Easter Sunday - Day of Celebration

They say that there are two things in life that are certain: death and taxes. In just a couple of weeks, we going to have to pay our taxes. Today I’d like to talk to you about the other issue: death.

Why talk about a morbid subject like death on Easter Sunday morning? Because you can’t avoid it. It’s part of the Easter story. When Jesus walked out of that tomb, he wasn’t waking up from a deep sleep, or recovering from a coma; he was rising from the dead.

At least that’s what we Christians have always claimed. We don’t claim that it was just Jesus’ spirit that rose—we go all the way out on the limb and claim it was a physical resurrection. He rose bodily from the grave. He was dead and he came back to life.

Now that seems like a rather fantastic claim, doesn’t it? And that claim is at the very centre of the Christian faith. Christianity stands or falls on whether or not that claim is true.

So how can we be certain of it? How can we be sure that the story of the resurrection isn’t just a fantastic legend that has grown up over the years? Is there any kind of historical evidence to support this story? Let’s think about that this morning…

Suppose that someone were to start a rumor today that President John F. Kennedy had physically risen from the dead and had been spotted walking in the Rose Garden of the White House. (Sounds like something you might read in the National Enquirer!)

At first, you would just scoff at such an idea, because there are so many people alive today who remember precisely where they were and what they were doing when they heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Maybe you’re one of them. Perhaps you watched those events on TV. You witnessed his funeral. And you just know that he’s dead.

But suppose that a determined little group of people—let’s call them Kennedy-ites—suppose they keep claiming to have seen JFK. They keep telling the story that he is alive, and eventually, they start persuading more and more people that it’s true. Pretty soon you start reading about it in the respectable newspapers. Hollywood celebrities and famous athletes start saying that they believe it. JFK is alive.

What would you do? How would you go about establishing that this story was not true, but really an incredible hoax?

Well a great place to start would be to go to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia to the place where JFK is buried. You would go to the tomb where his body lays. And if you had the authority to do so, you would open the tomb and the coffin and prove that his remains are still there. And that would be the end of that. Because in order to have a resurrection, you have to have an empty tomb.

Likewise, if you had lived back in the first century, and you wanted to prove that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, you would have gone straight to the graveyard, opened the tomb where Jesus was buried, pointed to his corpse and said “There. That settles that. Jesus did not rise from the dead.”

Question: Why didn’t that happen? Why didn’t the opponents of Jesus do precisely that? Answer: Because the tomb was empty. And there are several lines of historical evidence to prove it.

Fact #1

Even the enemies of Jesus had to admit that the tomb was empty.

On the day after they crucified Jesus, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate and asked him to post a guard on the grave. They were afraid that Jesus’ disciples might come and try to steal the body, and then spread some crazy rumor that he rose from the dead.

You see, the authorities were already thinking about the possibility of an empty tomb. So they decided to do everything in their power to make sure that there would be no empty tomb—that Jesus’ body would stay right where it was.

They had the body, and they fully intended to keep the body. On Saturday, Jesus body was still in the tomb and that’s where the authorities intended it to stay. The guards were posted there to maintain the status quo.

But listen to what happened Saturday night. I’m reading from Matthew 28:2:

There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

Now I’m skipping down to verse 11:

…some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.

Now there are some problems with the guards’ story. How could the guards have known what had happened when they were asleep? And why would they even dare to admit that they had fallen asleep in the first place? Falling asleep on guard duty was a capital offense for a Roman soldier.

The story of the guards has a lot of holes in it. But one thing they DID get right. The tomb was empty, and somebody had to come up with an explanation for it.. So they said “The disciples stole the body and we don’t know where it is. But one thing we do know—the body of Jesus is no longer in that tomb.”

The guards knew it. The authorities knew it. And pretty soon, everybody in Jerusalem knew it. Because even Jesus’ enemies, as much as they hated to do it, had to admit that the tomb that held Jesus’ corpse on Saturday was empty on Sunday.

Fact #2.

The disciples were never arrested for raiding the tomb and stealing the body.

If the soldiers’ story was true, and if disciples really DID raid that tomb, why didn’t the authorities arrest them and recover the body? There’s plenty of evidence to show that that’s what the disciples thought would probably happen. They were expecting a visit from the authorities.

John says in John 20:19:

On the evening of that first day of the week, the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews

Why were they afraid of the Jews? Because they assumed that there was going to be a knock on the door at any moment, and they would all be arrested and charged with stealing Jesus’ body.

But something weird happened—that knock on the door never came. And the disciples remained free to come and go as they pleased in Jerusalem. No arrest warrant was ever put out. There is no indication that any manhunt was ever conducted. They weren’t even brought in for questioning.

Fifty days later, even as the story of the guards was still circulating in Jerusalem, the apostle Peter stood up and made a public address before a crowd of several thousand people. Rather odd that the authorities would allow him to do that, if Peter were a wanted man!

Several months later, Peter and John were arrested by the authorities, but it was for a totally different reason. They were arrested for preaching about Jesus and creating a disturbance. And then they were released. There was not a word said about them being wanted for grave robbery, or for breaking the Roman governor’s seal on the tomb.

If the authorities really believed that the disciples had stolen Jesus’ body and hidden it somewhere, they sure didn’t act as though they did. That’s especially perplexing in light of the fact that the chief priests and Pharisees would have liked nothing better than to have recovered Jesus’ body.

If they could have just found his body think of all the problems that would have solved for them. They could have put Jesus’ corpse on the back of a cart and wheeled it through the streets of Jerusalem. And that would have been the end of the disciples preaching about Jesus being alive. And everything would have returned to normal.

The only explanation for the behavior of the authorities is that they knew that Jesus’ disciples had not stolen the body. The story of the guards was just a cover up. The truth was—the body had disappeared. They couldn’t produce a corpse, because there was no corpse to produce.

Fact #3.

The Resurrection story originated in Jerusalem where it would be easiest to disprove.

This is a detail that we don’t often think about. If you want to start a story that is essentially untrue, the best place to hatch that story is as far away as possible from the place where it would be easiest to disprove it.

For example, if I wanted to start a legend that all Scandinavians are 6’3 and have blonde hair, where would be a good place for me to start such a myth? Well, probably someplace where the people haven’t met too many Scandinavians! Someplace like New Guinea or Tibet.

You certainly wouldn’t be able to get anyone to believe that such a legend were true on the streets of Stockholm, Sweden. People would know better, because the evidence to disprove my story would be right under their noses. There are thousands and thousands of Scandinavians living in Stockholm who are not 6’3 and don’t have blond hair.

Question: Why didn’t the story of the resurrection get started in a place like Galilee? Jesus and his disciples were from Galilee. Jesus had done many amazing miracles in Galilee, so he already had the makings of a legendary reputation there. Surely it would not be surprising if a legend that Jesus rose from the dead came from Galilee?

But the fact is, it didn’t start there. It started in Jerusalem in the headquarters of Jesus’ opponents. It started in the very place where he was put to death and buried. Right under the noses of the authorities who had every reason in the world to stamp out such a story.

If the resurrection of Jesus were a myth, how could it start within walking distance of the place where it was supposed to have happened—where people could go and check out the material evidence for themselves?

If the story of the resurrection were a legend, surely Jerusalem would be the one place in all the world where you would be best equipped to demolish that legend.

But the historical fact is that the story of the resurrection not only got started, but grew explosively in Jerusalem, and not someplace else. Because the tomb was empty. Nothing else can explain the fact that Christianity was born in Jerusalem.

Fact #4.

The early Christians, who were Jewish, began to worship on Sunday—Resurrection Day

Remember, the earliest followers of Jesus were Jewish. They were people of the Sabbath. It was part of their religious and cultural heritage. Worship on the Sabbath was part of their Jewishness.

The followers of Jesus did not suddenly stop being Jews after Easter. Long afterwards, we still read about them going to the Temple to pray, of keeping vows in accordance with the OT Law, of practicing circumcision, and so forth.

But there was one enormous change in the way they did things. They changed their day of worship from the seventh to the first. Sunday became their principal day of worship, not Saturday. That was an incredible change for people who were Jews.

Why did they do it? What could possibly have become so important about the first day of the week that they would even think of changing something that their forefathers had been observing for thousands of years—something that was an intrinsic part of their racial and cultural identity?

It was because of what happened on that one Sunday almost two thousand years ago. They went to a tomb, expecting to find it occupied, and it was empty. On Easter Sunday, Jesus met them—in a glorified, physical body, victorious over death, not as some ghostlike spirit, still the prisoner of death—and that changed everything.

Fact #5

The disciples staked their lives on the truth of the Resurrection.

Let’s assume for a minute that the disciples DID steal Jesus’ body. Assume that they had somehow managed to get into the tomb, past the Roman guards, kidnapped Jesus corpse, and disposed of it someplace else. You know what that would mean? It would mean that the disciples—of all people—would know the truth. They would know beyond the shadow of a doubt that Jesus was really dead.

And if they now wanted to start a legend about him being alive, they would have to agree together that they were going to keep the fact that Jesus was dead a secret. They would have to form a conspiracy of silence. Then, they would have to go out and start preaching a lie—that Jesus Christ was alive.

Now here’s the kicker: They would also have to be willing to die for that lie. Eleven out of the twelve apostles died as martyrs because they were preaching that Jesus was alive.

I ask you: is it consistent with human nature to suppose that these men would be willing to die for something they knew wasn’t true? Don’t you think that one of them, facing the executioner, feeling the flames at his feet, hearing the hungry lions roar in the Coliseum, would have cracked and confessed the truth? But none of them ever did. They went to their deaths with their heads held high, because they were convinced in their hearts that the Resurrection was true.

So what do you do with an empty tomb? The historical evidence for the empty tomb is incredibly strong. Many skeptics have set about to disprove it, only to become convinced of its truth instead.

But evidence alone cannot change your life. There’s an old saying that goes “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” Because your will is the key. You cannot be convinced of something if you have already made up your mind not to believe it.

And that’s where this all gets very personal. You see, there is a very personal dimension to this matter of the empty tomb.

If Jesus did rise from the dead, it means two things:

He’s alive today.
He must have been who he said he was—God in human flesh.

Now if Jesus is God in human form, then there must be a pretty good reason why he came here to earth.

And if you understand the reason that He gave for his coming—to save us from our sin—then that has some pretty striking personal implications…

It means that you and I are lost in sin without him
It means that the only way to get “found” is to put your trust in him to save you
It means that you must turn your destiny over to him and let him have control of your life

And that is the very point at which your will steps in and says to your intellect: “Hold on, now. Let’s not be hasty here! Sure, it seems like a pretty rational and convincing case that Jesus actually rose from the dead. But if he did, then the only reasonable thing to do is to become a follower of him. And you know what that means—no more doing things MY way.”

So your will says to your intellect: “Maybe we’d better just ignore that empty tomb. Oh sure, we can come to church on Easter Sunday morning. We can even sing the resurrection songs. Not much harm in doing that.

“But for the rest of the year, let’s keep that empty tomb safely tucked away in the pages of the Bible. Jesus is a nice guy and everything, and it sure seems like He did rise from the dead, but I’d just as soon run my own life, thank you very much.’”

Is that where you’re at today?

Or do you want to become a follower of the only one in history whose tomb is empty?