Sermon manuscript:
Have you ever said to yourself: “What am I going to do now?”
Usually that is not a very happy situation. I have my plans set. I have my
expectations set accordingly. Maybe I have a best case scenario and a worst
case scenario. Then, all of a sudden, out of the blue comes something I wasn’t
expecting. The forecast I made for my life is not going to turn out. “What am I
going to do now?”
The lady in our Gospel reading today, Mary Magdalene,
probably was asking herself this question. The biggest blow came for her on
Friday. Mary Magdalene was one of the very few disciples who were present when
Jesus was crucified. The rest of them ran away. They didn’t want to get in
trouble. If the governing authorities had done this to Jesus, then guess who is
going to be next? His disciples. So Mary Magdalene, a couple other women, and
the apostle John are the only disciples mentioned as witnesses to Jesus’s
death.
Jesus’s death was a tremendous blow for Mary Magdalene.
Jesus had cast out seven demons from her. Anyone who is possessed or oppressed
by demons suffers greatly, is unstable, and is tempted towards despair. Jesus
had cast these out and set her free. Then he had taught her the way of justice
and truth. He taught her who God was and his commandments. The Word of God
became a lamp unto her feet and a light unto her path. Most importantly, I’m
sure that Mary Magdalene believed that Jesus was the Christ. She believed that
Jesus was the king who was going to change everything for his people. Like King
David of old, he would gather the people of God together in God’s righteousness
and salvation.
This Jesus, whom Mary had been following ever since he cast
out those seven demons, died before her very eyes. There was no mistaking it.
She knew Jesus was dead. She had helped with the hasty preparations for his
burial before the Sabbath came at sundown on Friday. She saw his color. His
corpse had cooled. The soldiers had stuck a spear into Jesus’s side after he
died, just to make sure that he was dead. He didn’t move. Blood and water came
out. Mary knew all this, and Mary loved Jesus.
Since she loved Jesus she wanted to be doubly sure that he
should receive a proper burial instead of the hasty one that they were forced
to do on Friday afternoon. It was forbidden to work on Saturday, however,
because that was the Sabbath. The first opportunity she had to come back to the
tomb was sunrise on Easter morning. It was an unpleasant shock. The stone was
rolled away; the body of Jesus was nowhere to be seen.
Imagine what that would have been like for her. They had
safely put Jesus into the tomb. She saw the stone rolled in front of the
entrance. Now he is gone. That would be like us going to the funeral home after
someone we loved had died, but the people at the funeral home tell us that the
body is gone. We don’t know what happened to it.
The main thing that is on Mary’s mind is “where is his
body?” That’s what she tells Peter and John. “We don’t know where they put
him.” The two angels she sees in the tomb ask her why she is weeping. She says,
“Because they have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they have laid
him.” When Jesus speaks to her, and she figures that he is the gardener,
she says, “Sir, if you carried him off, tell me where you laid him, and I
will get him.”
Throughout this whole awful ordeal Mary Magdalene might have
asked herself many times: “What am I going to do now?” The reason why we say,
“What am I going to do now?” is that we are bewildered and at a loss. What is
going on? How am I going to survive? What is going to happen to me?
Something that we should learn from Easter is that the most
fundamental and important issues—the things that matter the most for what I am
going to do now—have been settled for us by God. It is not a question of how I
am going to survive or manage. It is a matter of God settling what is otherwise
impossible to overcome—the worst sorts of things that make us ask ourselves,
“What am I going to do now?”
Some of you have faced the possibility of dying. Maybe
you’ve had a dread disease. Maybe you were in an accident. Perhaps the thought
has gone through your head: “I might be dying.” Maybe some of you are facing
that question right now today: “I might be dying.” “What am I going to do now?”
Dying and death is pretty bad. Most people don’t think of
anything worse than death. But there is something worse than death: hell. What
is going on with hell? Our sins and evilness is what make us deserving of hell.
The Bible teaches us a truth about this that we certainly aren’t going to get
anywhere else—and that is that each and every one of us should go to hell. We
are guilty. We have broken God’s commandments. Everyone wants to poo-poo this
away as being just part of our human condition. We figure—or perhaps more
accurately, we hope—that it is just the really notoriously bad people, the
monsters, who go to hell.
With all the sins that you have committed, and with all the
consequences of those sins that have attached themselves to you, you could very
well wonder, “What am I going to do now?” Precious few entertain this bracing
thought: “God is going to judge me. What am I going to do now?” What this feels
like is when we’ve done something wrong, and we know that we’ve been found out,
and we’re just waiting for the hammer to fall.
However, that dread and condemnation of yours was
voluntarily taken up by Jesus when he suffered and died in our place. Justice
had to be done for your sins, and it was done on the God-man, Jesus Christ, and
it killed him. Justice was satisfied thereby.
So in these greatest and most horrifying ways that we could
possibly ask ourselves, “What am I going to do now?” We conclude that God has
settled them for us. He didn’t snap his fingers or wish such a change into
existence. He sent his only begotten Son into human flesh, to suffer, die, and
rise from the dead on our behalf.
I’m sure you’ve heard of John 3:16, which tells us of God’s
will towards us: Jesus said, “God loved the world in this way, that he gave
his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have
eternal life. For God did not sent his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.”
God has sorted out and settled things so that you don’t have
to figure out for yourself how you are going to survive or manage. God is well
pleased with you for Jesus’s sake. Death has been defeated. You may be at peace
in Jesus. This is a peace that the world cannot give and it is beyond our
understanding.
Think again of Mary. What a change must have come over Mary
when she had been wondering about and looking for Jesus’s body, but then she
recognized him when he said her name. He said her name in love. This is not
just an experience that is locked in the past and could never happen to you.
There’s no reason to think that our Lord Jesus will not also
say your name to you one day too. Perhaps when it is time to rise out of our
grave our Lord Jesus might use our name to bring our body back to life. Perhaps
when we close our eyes in death we might open them to Jesus saying our name. Jesus
saying our name, knowing that he loves us and is well pleased with us, is about
the best thing that I can imagine happening. All our doubts and worries should
pass away like they did with Mary.
With Jesus as our Savior I’d also like to consider this question
we sometimes ask ourselves from a different angle. We ask ourselves, “What am I
going to do now?” at sad and shocking times. We also can ask that question at
very happy times.
Who can forget that feeling when the long-awaited summer
vacation from school finally arrived? The first day of summer vacation you
could wake up, knowing that you could do anything you wanted. You had the whole
summer ahead of you. “What am I going to do now?” Far from being trapped by your circumstances, the
circumstances set you free.
Or the way it is with young love. A young man and a young
woman want to spend all their time together. They have their whole life before
them. “What are we going to do now?”
These are times of life and joy. They come from the Source
of life and joy. That Source of life and joy is well pleased with you. He has
justified you in Jesus. Jesus is risen from the dead. God, with all of his
riches, is for you. “What are you going to do now?”
You have been put on a great adventure. While you live in
this life you may set your mind on the things that are above, as Paul says in
our Epistle reading, because you have been raised with Christ. You are no
longer enslaved to the desires of your flesh. When Jesus died, your flesh died
too. Being defeated by sin is no longer simply inevitable. When Jesus was
raised, you were raised too. You are set free from what we suppose to be our
need to have everything for ourselves. You are free to grow in the image of
Christ by daily dying to sin and being raised to live before God in
righteousness and purity forever.
But even with the very best Christian life, taking full
advantage of the spiritual gifts God gives you, this earthly life is awfully
like school. Our sinful flesh never stops fighting against the Holy Spirit. The
devil never stops tempting us. We do a lot of things that we do not enjoy
doing, just like getting up in the morning, being bored in class, and then
having to do it all over again the next day. We have not yet entered into the
fullness of our inheritance and the devil and evil are still on the loose. They
have not yet been forever confined in hell.
But the day is coming when school’s out—not just for the
summer, but for eternity. How’s that for a different way of looking at our
death day. Every kid has an intense awareness of that last day of school. It
can’t come quick enough. In the meantime school grinds on. In like manner God
has a death day for each of us (unless Jesus comes back first). We don’t know
when that day will be, but it is as certain and irrevocable as if it were
chiseled in granite. Our flesh looks to that day with dread, because our flesh
doesn’t want to die. The last thing our Old Adam wants is to die. But Jesus has
defeated death for you. At your death you will not lose, but gain. The struggle,
the crosses, the disappointments, even merely the boredom of this present life
will be done. It’s like getting out of school.
Then you might ask yourself: “What am I going to do now?”
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