Loving God, you vindicated your Son, Jesus, when you raised him from the dead and gave us hope both for this life and the next.  Make the power of his resurrection real for us this day, and continue to guide and direct us by the power of your Holy Spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

    The resurrection of Jesus seems to be one of the most difficult things for people to believe.  There was the empty tomb found by the disciples.  There were all of the encounters with the risen Jesus, beginning with the encounter of Mary Magdalene in the garden.  Yet, for many people, these recorded experiences in the Scriptures are not enough to convince them.  Thus, it is not surprising that a number of books have been written which ask the question as to whether Jesus really rose from the dead or not.

    One of these books (which I have mentioned before) is called The Case for Easter: A Journalist Investigates the Evidence for the Resurrection.  It is written by Lee Strobel, who went from being an atheist to believing in Jesus Christ.  In the book, Strobel addresses three basic questions.  First of all, was Jesus really dead?  Secondly, was his body really missing from the tomb?  And finally, did people really see him alive after his death on the cross? After examining the evidence and concluding “Yes” to all of these questions, Strobel asks Gary Habermas why the resurrection is important.  Habermas is a man who has spent his life writing about the resurrection and making a case for the resurrection of Jesus in debates with philosophers and atheists.  Here is Strobel’s account of their interview.

    “I had asked about the importance of the resurrection, and Habermas decided to take a risk by describing what happened in 1995, when his wife, Debbie, slowly died of stomach cancer.  Caught off guard by the tenderness of the moment, all I could do was listen.
    “I sat on our porch,” he began, looking off to the side at nothing in particular.  He sighed deeply, then went on.  “My wife was upstairs dying.  Except for a few weeks, she was home through it all.  It was an awful time.  This was the worst thing that could possibly happen.”
    He turned and looked straight at me.  “But do you know what was amazing?  My students would call me – not just one but several of them – and say, ‘At a time like this, aren’t you glad about the resurrection?’  As sober as those circumstances were, I had to smile for two reasons.  First, my students were trying to cheer me up with my own teaching.  And second, it worked.
    “As I would sit there, I’d picture Job, who went through all that terrible stuff and asked questions of God, but then God turned the tables and asked him a few questions.
    “I knew if God were to come to me, I’d ask only one question: ‘Lord, why is Debbie up there in bed?’  And I think God would respond by asking gently, ‘Gary, did I raise my Son from the dead?’
    “I’d say, ‘Come on, Lord, I’ve written seven books on that topic!  Of course he was raised from the dead.  But I want to know about Debbie!’
    “I think he’d keep coming back to the same question – ‘Did I raise my Son from the dead?’ – until I got his point: the resurrection says that if Jesus was raised two thousand years ago, there’s an answer to Debbie’s death in 1995.  And do you know what?  It worked for me while I was sitting on the porch, and it still works today.
    “It was a horribly emotional time for me, but I couldn’t get around the fact that the resurrection is the answer for her suffering.  I still worried; I still wondered what I’d do raising four kids alone.  But there wasn’t a time when that truth didn’t comfort me.
    “Losing my wife was the most painful experience I’ve ever had to face, but if the resurrection could get me through that, it can get me through anything.  It was good for AD 30, it was good for 1995, and it’s good beyond that.”
    Habermas locked eyes with mine.  “That’s not some sermon,” he said quietly.  “I believe that with all my heart.  If there’s a resurrection, there’s a heaven.  If Jesus was raised, Debbie will be raised.  And I will be someday too.
    “Then I’ll see them both.” (The Case for Easter, Zondervan, 2003, pp. 82-84)

    It is no accident that the readings that are most commonly used at funerals all proclaim the resurrection.  The resurrection of Jesus is the source of our hope as Christians.  It confirms his identity as the Son of God and proclaims his victory over sin and death.  It also proclaims that God will raise with Jesus all those who belong to him.  Yes, there still will be suffering and death in this life, but death is never the final word.  There is a new creation and new life through Jesus Christ.

    To return to Strobel’s book for just a moment, he says that there was one thing that clinched the case for him with respect to the resurrection of Jesus (pp. 87-88).  This one thing was the way in which the disciples acted afterwards.  They all left their previous ways of life in order to spend the rest of their lives proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus.  From a purely human point of view, they had nothing to gain by doing this.  In fact, they faced imprisonment, torture, hardship and execution.  Why would anybody do this merely to perpetuate a hoax?  He writes:

“The disciples were in the unique position to know for a fact whether Jesus had returned from the dead.  They saw him, they touched him, they ate with him.  They knew he wasn’t a hallucination or a legend.  And knowing the truth, they were willing to die for him” (The Case for Easter, p. 88).

The disciples not only believed that Jesus had risen from the dead, they knew it for a fact.

    For our part, we are asked to believe in Jesus, taking into account the witness of those first disciples, who knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Jesus is the Son of God, our Saviour, who is risen from the dead.  And, because Christ is risen, this means that he is still available to us today: available for a relationship with us; available to intercede with God on our behalf; available to guide and direct our lives by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus is not just a historical figure who once was crucified.  Jesus is our risen and ascended Lord, who continues to love us and to call us to come and follow.

    Because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, we, too, are called to live the risen life.  When Paul writes  about how we are raised with Christ through baptism, he talks   about setting our minds on the things that are above and seeking the things that are above in order that we, too, might share in Christ’s glory.  There is a transformation in our thinking that takes place when Christ becomes our life (Col. 3:1-4).  This leads to a transformation in how we act, too, as we become more and more Christ-like by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The transformation is complete when we find ourselves truly able to love one another as Jesus has first loved us.

    Let us then live as people who have hope – as people who have an active relationship with Jesus, our risen and ascended Lord.  As we do so, remember that we are both saints and sinners – imperfect human beings who strive to live by the power of the Holy Spirit.  We also live in a sinful and imperfect world, which will bring us our share of sorrow in this life.  Yet, just as it did for Gary Habermas, the resurrection has the power to carry us through many a crisis.  May we, too, know this to be true.  Amen.

The Resurrection of Our Lord (A)                        John 20:1-18
April 20, 2014                                
St. Luke’s Zion Lutheran Church
Pastor Lynne Hutchison

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