By Donald M. Tuttle

A few years ago, our church was planning a trip to the Holy Land. Unfortunately, we never made it. Violence erupted between Jews and Palestinians, making such a trip unwise.

If we were to plan another such trip, we could use your journey through the season of Lent as our itinerary. We started in Galilee, along the Jordan, where Jesus was baptized and from which he went into the wilderness to be tested. From there, we followed him to Caesarea Philippi, not far from what the modern city of Damascus. There we heard Peter declare that Jesus is the Christ and Jesus declare the rejection that was ahead of him.

After that, we went with Jesus to Jerusalem, to the Temple, where he say the moneychangers’ hawking their wares and tossed them out. Then there was the visit to a typical home in Jerusalem. It was there that a teacher named Nicodemus came to see Jesus and went away uncertain as to what Jesus had come to do.

Later we went with Jesus to a place of prayer, where he struggled with the choices before him. And, of course, last week we walked with him—actually, well behind him—as he went to the Cross.

It has been quite a journey—even if we never left the sanctuary—because along the way we have answered in part the question: “What Did Jesus Do?” We discovered that he resisted temptation, suffered for others, confronted injustice, came to save, obeyed God and died in our place and for our sins. That is quite a list.

Now it is Easter. And the fact is that none of the answers we have heard to question “What Did Jesus Do?” would matter if it were not for today. Oh, a few folk might still celebrate Christmas in the same way we celebrate the birthdays of George Washington or Abe Lincoln. A few might even commemorate his death in the way folks do the death of Princess Di or Elvis. But not of what he did would much matter if it were not for what Jesus did on that Sunday morning long ago.

And What Did Jesus Do?

He rose from the dead. More precisely, God raised him from the dead.

The same child who was born in stable and who died on a cross was resurrected. He got up—not from sleep but from the cold, hard reality of death.

Now I know it is hard for many of us to believe that. It is hard for the modern mind to grasp the resurrection. Such things just don’t happen. Yet the resurrection is the heart of the Christian faith. It and it alone gives meaning to the life and death of Jesus. Today I want us to explore how.

First, the resurrection of Jesus confirms that he was and is the Christ.

Recently new rules went into effect at hospitals across the United States. In Corpus Christi, one hospital system decided that only licensed or ordained clergy can have access to certain information. That is fair enough. But to enforce such a rule, the system now requires pastors to prove that they are who they say they are. A week or so ago the Rev. Ruth had to take a bulletin from the church, a photo ID and her certificate of license to prove that she really is a pastor. Next week I will have to do the same. Proving that we are who we say we are may be inconvenient but it is not difficult.

That is not true for Jesus. For three years had been traveling about ancient Israel teaching and healing. He had sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely said he was the Christ, the one God had sent to set the people of Israel free. He told people that the kingdom of God was going to be revealed through him and that one of these days they would see him ruling at the right hand of God. He made extraordinary claims, but they were not unique claims. Others also claimed to be the messiah. The difference is that Jesus’ identify as the messiah was affirmed by the resurrection.

The fact is that if Jesus had not been raised from the dead, no one would have cared about him. The rag-tag bunch of misfits who fled when he was arrested, denied him when asked if they knew him and hid out in the Upper Room for fear of the crowds would have vanished into obscurity. His teachings—the Beatitudes and the parables, for example—would never have been recorded because they would have been nothing more than the utterances of a failed egotist or deranged lunatic.

But Jesus did rise from the dead. His resurrection confirmed his identity. That is why the same men whose strategy was to run and hide when Jesus was arrested went on to suffer and die proclaiming him Lord of all. That is why his followers began to recount his every word and every deed, even writing accounts of his life so that nothing vital might be loss. The resurrection confirmed for them—and for us—the fact that Jesus is who he claims to be—the Christ, the Son of the Living God. (424)

But the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead doesn’t just confirm who he is. It also confirms what he had done for us.

In his wonderful little book The Will of God, Leslie Weatherhead suggested that God’s purpose in sending Jesus into the world was that humanity might follow him. God intended for all of us to recognize Jesus as Lord, to heed his voice, to live as he taught us to live. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. The power of sin was so great that humanity didn’t just fail to recognize and follow Jesus, it, that is, we rejected him, we determined that he had to die. What Weatherhead said is that we created a dilemma for Jesus. He would either run or die. When he chose the later, God used his death as the means by which our sins could be forgiven.

Scripture clear understands Jesus’ death as the means by which our sins are forgiven. We see that in the stories of his life. At one point, Jesus tells his followers that God has sent him not to condemn the world but to save it. Those words immediately follow a reference to him “being lifted up,” that is, a reference to his death on the cross.

We also see it in the gathering of his disciples for the Last Supper. When Jesus takes the cup and blesses it, he tells them it is his blood, the blood of the new covenant, he is telling them that he is the new Passover Lamb, the one who is to be sacrificed for the sins of the people. And, of course, it only follows that he dies during the Passover. Because, as John the Baptist said, he is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

Yet if Jesus had not been raised from the dead, we would have no reason to believe that our sins are forgiven.

Less than 30 years after Jesus’ death, there were people—in the church—who thought that the resurrection of Jesus’ body was impossible. They believe only in a spiritual resurrection, some type of extreme spiritual experience rather than the raising of flesh and blood. Yet the Apostle Paul, the same Paul who became a follower of Jesus no more than four years after our Lord’s death, the same Paul who encountered the Risen Lord on the road to Damascus, told them bluntly: “If Christ has not been raised, then your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” “But,” he goes on to say, “Christ has been raised from the dead.”

Only the resurrection of Jesus can explain the confidence with which the earliest Christians proclaimed the forgiveness of sin. But maybe even more importantly, only a Risen Lord can make sense of 2000 years of people experiencing God’s grace in confession, repentance and baptism. Even today, the resurrection affirms that through Christ we are forgiven.

But there is still more.

We live in a broken world. People live in poverty. Children succumb to hunger. Loved ones die of disease. Ethnic, racial and even religious hatreds flourish. Whole countries are repressed. Nations find themselves at war.

Some believe it will only get worse. Do you remember The Doomsday Clock? After World War II a group of scientists concluded that the world was likely to end in a nuclear holocaust, so they published a journal and on the front cover they feature a clock counting down the minutes until the end. Every so often they move the hands back, if they like what is happening in the world, or forward if they don’t. Given that they started only seven minutes from “midnight,” it is clear they are not optimistic. Like many others, they seem to assume that sooner of later evil will overcome whatever good there might be in the world.

Others are not so pessimistic. They don’t fear the future as much as they simply dread it. They do so because they don’t figure that the world will end in some grand disaster, but that it will never end—that good and evil will battle one another forever. Evil will win for a while, then Good will get the upper hand. Good will rule the day, then Evil will rise again. They expect such a cycle to be never-ending.

Yet Christians are people of hope. We don’t fear the future. We don’t dread it. We live anticipating a glorious future because the resurrection affirms God rules.

Even before the days of Jesus, some people believed in resurrection. They believed that all of history was from God. And that just as God had initiated history, so God would one day write the final chapter. They believed that then all the righteous people would be resurrected and that all God had been doing in the world and wanted for his people would be revealed.

Then came Jesus. Unlike anyone before or since, he was raised from the dead. It was not resuscitation, as if he had to die again. He was resurrected. In being raised, he revealed what God had been doing in the world. In being raised, he revealed what God wanted for all of creation. In being raised, Jesus gave the disciples a glimpse at the future, a future in which God overcomes all evil, even the last evil, death.

Some ministry students played basketball at a public school near their seminary. The janitor there was an old, white-haired man who would sit and read his Bible while waiting for the seminary students to leave.

One day one of the students asked the old man what he was reading.

“Revelation,” he replied.

That surprised the student. “Your reading Revelation? That’s a complicated book. Do you understand it?”

“Sure,” the janitor said.

“Well, what does it mean?” he was asked.

“It means,” he said, “that Jesus is gonna win.”

The same is true for the resurrection! It affirms that the good God intends for us cannot be thwarted. Jesus, the same loving Jesus that gave his life for us, is the one that God has ordained to judge us when the time comes. That is good news.

It has been nearly 2000 years since that first Easter morning, and yet we join millions upon millions of other Christians in celebrating this day. It is not because Jesus was born in humility. It is not because he was a wise teacher. It is not because he could heal the sick or cast out demons. It is because on the third day, he rose from the dead. It is because the tomb was empty. It is becasuse Jesus Christ is risen. It is because Christ lives today. Amen.