Sermon for Easter Day, the Resurrection of Our Lord: April 17, 2022 jj
Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝
Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
For Christians there’s nothing quite so glorious as the brilliance of this Day. For Easter is the high point of your life on this earth. Easter makes every Sunday the Lord’s Day, the Day of Resurrection, the day of New Creation. This is when you savor a marvelous foretaste of heaven and eternal life. There is no greater contrast in the liturgical year than the difference between exuberant alleluias today and the bitter simplicity that was just witnessed on Good Friday. The fragrance of the Easter lilies rise like incense while the beautiful hymns of Easter echo in your ears. All your senses are participants in the life and vitality of this great Feast.
Gathered here as you are on this First Day of the week you can’t help but marvel at the goodness of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who has risen from the dead just as He said He would. All of creation praises Him who has done such marvelous things. And wouldn’t it be great if we could enjoy springtime a little longer before it gets too hot? But these things about Easter are easy to notice, for they are on the surface. What you need on this happy occasion is the Godly perspective that today’s Bible readings give. The Holy Spirit bids you to notice what is under the surface, the hidden reality that has gone on during this holy observance of our Lord’s Passion, Death and Resurrection.
A battle has taken place under your nose. “It was a strange and dreadful strife,” Martin Luther wrote in his hymn, “When life and death contended.” This is no mythical clash of the titans that the Church somehow made up to scare you into believing. It may be true that the majority of so-called religious experts out there today believe nothing of what the Bible actually says, especially about miraculous events, but that does not make it any less the true Word of God. It may be hard to believe that a horribly executed Man walked out of the tomb on the third day after His death, but that does not mean it didn’t happen. The ones who saw and felt and cried and wondered and experienced the whole thing for themselves—they were the ones who wrote it down and passed it on to you the church. But even they knew later on that the real events were much greater than what had appeared to their eyes and ears. The disciples of Jesus, and Paul not too long afterward, understood that Death which tarnished our world in a bad way, had just been wiped out decisively. “The victory remained with life, the reign of death was ended,” as Martin Luther exults.
Spiritual matters are making a comeback. For a while, it was unpopular to be thinking about spirits, ghosts, or what they call “paranormal activity.” Now, there’s a host of experts who can talk all day about phenomena, most of which, curiously enough, occurs only at night, and only in creepy old buildings with strange and sometimes violent histories. Whether it’s really a leaky pipe, a figment of someone’s over-active imagination, or an actual spirit that is mistaken for a specific person, it matters little. You must let God’s Word remind you that the spiritual realm is real, and not a joke or source of entertainment. You must also realize that this battle between death and life involves you and your eternal destiny. This is not a game or hobby to decipher great-great-grandpa’s nebulous message to you from the beyond. The real question, the only one that matters, is this: will you enter into the joy of your heavenly Father, or will you be joining the devil and his evil angels in the utter destruction of hell, where there is eternal weeping and gnashing of teeth?
I must admit, it is a little unfair to put this issue forth in the form of a question. Why? because It is not your decision to make, heaven or hell, pick what you want, simple as that. The answer to this spiritual quandary was already given for you, long ago. And its results were handed on down to you. You had decided for the option of death, way back through your ancestors Adam and Eve. Separation from God was what they wanted, being like God, yet acting in rebellion against Him, following the rebellion of Satan himself. And the curse of God, the penalty for separation from His life-giving love, was pronounced upon your ancient parents, “You shall surely die,” and it rings in your ears too from the Almighty Judge’s throne.
To be sure, you are not an innocent victim. You’ve added your own sins to the heap of death upon which you were flung. Going through God’s holy commandments, you can easily find where you have broken all of them. Your self-serving human nature has done its damage and thanks to God’s unbelievable mercy, you may be aware of some of the hurt. The rest you may be trying to explain away as though it were someone else’s fault, or you had no other choice. And that is far more dangerous because at those times you are apathetic toward your sin, you think it doesn’t matter and you pave the way for death and the spiritual forces of evil to root themselves deeper inside you. Every day you must repent, or death will win the victory over you.
There is no negotiation with this enemy, that is, the hidden, but very real powers of death. That was clearly evident by our Savior’s agony already in the Garden of Gethsemane. There was no way to bring life to your death but through the cross. For on Golgotha’s grisly hill the battle line was drawn. It looked like Jesus was getting swallowed up in pain, blood, shame and death, but in those lowly, nasty experiences, He fought like a champion! He won the all-important battle between death and life. When He died, He said, It is finished, and it truly was! Death was swallowed up in victory! That is precisely why even at Easter, the Church proclaims Christ’s death with joy. Good Friday was not reversed, nor taken away, but confirmed with God’s confident statement of “Mission Accomplished!”
Your Lord who once was dead has now shown the world that He was victorious in His death. He is the firstfruits of them that sleep. That means for you and me that death is not the end for us, either. Death will not prevail in this ages-old spiritual battle. Life has won, and let it be proclaimed and shouted from the mountaintops on this Day of Days, the Day of our Lord’s Resurrection! The payment of God’s own shed blood was enough. Your sins have been paid for in full. Your forgiveness was achieved in your place and Life has claimed you forever. Death has lost its grip and your sinful human nature, sometimes called the “Old Adam” has drowned with the Egyptians in the Red Sea of baptism. You are free with God’s people, the church, the true Israel. The promised land is yours for the taking!
Sure, Death, and the Devil and all kinds of evil spirits, and even your own flesh may at times attack you and try to scare you, but do not fear. You have the Crucified Lord’s Easter victory to give you all the confidence you need to withstand any trial. Whether your enemy is visible or unseen, greater is He who is in you by the power of the Holy Spirit, than he who is in the world. In fact, Christ on this day places in your mouth His very Body and Blood given and shed into death to strengthen you in body and soul. Remember also your baptism which with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, also drowned death and drove out Satan from you, to make you the Lord’s servant, a child of God.
On this Holy Day and for the rest of your life, you have reason to rejoice in the victory of your triumphant Savior. No reason anymore to have fear or bewilderment like the women had when they discovered the empty tomb. You do not have hope in Christ to make your life feel better now, for as Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians that would make us of all people most to be pitied. No, you have an even greater benefit from our Lord’s resurrection—eternal life in His heavenly kingdom. All your enemies, both physical and spiritual, are undone when Jesus died and rose from the dead. Now we know what it truly meant when Jesus declared in the midst of His agony on the cross: It is Finished! O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory? Thanks be to God, who has given us the Victory in our Lord Jesus!
Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!
In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Readings:
Job 19:23-27 I know that my Redeemer lives
1 Cor. 5:6-8 a little leaven leavens the whole lump
Mark 16:1-8 Who will roll away the stone