Resurrection Sunday!

I hope that everyone is having a very blessed Resurrection Sunday! Remember this morning some two thousand years ago when the three women tent to the tomb only to find it empty according to Mark 16:1-8, When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 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.’”

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

So what does the resurrection mean to us today? Like many things there are many meanings take for example grammar and let us use verbs in our example, they come in three tenses: past, present, and future. The past is used to describe things that have already happened (e.g., earlier in the day, yesterday, last week, three years ago). The present tense is used to describe things that are happening right now, or things that are continuous The future tense describes things that have yet to happen (e.g., later, tomorrow, next week, next year, three years from now).

Easter morning is the central event in human history, because it was for this purpose that Christ came: to die, to be buried, and to rise again. The resurrection confronts us with the curse of sin, the certainty of judgment, the reality of death, and individual eternal destiny. It forces us to take seriously all the prophecies of Scripture.

With this in mind, we can think of Easter in three tenses, each of which is rooted in the historical resurrection of Jesus:

So let us take a brief... really brief look at what the resurrection has meant in the past, in the present and in the future:

The resurrection past . . . is our peace with God that was accomplished for us in the moment of Christ’s resurrection.

God’s power toward us who believe is according to the working of his mighty strength which he exerted in Christ, when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms.

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. Ephesians 1:19–20 NIV

The resurrection present . . . is the power of God at work in us to shape us in our new identity in Christ.

For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. 2 Corinthians 5:14–15 NIV

The resurrection future . . . is the promise of God, the hope of glory, that just as Christ was raised in his glorified body so we will be raised at his second coming, and that we—spirit, soul, and body—will then be perfectly conformed to the person of Christ.

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?” John 11:25-26 NIV

Make no mistake: if he rose at all

It was as His body;

If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,

The amino acids rekindle,

The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,

Each soft spring recurrent;

It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the

Eleven apostles;

It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes

The same valved heart

That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered

Out of enduring Might

New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,

Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded

Credulity of earlier ages:

Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,

Not a stone in a story,

But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of

Time will eclipse for each of us

The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,

Make it a real angel,

Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in

The dawn light, robed in real linen

Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed

By the miracle,

And crushed by remonstrance.

“Seven Stanzas at Easter”  by John Updike