Sunday, April 20, 2025, The Resurrection of Our Lord
“It’s a Great Day to be Alive!”
Psalm 118; Isaiah 65:17-25; Romans 8:9-17; John 20:1-18
A Hymn Service for Easter, with Holy Communion
Hymns: #457 “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today”; #465 “Now All the Vault of Heaven Resounds”; #466 “Christ Has Arisen, Alleluia”; #461 “I Know That My Redeemer Lives” ; #475 “Good Christian Friends, Rejoice and Sing”; #479 “Christ Is Risen, Christ Is Living”; #490 “Jesus Lives! The Victory’s Won”; #480 “He’s Risen, He’s Risen”
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father, and from Jesus our risen and living Savior. Amen.
One of my parishioners back in Michigan, years ago, was a really wonderful man named Ray Bauer. Ray was a man of great faith, and a man who wasn’t afraid to talk to people about Jesus. Some found him a little abrasive, but that was because he cared about the Gospel so much, he just couldn’t keep quiet about it. And he wanted everyone else to care just as much as he did. He was a good friend.
Anyway, my friend Ray had to have heart surgery when he was in his mid-eighties, where the doctors replaced a faulty valve with a pig valve. After the surgery, his wife and children gathered around as he was coming out of the anesthesia. They said, “Dad, Dad, can you hear us? Are you awake?” And he answered, “Oink, oink, oink.”
“Oh, for a faith that will not shrink, though pressed by many a foe,” the old hymn says. What a joy it must be to have a faith like that; a faith that can open its eyes, even through pain, and still say, “It’s great day to be alive!”
The trouble with preaching an Easter Sunday message is that I never feel like I can do the thing justice. There are no adequate words in any human language to express what a great thing Jesus has done for us. “What language can I borrow to thank You, dearest Friend,” the old Lent hymn says. St. Paul writes, “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were sinners, Christ died for us.”
We were dead, man! We were all stuck in this time trap of a world, the clock winding down on us day by day, time running out, death and a place in the ground waiting for us; and an eternity in hell waiting for us after that, on account of our sin. When St. Paul wrote, “The wages of sin is death,” he didn’t mean just death in this world, but a fate worse than death forever in the next one. That’s what is means to be “dead in sin”
But here we are today, very much alive on this Easter Sunday morning! We were dead, but now we get to live! And not just live, but live with joy, and live with hope, and live in the peace of God, alive with the promise that we’ll get to live forever in God’s heaven. How can we come up with words to thank God for a blessing like that?
It’s a great day to be alive! No more fear, St. Paul says. We get to be God’s children, children of the King of Heaven, inheritors of every good thing our Father has to give us. Will we have to share in Jesus’ sufferings, to suffer just a little bit of what He did, for just a little while? Sure, that’s part of the deal, if we’re going to follow Him. But after this, we get to share forever in His glory.
These aren’t just words somebody plucked out of thin air. We don’t have an empty hope, or a maybe hope, or a hope based on a wish or a dream. We have a real hope, based on a real Savior, who was hung on a cross outside Jerusalem in 33 A.D. – and who proved Himself to be the Son of God by showing Himself to be very much alive, after the Jews and the Romans and the disciples and everyone else had written Him off as dead and buried. Apostle John, who wrote down our Easter Gospel as the Spirit enabled Him, said: “These are written than you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His name.”
Early on the first day of the week – Sunday, Easter Sunday morning - while it was still dark, dark as a grave, dark as death itself – Mary Magdalene went to the tomb. She went there to mourn and to cry, like how many millions of other people who’ve gone to a grave to cry for a friend; we’ve all been there. She didn’t expect anything else; who would? Death is what it is. And she saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance to the tomb. Why would that be? Who would do such a thing? Her first thought was that His grave must have somehow been robbed.
So she ran to find Simon Peter and “the other disciple, the one Jesus loved.” That was John, the one who wrote this Gospel; what we’re reading here is his eye-witness account of what happened that day. (By the way, John wasn’t being arrogant, calling himself “the one Jesus loved;” he was simply acknowledging that Jesus loved him. He wasn’t saying he was the only one Jesus loved; only that he was one of many. You and I are also “the ones Jesus loves”). And Mary Magdalene, out of breath and frightened and confused, told them, “They (whoever “they” was) have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we (Mary and the other women) don’t know where they have put Him.”
Peter and John, another Gospel tells us, though she was talking nonsense, just the blathering of a hysterical woman. (They should have known better; Jesus had told them exactly what was going to happen). So Peter and John ran for the tomb, with John outrunning Peter and getting there first. John bent over and looked into the tomb. (Such tombs have a low entrance, about waist high). And he saw the strips of linen lying there. Those were the same strips of linen Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus had wrapped Jesus’ body in when they took Him down from the cross. (If someone was going to steal a body, why would they unwrap it first?)
Then Peter arrived, and a little bolder than John, went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, and the burial cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head (the one that was used to keep the jaws of a deceased person from hanging open). That cloth had evidently been carefully folded and set to the side.
Then John also found the courage to go inside, and “he saw and believed.” Believed what? That Jesus’ body was gone, certainly; that somehow He’d been freed from His burial linens. But that He was alive? Maybe not just yet. “They still did not understand from Scripture (that’s the Old Testament prophets) that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” That would come soon, but not just yet.
Peter and John went home, back to that locked room they’d been hiding in, wondering to themselves what in the world was going on. But Mary stood outside the tomb, still crying, because her Lord had been crucified, and now His body was gone. And she bent over to look into the tomb… And that’s when this Easter morning just exploded into glory.
The angels showed up, two of them, dressed in white and sitting where the body of Jesus had been (past tense!) Angels, you may have noticed, always seem to be there when really glorious things happen in the Gospel story. An angel was there to tell mother Mary she was going to have a Son. The angels filled the sky above the shepherds to announce the Savior’s birth. The angels came to attend to Jesus whenever His road was hard, and He needed help to be strong. And now here they were to deliver that greatest good news that ever been told in the history of this world.
The angels asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” Why wouldn’t I be? On any other day but this, that would be a cruel and really insensitive question. "They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put Him."
“And at this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.” He was standing there. Against all odds, against all human reason, against everything known to be ordinary or rational or sane that’s ever happened in this world, He was standing there alive! He was dead; and not just dead, but beat to pieces. Abused for hours, poor back torn open, nails through His hands and feet, hung on a cross for hours for everyone to see, then taken down and wrapped in those strips of linen and buried. And now He was alive.
Jesus asked her the same awful question the angels had asked her: “Woman, why are you crying?” That question is only fit to ask if you can give me a reason not to cry.
Jesus asked her, “Who is it you’re looking for?” She thought maybe He was the man who tended the garden, maybe even the man who’d taken His body away. She said, "Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where you have put Him, and I will go and get Him."
Jesus said to her, “Mary.” He called her by name; she heard His voice, and then she knew. (He knows your name, too!) She called Him “Teacher!” and she went to embrace Him; but it wasn’t time for that yet, either. There was much to be done yet on this Easter morning. For Jesus, to return to His Father to tell Him the saving work had been done and life had won out over death. For Mary, to tell the disciples the Good News: “I have seen the Lord!”
It’s a great day to be alive! Christ is in us! These bodies of ours will die one day because of sin, yet our spirits are very much alive. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is living in us, and that same Spirit will raise us up when Jesus comes again. No more fear! “Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid,” Jesus says. We don’t ever have to be afraid again, not of life or death or anything this world can do.
“Dear friends,” John writes, “now we are children of God, and what we will be had not yet been made known. But we know that when He appears, we shall see Him as He is.” That’s our hope. That’s our life. That’s our Easter peace. I pray I’ve said it right, and I hope I’ve said enough.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! Alleluia! He is risen indeed! In Jesus’ name; Amen.