We are confronted with two tremendous facts in our Gospel
reading today. The first thing that we can see is that a young man is dead.
This is a dreadful fact. When it happens among us, we do whatever we can to shy
away from it. We don’t want to look at the body until some makeup has been put
upon it. We don’t want to say that the young man is really dead, but that the young
man will live on in our hearts and memories. Much of the funeral industry’s
profits are built upon the desire to not have to consider the fact of someone
being finally and totally dead. The products they sell are meant to further the
delusion that the person will live on somehow.
This is unnecessary. We don’t have to pretend that a person
continues living in some contrived sense of the word, for there is another fact
that is presented to us in our reading. Jesus says, “Young man, I say to you
arise,” and that is what happens. He sits up in that coffin that the
pallbearers are carrying, gets out, and goes to his mother. The other great
fact besides the boy being dead is that the boy is alive, because Jesus made
him alive by speaking a word.
These two great facts are at the heart of our religion.
Isn’t it true that the two greatest days that have ever been are Good Friday
and Easter? Two great facts are presented to us on these days. On Good Friday
Jesus is dead. There’s no doubt about this fact. The disciples did not miss the
significance of this fact. They scattered in despair. They thought that he was
the Christ. They thought that he would be the king. How can he be the king when
he is dead? The factuality of his death made such an impression on them that
they were very slow to believe that he was actually risen from the dead. When
the women reported what they had seen and heard at his tomb, the rest thought
that they were indulging in wishful thinking. It seems as though hardly any of
them believed until they actually saw Jesus. Their hearts were hard and slow to
believe. It wasn’t really until Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out
upon them, that the disciples began to boldly testify to these two great facts
as the salvation God has extended towards us.
Nobody is saved through the death and resurrection of the
young man who lived in Nain. Nobody is saved by the death and resurrection of
the boy whom God raised through the prophet Elijah. Even these two boys weren’t
ultimately saved by their own resurrection, for that was a resurrection to this
life only, not an eternal life. And so we can see that two great facts of
Jesus’s death and resurrection are different from these others that we hear
about in the Scriptures. I’d like to consider today how there are at least
three different ways that Jesus’s death and life are different from the others.
First of all, Jesus is the Son of God incarnate. He has no
earthly father, but was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin
Mary. According to his human nature he is the seed of the woman, a son of King
David, from the tribe of Judah. According to his divine nature he is the
eternally begotten Son from the Father. There was never a time that he didn’t
exist. He is God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, of one substance
with the Father by whom all things were made. Therefore, it was not just a man
who died on Good Friday. It was the one person of Jesus Christ—true God and
true man—who died.
The Good Friday hymn, “O Darkest Woe” has a stark and
shocking line that speaks to what has taken place: “O sorrow dread, our God is
dead, upon the cross extended.” “Our God is dead.” Let that sink in. No matter how
deeply you think you have taken it in, you have not even begun to take it in.
How can it be possible? And yet, it is a fact. Whether you believe it is
possible or not won’t change what has actually taken place.
The first way that Jesus’s death and resurrection are
different than the others that we hear about in the Scriptures is that Jesus
was not just an ordinary man. He is true God and true man. God, who by
definition cannot suffer or die, suffered and died in Jesus. The second way
that Jesus is different than the others is in the nature of his death. When
Jesus died, he drank the cup of woe down to its last dregs. Jesus did not die
under the delusion that death is just a part of life, or that everybody
experiences it sometime, or whatever other philosophy people have about it. He
knew what death really was and didn’t lie to himself about it.
In order for us to understand this better, it is necessary
to speak a bit more about this understanding of death. The Biblical
understanding of death has been severely repressed in our times by the kinds of
thoughts that I mentioned at the beginning of our sermon today. The severity of
it all has been avoided. False hope and comforts have been dished out by the barrel.
The reason why people die is because God punishes sin with death. This is no
great secret so far as the Bible is concerned. God said that in the day that
Adam sinned, he would surely die. God killed the whole world, save eight souls,
with the flood. God put to death those who grumbled and were disobedient to him
in the wilderness. God struck down king after king in Israel and Judah who
sinned against him. Ananias and Sapphira were killed in the New Testament
Church for lying about their offering not long after Pentecost. People die
because God kills evildoers. It wasn’t meant to be that way. We were not
created to be evildoers. But that’s what happened when we became sinners.
So the way that Jesus understood death and the way that we
should understand death is that it is brought about by God because we are guilty.
Perhaps you came to church today with the guilt of some certain sin that you
have committed lying on your conscience. We find that to be bad enough. What
about all the other sins that you have committed? You’ve forgotten about those.
That’s the old Adam’s way of dealing with sin. Adam and Eve tried to forget
about their sin in the Garden by getting busy with making clothing and whatever
else they could find to pass the time. The horror of Judgment Day for
unbelievers is that they won’t be able to forget anymore. The weight of all
their sins, all at once, will crush them when they awaken from their sleep in
the grave. This is a tremendous and awful thing that we cannot understand
beforehand. God save each and every one of us from ever experiencing it!
And so you can see that the weight of guilt and the severity
of God’s wrath for the sin of but one person is enough to drive us to madness
and despair. What was it like for Jesus to know and experience the guilt for
every sin of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived? The bitter
sufferings and death of Jesus was not just a matter of the physical agony. That
is just the tip of the iceberg. Much more is going on spiritually below the
surface. He is experiencing in his conscience God’s righteous anger against
him, because he became Sin for us. The “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!—My God, my
God! Why have you forsaken me?” is the despair of each one of us when we should
be judged for the way that we have lived our lives.
By Jesus’s suffering and death, satisfaction is made for
God’s righteous anger against sin. Jesus was like a lightning rod for God’s
wrath. Instead of it striking out here and there on each individual, it
gathered up all its power and released it all upon the strong shoulders of the
God-man, Jesus Christ. The severity of it is so great that it killed God.
And so Jesus’s death and resurrection is different from
these others, first of all, in that he was not just an ordinary man, and,
second of all, that he did not die for his own sins (because he himself was
sinless), but for the sins of all mankind that he willingly took upon himself.
It is unsurprising, therefore, that his resurrection was also different than
these others that we hear about in the Scriptures. Jesus’s resurrection is not just
about himself. His resurrection is the announcement of the justification—that
all people who are otherwise sinners, are just and righteous because Jesus has
redeemed them. The era of sin and death is over. That is what Good Friday
accomplished. The era of righteousness and life is begun. Easter is God’s great
benediction, great announcement of grace, that is for all people. God is not
angry with us for our sins, because he was already angry and punished Jesus in
our place. He did this because he has loved us from eternity and wanted to
defeat death and hell, which we voluntarily brought upon ourselves through sin.
Because Jesus lives, we will live also. Just as Jesus was resurrected from the
dead without sin, so also we will be resurrected from the dead without sin.
Jesus and we are one. Jesus became one with us in our death, and so we are one
with him in his resurrection. Jesus is raised and so we will be too.
Through Jesus, death—as I have spoken about it today in the
true, Biblical way—is defeated. Death with a capital “D,” death in the true
sense of the word, is inextricably tied up with God’s wrath. But God’s wrath
against us has been taken away because Jesus has taken our place. The wrath of
God for sin has fallen on him, and so it cannot not fall on us who believe in
him. Therefore, the death that Christians die doesn’t really deserve to be
called death, because God’s wrath isn’t part of it anymore. It is much closer
to the truth to think of it is as sleep.
Here our Gospel reading is instructive. This young man is as
dead as dead can be. He is discolored and stiff and cold. But look how easily
Jesus awakens him. All it takes is a word. The young man is sleeping more
lightly than we do in our beds, for in order to awaken us it often takes some
shaking, and then we are groggy until we’ve gotten some caffeine into us. Not
so here. The young man doesn’t have the faintest whiff of death about him. He
is alive and ready to go.
And do not think that this is just for somebody else or that
such things could not happen to you—nothing so exciting or extraordinary could
happen to you. Not so! In fact, something much greater is going to happen for
you. This young man was not raised with the final resurrection that we see in
Jesus where the reign of sin and death are forever put away. He was raised to
this earthly life that is still partly under the curse. When Jesus on that
final day says, “Get up,” to you, you will be raised in a different and better
and more lively way than this young man. The corruptible will put on
incorruptibility, the mortal will be swallowed up by immortality. Then shall
come to pass the saying that is written, “O Death, where is your victory? O
death, where is your sting?” The life we now live is weighed down in a
tremendous way by sin and death. We’ve never known anything different, and so
we’ve gotten used to the sadness and slavery to sin that hounds our flesh our
whole life through. There is no evil or sadness in the resurrection we are
given in Jesus.
And so we can see how death and resurrection, the two facts
that confront us in our Gospel reading today, are at the heart of our religion.
Jesus died and now he lives and reigns eternally. Because he lives, we also
will live. Whoever lives and believes in him will never die. Because these two
great facts are so certain and wonderful, I’ve developed a definite distaste
for the cheap substitutes that that the old Adam has come up with, to comfort
himself in the face of death. They are like a blanket that is too small on a
cold night. No matter how you finagle it, it never satisfies. Instead, commend
yourself to God. Believe that Jesus has died for you and for all your sins, and
that you will live just as Jesus lives.
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