What Happened?--An Easter Message Rough Cut

 

What Happened?

            You know how it is. You may have heard about it. Someone may have told you what was going to happen. But then it happens, and even if you were expecting it, you were totally not expecting it?

          I know, sounds strange doesn’t it? Let me explain.

          I knew that my oldest child was going to enter kindergarten. Kind of looking forward to smaller day care bills even! Yet, when we got to that point, I was really not ready. I wasn’t ready for her eagerness to run in the door. I was not ready for Mattea to scream and cry because she was missing her sissy (I have that on video mind you). I was not ready. Even though I was prepared and ready.

          I just sat down in the quiet of that night and said to myself, “What happened?”

          You decide to get married. You plan a day. You have people gather around and you say I dos. The reception, the honeymoon happen, and you walk into your new home together. And all of the sudden you are like, “what just happened”. It was like you were living your life, but you were somehow watching it in a movie at the same time. And now I have to share all my space and all my stuff. Wow.

          I suspect, that this phenomenon is even more pronounced after deep trauma. And no doubt, the death of Christ was a profound lifeshock, an earth shattering trauma. They watched him beaten, bleed, and eventually suffocate and die.

          The disciples were not ready for Jesus’s death. He had told them he was going to die. He had done this over and over. Even the week of his death, after that Palm Sunday procession, he told the disciples that one of the women was anointing him because she was preparing for his burial. But often we hear what we want to hear.

          Our loved one tells us they are not going to make it much longer. We tell them to stay positive, and to keep fighting. They tell us there is not much time left. But we don’t want to hear it. And then….they are gone.

          And then the death of Jesus is interrupted by the Passover Sabbath. In Jerusalem. No opportunity to care for the body. No ability for over 24 hours to bring spices, to care for his corpse, to do any of that. He died and he was rushed off to a borrowed tomb, and then a day of rest and worship where nobody could do anything. Which brings us to where the passage starts, on the first Easter Sunday.

They were still trying to find out, what happened? What happened on Good Friday?

          So, early in the morning, the Scripture says, the women get busy going out to care for Jesus’ body. There is a stone that has been rolled away from the tomb. They look in. They do not find the body of Jesus.

          New Testament scholar Tom Wright says in his translation called THE KINGDOM NEW TESTAMENT that “they were at a loss what to make of it all”. The NIV puts it, “they were wondering about this”.

          They were wondering what happened? They walked in ready to care for a body, but there was no body there,

          The angels reminded the women of what Jesus had said and taught about his death, burial, and resurrection. The Scriptures said that the women then remembered what Jesus had taught them.

          The women went and told the 11 what happened. And they thought they were just women telling stories, and they did not pay much attention to what the women had said.

          Now mind you, from the context I believe they told the men about the empty tomb, but then they also reminded them about what Jesus had said that they had remembered after they were confronted by the angels. They preached their experience, but they also preached some theology. Nevertheless, the men all thought that all that they were saying made no sense. Probably just emotional women telling stories.

          All of them, anyway, except for Peter (and probably John from the other gospel accounts), did not respond at all to what the women had said.

          Luke says that Peter got to the tomb. He too saw that it was empty. Wright translates it this way, “he too saw the grave clothes, he went back home, perplexed at what had happened”. THE NIV translates it as “wondering what had happened.”

          And that is how that first account of the resurrection account ends. Perplexed. Shocked. With the people who encountered the empty tomb saying, “what happened”?

          It is a little disappointing isn’t it? You mean the early disciples encountered the empty tomb and they didn’t have it all figured out then and there? They didn’t have a theology developed, a sermon prepared, and a ministry plan ready to go?

Nope.

They didn’t have all the answers.

But, they were lost in wonderment.

The experience of the risen Christ rocked their world. Their hopelessness turned to eternal hope. Their brokenness begun to be made whole. Their confusion was transformed to clarity. Their apparent loss and defeat was turned into victory.

They may have been perplexed and confused, they might not have had all the answers or put everything together right away. But this one thing we see in the passage, and in the encounters people had with risen Lord throughout history. People who were drawn into the movement of Christ were captured by a sense of wonder.

You see, my friends, we may have lived life with great church programs, wonderful Christian friends, awesome memories of great childhood Sunday school teachers, and more.

But I worry we have lost the sense of wonder and awe that stems from encountering the power and truth of Almighty God, and surrendering ourselves to his call.

The men on the road to Emmaus had their hearts burn within them.

Does your heart burn within you because you are living in the presence of the risen Lord?

I have to be honest. As a pastor, one of my worried as a parent has always been that we will live near the church, and they will live under the day to day operations of church life, and because of all the kind of “church business” that they live with day to day they will miss encountering the power of the living God. Or worse, they will live with it so surrounding them that they see it as commonplace. I have seen it in youth group with church kids whose parents go to meeting after meeting, and the things of God become common place. It concerns me. It grieves me.

This is my prayer for you today: Don’t lose that sense of awe and wonder that you have been called by the one who conquered sin and death, who died a painful death to show us his love, and who now shows us how to live in supernatural victory through transformed lives.

Don’t lose the wonder, friends.

 

Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning puts it this way,

 ““Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

Miracles are breaking through all around us. God’s glory is at work in every nook and cranny of the universe. Some of you take off your shoes, raise your hands and cry glory.

But many of us are oblivious, and so we just sit around and pluck blackberries.

Don’t lose the wonder.

Don’t lose the wonder.

I’m still in awe that God broke through to my broken heart and found me. A lonely teenage who was in middle school, wondering if my life was really worth living, wondering if my life really was worth anything, wondering if I had any value. Wondering if there was anything anyone saw in me that was loveable. Wondering how long I could really go on.

And somehow this fat, awkward kid, who had some semblance of a knowledge of Christ from Sunday School years before, found his way into a small church that met in the little league clubhouse, and then the seventh day Adventist church on Sunday mornings.

And somehow I encountered this Jesus who loved me when I felt unlovable, who called me to trust and follow him, who slowly pulled me out of my life of hopelessness into a life that had some sort of purpose that he gave to me.

I am still wondering how and why I went on to sense some sort of call of God on my life in full-time ministry, encouraging others to know Christ and grow deeper in their relationship with him. I mean, I am not really all that smart or gifted. And I am certainly not

I am still in awe in how I am so blessed to have someone like Jennifer to walk in this life with me, and how I got two little girls that are so wonderful and smart to raise and hopefully point them Jesus.

Don’t lose the wonder, friends.

Christ is risen! God has done marvelous things, and given us a lifetime to work out what happened on that first Easter morning.

He has given us the opportunity stare in the empty tomb with wonder. And to know that that empty tomb means new life, victorious life, a life of beauty, and life everlasting.