suggest even 17 times, more likely to be paedophiles than are heterosexuals.(For the record can I say that Scout and Guide leaders, of whatever inclination, at Jesmond Parish Church will be committed to the Christian Sex Ethic of reserving sex for heterosexual marriage. They must teach that there is forgiveness for everyone - heterosexual or homosexual. But Christian standards will be firmly maintained.) We are living in a world of bare faced lies. But Christianity is committed to the truth. Jesus said, "I am the way and the truth and the life." The Jews of the first century knew the difference between truth and lies, between imagination and fact. They had courts of law for evaluating evidence. And they had a principle. You get it quoted several times in the Bible:

(2 Cor 13:1 - for example) "Every matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses."

But when it comes to the person and work of Jesus Christ, there are not "two or three" but four witnesses - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This is quite remarkable. Those early believers were interested in the truth. They did not want imaginative stories or fiction. So, my question again is this: is the resurrection true? You say, "the resurrection seems so odd". But the issue is not "is it odd, but did it happen?" The Bible says that God is the creator of the world. It says that he normally works according to the natural order he has created:

(Gen 8:22) As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.

But God is not bound by nature; he created it. At times, the Bible teaches, there have been and are miraculous interventions. These are not against nature but beyond nature. Nor are God's interventions spread evenly through history. They have occurred at certain times with more frequency than at other times. But the greatest miracle and intervention was the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So I want us to think about first, therefore,THE RESURRECTION THEN - that first Easter Day; secondly, THE RESURRECTION ONE DAY; and thirdly, THE RESURRECTION NOW. First, THE RESURRECTION THEN Mark's Gospel has to be taken seriously, as do all the others. The Resurrection narratives are different in the four Gospels. But the basic difference lies in the accounts of the appearances of Jesus to the disciples, not in the accounts of how women (and others) found the tomb of Jesus empty. Common sense says that the different accounts of the appearances of Jesus came from different apostles reporting different appearances on different occasions. But it is amazing how similar the accounts of the empty tomb are in the four Gospels. The Gospel writers were all drawing on different sources. But they all agree over the empty tomb. And remember: Mark's Gospel is reckoned to be written in the 60's of the first century. The information he drew on, probably from Peter, was preached, remembered and recorded much earlier. In AD 56 Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians that many of the disciples who had seen Jesus after the Resurrection "are still alive". Those eyewitnesses would not have allowed accounts of the Resurrection to become standard in the churches if they were fictions. That time gap from the Resurrection to when Paul was writing is not very long - only the length of the period that I have been a vicar here at Jesmond. Suppose I was now trying to invent a religion. Suppose I now wrote in the Coloured Supplement next week that in April 1973, just after I arrived here, following a funeral one of the graves in the local cemetery was being visited by family and friends. And it was found opened up; the coffin was not vandalised; but it was empty as though the corpse had passed through it. And what is more, I wrote that the dead person had been seen around town by members of the congregation. What would happen? What would happen is that people in the congregation who were in the congregation then in 1973 would deny it most strongly. They would say that as far as they were concerned it was a complete fiction. By contrast there were people with Paul and Mark who had been contemporary with the resurrection of Jesus and who were still around in the late 50's and early 60s of the 1st century. But they did not deny the Resurrection. Rather they, Paul implies, confirmed it because they themselves had seen the risen Jesus. The evidence is that it was not a fiction. Nor is the Resurrection of Jesus something the disciples were expecting. Mark tells us that the women who were going to anoint the body expected the tomb to have the stone still over the entrance. The women were, we are told, "alarmed". What they found made them fear. Verse 8 of chapter 16:

Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Nor were these hallucinations - the mistaking of visual signals for something you are looking for. They weren't looking for anything. Mary did not see the gardener near the tomb and think he was Jesus. She saw Jesus and thought he was the gardener. The two on the road to Emmaus did not see a stranger and think he was Jesus. They saw Jesus and thought he was a stranger. The apostles in the upper room did not see a ghost and think it was Jesus. They saw Jesus and thought they had seen a ghost. All the theories that try to get around the plain reality of the resurrection have failed. They have been put forward and rejected for centuries. Some have tried to say the women went to the wrong tomb. But Mark tells us it was day light when the women went and two had seen where Joseph and Nicodemus had laid the body; and other apostles later, we are told in John, went to the tomb and found the same thing. Some have tried to say Jesus only swooned. But the Romans ensured Jesus had died on the cross. In any case which of the disciples would have endured martyrdom for a poor, dehydrated Christ, racked with pain and needing enormous care to survive? Which of them would have then proclaimed him the divine Saviour of the world? That is why the Jewish authorities at the time were on very weak ground when they said that the disciples stole the body. They also were disproved when they saw the disciples willing to suffer for Christ. And those disciples were not like some weird and gullible cult in California. They included people like Thomas who refused to believe until there was water-tight evidence. Robert Browning began his poem Easter Day with the exclamation:

How very hard it is to be a Christian.

That is the reason why so many refuse to face the facts - there is a cost. Aldous Huxley was honest about it. He said:

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able with out any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do ... For myself, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.

So what happened to Jesus? The natural process is one of physical decomposition after death. With Jesus this was not simply stopped; nor was it simply reversed. It was superseded. Normally at death you become dust - in a grave, after a longer time; at the crematorium, very quickly. Genesis 3.19 says:

for dust you are and to dust you will return.

But Christ's body did not return to the dust! His body was transformed. It became a new and glorious body. His soul, the Bible suggests, had been in Hades - the abode of the dead. His body had been lying on the stone slab in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb. But his body and soul were united in a raised and glorified body. Paul calls it "his glorious body" (Phil 3.21). It had new powers. Christ not only passed through the grave clothes and doors, he appeared to the disciples - but there was physicality to his body. Professor G.B.Caird, the distinguished Oxford New Testament scholar, said this:

sober criticism cannot get behind ... the risen Jesus [who] eats and drinks with his disciples.

And, there was that mysterious experience of the Ascension. All that is the wonderful truth of the resurrection of Jesus on that first Easter Day. That was the great demonstration of the power of God. The Bible calls it ...

the working of his mighty strength, {20} which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms (Eph 1:19-20).

But Christianity is a religion of resurrection, not just because of Jesus' resurrection from the tomb; but because Jesus' resurrection is the proof that one day we too shall rise. The Bible says:

we eagerly await a Saviour ... the Lord Jesus Christ, {21} who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body (Phil 3:20-21).

So secondly, there is THE RESURRECTION ONE DAY Are you ready for that day? Christ is going to come again. No one knows when. It could be vast distances of time away. It could be today. If it were, are you ready? Jesus said:

a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice {29} and come out--those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned (John 5:28-29).

Whether you are alive or dead the issues will be the same? The great question then will be, what has been your response to Jesus Christ. And the result will be, literally, heaven or hell. Just before his crucifixion Jesus said these words - he was speaking about the Holy Spirit who would come into the world after he left the world:

when he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me.

The greatest sin is not murder, rape, child abuse, or any of the terrible things you read about in the papers. According to Jesus the greatest sin is not believing in him. He alone is the one who can give forgiveness and new life - the real way to deal with the problems of the world. So that brings us, finally, to RESURRECTION NOW The only hope is resurrection now for men and women. The real problem is that we are all, by nature, dead spiritually. The Bible says we are "dead in transgressions and sins". That is how we are born. That is the result of the Fall. The only hope is new life. And Jesus offers that. John 5.24:

I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.

There can be resurrection life now. That is the gospel - or good news. Paul said:

because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, {5} made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved. {6} And God raised us up with Christ (Eph 2.4-6).

The Christian life is not a set of resolutions to do better. We cannot do better. A physically dead person cannot give themselves physical life. So a spiritually dead person cannot give themselves spiritual life. We need God to give us new life and new power. He does that in Christ, as we admit our sin, guilt, and failure; and as we thank him for bearing that sin, guilt, and failure, in our place, on the cross that first Good Friday. So becoming a Christian is a process of spiritual resurrection now. I want to conclude with two questions. First, who this morning has never yet received new life from Jesus Christ? Who, if you are honest, has never yet been "raised" with him - as the New Testament puts it. Why not receive that new life from him this morning. What could be better day than Easter Day. By faith, as you sit there, you simply turn to Christ; and you ask for his forgiveness and his Holy Spirit. And you believe that what God says is true - that Christ is the only way; that we all fall short of God's standards; that we are, in fact, spiritually dead; and being spiritually dead we can do nothing to save ourselves. And then you trust those words of Jesus (John 5.24):

{24} "I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.

The second question is to all those who do trust Christ. There is a danger for Christians to be fearful. Perhaps they fear that all is against them. That was the case with the women we read about in Mark's Gospel. "They were afraid." We read in John that the other disciples were also afraid and so locked the doors for security. But as they realised that Christ was truly risen, the fear went away. Today, as Robert Browning said:

How very hard it is to be a Christian.

When you feel that, remember those words of the young man dressed in white that he spoke to the women:

Don't be alarmed ... You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen!

The Risen Lord	30/03/1997 at 9.30am / 11.15am
Mark 16	Jesmond Parish Church

A sermon preached by David Holloway
"You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. {7} But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.'" So said the young man in white to the women at the tomb of Jesus on that first Easter morning, as we heard in our New Testament reading. That remarkable fact is right at the heart of the Christian faith. Christianity is a religion of "resurrection". Without the resurrection of Jesus Christianity collapses. St Paul said: if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith (1 Cor 15.13). We now come to the end of our studies in Mark's Gospel. Over the past two or three months at Jesmond Parish Church we have been studying Jesus and his teaching according to Mark. And on this Easter Day we are looking at Mark 16.1-8. But is the resurrection true? That is the vital question. Today many people are not interested in truth. That is so serious. Relativism is in vogue - that is to say, people claim that there is nothing absolutely true; it is just "true for me". What nonsense! It is either true that today is 31 March or it is false. It is either true that tomorrow is a Bank Holiday (and actually 31 March) or it is false. Matters of fact are either true or false. And they are objective. The Bible says that the devil is the father of lies. In the late 20th century the devil is having a field day. This past week there was the Heaven's Gate cult in San Diego in America. It is quite appalling what people can believe when facts go out the window and truth has ceased to be important. Here were people living and working in the most sophisticated part of the world, but believing that there was a UFO in the wake of the Hale Bopp Comet. And they could join it by killing themselves. This past week, heterosexually, there were lies in the case of Piers Merchant the MP accused of an affair with a seventeen year old. Either he is lying or the Sun newspaper is lying. This past week, homosexually, there were lies relating to the Boy Scouts Association opening its leadership to men who have sex with other men. On a BBC programme on the subject it was repeatedly said that opposition was prejudice as homosexuality and paedophilia were not connected. But that is just false. Studies now show that non-celibate homosexuals are at least 3 times, and some suggest even 17 times, more likely to be paedophiles than are heterosexuals.(For the record can I say that Scout and Guide leaders, of whatever inclination, at Jesmond Parish Church will be committed to the Christian Sex Ethic of reserving sex for heterosexual marriage. They must teach that there is forgiveness for everyone - heterosexual or homosexual. But Christian standards will be firmly maintained.) We are living in a world of bare faced lies. But Christianity is committed to the truth. Jesus said, "I am the way and the truth and the life." The Jews of the first century knew the difference between truth and lies, between imagination and fact. They had courts of law for evaluating evidence. And they had a principle. You get it quoted several times in the Bible: (2 Cor 13:1 - for example) "Every matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses." But when it comes to the person and work of Jesus Christ, there are not "two or three" but four witnesses - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This is quite remarkable. Those early believers were interested in the truth. They did not want imaginative stories or fiction. So, my question again is this: is the resurrection true? You say, "the resurrection seems so odd". But the issue is not "is it odd, but did it happen?" The Bible says that God is the creator of the world. It says that he normally works according to the natural order he has created: (Gen 8:22) As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. But God is not bound by nature; he created it. At times, the Bible teaches, there have been and are miraculous interventions. These are not against nature but beyond nature. Nor are God's interventions spread evenly through history. They have occurred at certain times with more frequency than at other times. But the greatest miracle and intervention was the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So I want us to think about first, therefore,THE RESURRECTION THEN - that first Easter Day; secondly, THE RESURRECTION ONE DAY; and thirdly, THE RESURRECTION NOW. First, THE RESURRECTION THEN Mark's Gospel has to be taken seriously, as do all the others. The Resurrection narratives are different in the four Gospels. But the basic difference lies in the accounts of the appearances of Jesus to the disciples, not in the accounts of how women (and others) found the tomb of Jesus empty. Common sense says that the different accounts of the appearances of Jesus came from different apostles reporting different appearances on different occasions. But it is amazing how similar the accounts of the empty tomb are in the four Gospels. The Gospel writers were all drawing on different sources. But they all agree over the empty tomb. And remember: Mark's Gospel is reckoned to be written in the 60's of the first century. The information he drew on, probably from Peter, was preached, remembered and recorded much earlier. In AD 56 Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians that many of the disciples who had seen Jesus after the Resurrection "are still alive". Those eyewitnesses would not have allowed accounts of the Resurrection to become standard in the churches if they were fictions. That time gap from the Resurrection to when Paul was writing is not very long - only the length of the period that I have been a vicar here at Jesmond. Suppose I was now trying to invent a religion. Suppose I now wrote in the Coloured Supplement next week that in April 1973, just after I arrived here, following a funeral one of the graves in the local cemetery was being visited by family and friends. And it was found opened up; the coffin was not vandalised; but it was empty as though the corpse had passed through it. And what is more, I wrote that the dead person had been seen around town by members of the congregation. What would happen? What would happen is that people in the congregation who were in the congregation then in 1973 would deny it most strongly. They would say that as far as they were concerned it was a complete fiction. By contrast there were people with Paul and Mark who had been contemporary with the resurrection of Jesus and who were still around in the late 50's and early 60s of the 1st century. But they did not deny the Resurrection. Rather they, Paul implies, confirmed it because they themselves had seen the risen Jesus. The evidence is that it was not a fiction. Nor is the Resurrection of Jesus something the disciples were expecting. Mark tells us that the women who were going to anoint the body expected the tomb to have the stone still over the entrance. The women were, we are told, "alarmed". What they found made them fear. Verse 8 of chapter 16: Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. Nor were these hallucinations - the mistaking of visual signals for something you are looking for. They weren't looking for anything. Mary did not see the gardener near the tomb and think he was Jesus. She saw Jesus and thought he was the gardener. The two on the road to Emmaus did not see a stranger and think he was Jesus. They saw Jesus and thought he was a stranger. The apostles in the upper room did not see a ghost and think it was Jesus. They saw Jesus and thought they had seen a ghost. All the theories that try to get around the plain reality of the resurrection have failed. They have been put forward and rejected for centuries. Some have tried to say the women went to the wrong tomb. But Mark tells us it was day light when the women went and two had seen where Joseph and Nicodemus had laid the body; and other apostles later, we are told in John, went to the tomb and found the same thing. Some have tried to say Jesus only swooned. But the Romans ensured Jesus had died on the cross. In any case which of the disciples would have endured martyrdom for a poor, dehydrated Christ, racked with pain and needing enormous care to survive? Which of them would have then proclaimed him the divine Saviour of the world? That is why the Jewish authorities at the time were on very weak ground when they said that the disciples stole the body. They also were disproved when they saw the disciples willing to suffer for Christ. And those disciples were not like some weird and gullible cult in California. They included people like Thomas who refused to believe until there was water-tight evidence. Robert Browning began his poem Easter Day with the exclamation: How very hard it is to be a Christian. That is the reason why so many refuse to face the facts - there is a cost. Aldous Huxley was honest about it. He said: I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able with out any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do ... For myself, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political. So what happened to Jesus? The natural process is one of physical decomposition after death. With Jesus this was not simply stopped; nor was it simply reversed. It was superseded. Normally at death you become dust - in a grave, after a longer time; at the crematorium, very quickly. Genesis 3.19 says: for dust you are and to dust you will return. But Christ's body did not return to the dust! His body was transformed. It became a new and glorious body. His soul, the Bible suggests, had been in Hades - the abode of the dead. His body had been lying on the stone slab in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb. But his body and soul were united in a raised and glorified body. Paul calls it "his glorious body" (Phil 3.21). It had new powers. Christ not only passed through the grave clothes and doors, he appeared to the disciples - but there was physicality to his body. Professor G.B.Caird, the distinguished Oxford New Testament scholar, said this: sober criticism cannot get behind ... the risen Jesus [who] eats and drinks with his disciples. And, there was that mysterious experience of the Ascension. All that is the wonderful truth of the resurrection of Jesus on that first Easter Day. That was the great demonstration of the power of God. The Bible calls it ... the working of his mighty strength, {20} which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms (Eph 1:19-20). But Christianity is a religion of resurrection, not just because of Jesus' resurrection from the tomb; but because Jesus' resurrection is the proof that one day we too shall rise. The Bible says: we eagerly await a Saviour ... the Lord Jesus Christ, {21} who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body (Phil 3:20-21). So secondly, there is THE RESURRECTION ONE DAY Are you ready for that day? Christ is going to come again. No one knows when. It could be vast distances of time away. It could be today. If it were, are you ready? Jesus said: a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice {29} and come out--those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned (John 5:28-29). Whether you are alive or dead the issues will be the same? The great question then will be, what has been your response to Jesus Christ. And the result will be, literally, heaven or hell. Just before his crucifixion Jesus said these words - he was speaking about the Holy Spirit who would come into the world after he left the world: when he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me. The greatest sin is not murder, rape, child abuse, or any of the terrible things you read about in the papers. According to Jesus the greatest sin is not believing in him. He alone is the one who can give forgiveness and new life - the real way to deal with the problems of the world. So that brings us, finally, to RESURRECTION NOW The only hope is resurrection now for men and women. The real problem is that we are all, by nature, dead spiritually. The Bible says we are "dead in transgressions and sins". That is how we are born. That is the result of the Fall. The only hope is new life. And Jesus offers that. John 5.24: I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. There can be resurrection life now. That is the gospel - or good news. Paul said: because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, {5} made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved. {6} And God raised us up with Christ (Eph 2.4-6). The Christian life is not a set of resolutions to do better. We cannot do better. A physically dead person cannot give themselves physical life. So a spiritually dead person cannot give themselves spiritual life. We need God to give us new life and new power. He does that in Christ, as we admit our sin, guilt, and failure; and as we thank him for bearing that sin, guilt, and failure, in our place, on the cross that first Good Friday. So becoming a Christian is a process of spiritual resurrection now. I want to conclude with two questions. First, who this morning has never yet received new life from Jesus Christ? Who, if you are honest, has never yet been "raised" with him - as the New Testament puts it. Why not receive that new life from him this morning. What could be better day than Easter Day. By faith, as you sit there, you simply turn to Christ; and you ask for his forgiveness and his Holy Spirit. And you believe that what God says is true - that Christ is the only way; that we all fall short of God's standards; that we are, in fact, spiritually dead; and being spiritually dead we can do nothing to save ourselves. And then you trust those words of Jesus (John 5.24): {24} "I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. The second question is to all those who do trust Christ. There is a danger for Christians to be fearful. Perhaps they fear that all is against them. That was the case with the women we read about in Mark's Gospel. "They were afraid." We read in John that the other disciples were also afraid and so locked the doors for security. But as they realised that Christ was truly risen, the fear went away. Today, as Robert Browning said: How very hard it is to be a Christian. When you feel that, remember those words of the young man dressed in white that he spoke to the women: Don't be alarmed ... You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen!
For more sermon transcripts visit http://www.church.org.uk

The Risen Lord

A sermon preached by David Holloway