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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
At times modern medicine may blur the distinction, but, generally speaking, people are regarded as either living or dead. And, one would not normally look for someone who is living in a place where one would normally find those who are dead. So, the angels in the Gospel Reading this morning rhetorically ask the women who had gone to the tomb why they are seeking the Living One among the dead ones. This Easter Day the angels’ rhetorical question gives us the theme for this sermon: “The Living among the Dead”, which theme we will see applies not only to Jesus but also in some ways to us.
On that first Good Friday afternoon, the women who had come with Jesus from Galilee saw the tomb and how Jesus’s body was laid, and they returned home and prepared spices and ointments. On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment, but on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. (Luke 23:55-24:1) Did they expect to find a Living One? Would they have brought the spices and ointments, if they had not expected to find Jesus’s body among the dead ones? Could they have been wanting to anoint a dead body that would only be in the tomb for parts of three days? The divinely‑inspired St. Luke does not really answer those questions. He simply tells us that the pious women found the tomb open but not the body of the Lord Jesus, and then he tells us what happened next.
Two men in dazzling apparel—angels, they are identified as later—suddenly are standing by the perplexed women. The angels ask their rhetorical question: “Why are you seeking the Living One among the dead ones?” The angels tell the women something they already knew and something they apparently did not already know: “He is not here, but He has risen!” And the angels recall for the women Jesus’s own words’ prophesying of His betrayal, crucifixion, and resurrection. (Apparently those words of Jesus were proclaimed to the women by the disciples who themselves heard the words from Jesus.) The women remember the words and, having returned from the tomb, tell all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. In fact, St. Luke says, they kept telling them, but the women’s report seemed to them an idle tale, like the women were enacting a charade, or were delirious (St. Luke the doctor uses a medical term). They kept not believing the women, but, St. Luke says, Peter arose, ran to the tomb, saw the linen cloths by themselves, and went home marveling.
Was Peter’s marveling belief or unbelief? Even before that, did the angels rebuke or reproach the women for seeking the Living One among the dead ones? Again, the divinely‑inspired St. Luke does not really answer those questions. Our looking back with 20‑20 hindsight and judging them is not as helpful for us as examining ourselves. How do we struggle to believe the report we hear of Jesus’s resurrection and its importance for our lives? When something seems impossibly good and against our human reason, do we reject it outright? Do the implications of God’s Word always determine what we think, say, and do in our lives? How do we think, speak, and act contrary to what God tells us to be true? Physically we certainly appear to be living, but, perhaps like some cases of modern medicine, spiritually we by nature are dead. By nature, we are dead in trespasses and sins, following the course of this world, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is at work in those who disobey, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and so were by nature children of wrath like everybody else (Ephesians 2:1-3).
Perhaps when we hear the words “the living” and “the dead” we think first about the teaching of the Bible and the confession of the creeds that Jesus will come “to judge the living and the dead” (Acts 10:42; 2 Timothy 4:1; 1 Peter 4:5). That looming judgment, when Jesus returns or when we die (whichever comes first), serves to call us to repent: to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust God to forgive our sin, and to want to do better. So, we repent: we repent of our struggling to believe God’s Word; we repent of our failing to think, speak, and act in keeping with God’s Word; we repent of all of our sins. Repentance leads from death to life (Acts 11:18); through repentance, the Lord kills and makes alive (Deuteronomy 32:39). When we so repent, then God forgives our sin, whatever our sin might be; He forgives it all for Jesus’s sake.
Jesus is He Who was dead but now lives (Revelation 1:18; 2:8). As strips of cloth were a sign of God’s being born into human flesh, so strips of cloth were a sign of the miraculous resurrection of that flesh (Luke 2:12; 24:12). St. Luke tells us that the women who went to the tomb “did not find the body of the Lord Jesus”—St. Luke’s statement is the first time in his account that the title and name “Lord Jesus” are used together. The resurrected Jesus is now the Lord Jesus—Lord of the living and the dead (Romans 14:9). As Jesus told the disciples, and as the disciples told the women, and as the angels reminded the women, the Son of Man’s betrayal, crucifixion, and resurrection were divinely necessary—they were divinely necessary to save us from our sins! As Scripture and Jesus had prophesied, so Jesus, out of His great love for us, died on the cross and rose from the grave for us. As St. Paul put it so succinctly in the Epistle Reading (1 Corinthians 15:19-26), “For as by a man came death, by a Man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” “God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses [and sins], made us alive together with Christ … and raised us up with Him” (Ephesians 2:4-6). By grace through faith in Jesus Christ we receive the forgiveness of our sins, and so we also receive eternal life.
Some four weeks ago, in the hours before signing the sequester order into law, President Obama tried to make but botched a Science Fiction reference, saying that people think that, to resolve the nation’s budget crisis, the President should “somehow do a Jedi mind meld” with the Republicans. Of course, fans of Star Trek and Star Wars know that the President should have said either “Vulcan mind meld” or “Jedi mind trick”. One could almost say that the angels’ words worked something similar on the women: the angels said to the women, “Remember how He told you”, and the women remembered. But, in the case of the angels and the women, there’s no fictional trick! The Word of God is living and active (Hebrews 4:12); the Gospel is the power of God (Romans 1:16; 1 Corinthians 1:18; 1 Thessalonians 1:5). We receive the forgiveness of our sins and so also eternal life through the living, active, and powerful Word of God.
God’s sent messengers apply that living, active, and powerful Word of God to us with water in Holy Baptism. At the Baptismal Font we are baptized into Christ Jesus and so into His death and resurrection so that we consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus (Romans 6:1-11). Similarly, in the Sacrament of the Altar that living, active, and powerful Word of God with bread and wine gives us Jesus’s body and blood. In this breaking of the bread, the resurrected Christ Jesus makes Himself known to us, as St. Luke records He did to the believers in Emmaus (Luke 24:30-31). As we receive His body given for us and His blood shed for us, we, who once were dead, receive the forgiveness of our sins and so also eternal life. Now is the time when those who are spiritually dead hear the voice of the Son of God and spiritually live (John 5:25).
So made spiritually living ones, we find ourselves to be “The Living among the Dead”—that is, the ones living among those around us who remain spiritually dead. We do not conform to the world (Romans 12:2), but we live in the world as witnesses to our Lord in word and deed (John 16:33; 17:15). We present ourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life (Romans 6:13), each day putting our sinful nature to death and rising as a new person to live before God in righteousness and purity forever.
That eternal life we have already now on account of Jesus’s resurrection—that eternal life so beautifully described in today’s Old Testament Reading (Isaiah 65:17-25)—that eternal life is coming! Our loved ones’ bodies (or our own bodies) may well die in this world before our Lord returns. And, when the bodies die, we care for them, as the women in the Gospel Reading were going to care for Jesus’s body; we care for the bodies because they will be resurrected when Jesus returns. Even now, the souls of such believers’ bodies are alive with Christ, for, as He said, God is God of the living, not of the dead (Matthew 22:32; Mark 12:27; Luke 20:38). We do not fear the death of the body, for, thanks to Jesus’s resurrection, the death of the body is the soul’s entrance to eternal life. May God truly grant that we, who are raised from the death of our sin and made alive in Christ, may remain faithful now, so that, in the end, we may have our bodies resurrected not to eternal death but to eternal life.
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +