Margaret Sangster Phippen wrote that in the mid 1950s her father, British minister W. E. Sangster, began to notice some uneasiness in his throat and a dragging in his leg. When he went to the doctor, he found that he had an incurable disease that caused progressive muscular atrophy. His muscles would gradually waste away, his voice would fail, his throat would soon become unable to swallow.
Sangster threw himself into his work in British home missions, figuring he could still write, and he would have even more time for prayer. “Let me stay in the struggle Lord,” he pleaded. “I don’t mind if I can no longer be a general but give me just a regiment to lead.” He wrote articles and books and helped organize prayer cells throughout England. “I’m only in the kindergarten of suffering,” he told people who pitied him.
Gradually Sangster’s legs became useless. His voice went completely. But he could still hold a pen, shakily. On Easter morning, just a few weeks before he died, he wrote a letter to his daughter. In it, he said, “It is terrible to wake up on Easter morning and have no voice to shout, ‘He is risen!’—but it would be still more terrible to have a voice and not want to shout.”[1]
In a way it is terrible to wake up on Easter morning and not be able to go to a sunrise service on a mountain top or to attend a service in church. But I have good news for you this morning. Easter is not cancelled. God’s love is not cancelled. The resurrection power of Jesus is not cancelled. It is just as present for us today as it was 2000 years ago. So, let us read together Matthew’s account of that first Easter morning. Listen for God’s word to you from Matthew 28:1-10…
After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
I imagine most of you have heard of the Ten Commandments and could maybe even quote some of them to me. But have you heard of the four commandments of Easter? They are right there in our text for today. The first commandment of Easter is: Do not be afraid! These were the words of the angel to the women. They are words we need to hear and take to heart.
We must remember that when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb on that first Easter morning two thousand years ago, they were not expecting Jesus to rise from the dead. They were in deep mourning because the one whom they had called Master was gone. The man who had cast seven demons out of Mary Magdalene was no more (Luke 8:2). Mark and Luke tell us that the women went to anoint Jesus; body with spices. They went, as we would go to a funeral home, to view a dead body. They went to finish preparing that dead body for the first stage of Jewish burial. The second stage would happen sometime later when the flesh had rotted away from the bones and the bones themselves would be placed in a bone box, an ossuary.
If you have had a loved one die, then you know what it is like when you go to view the body at the funeral home. You are numb with grief. It feels like you are walking around in a perpetual cloud. This is what Mary Magdalene and the other Mary must have felt like as they went to the tomb at the first possible opportunity after the Sabbath was over.
Then the two Marys were met by a series of events they did not expect at all. There was an earthquake and an angel, both traditional apocalyptic elements that Matthew introduces into his Gospel account to signal God’s miraculous action. Furthermore, the Roman soldiers guarding the tomb were knocked unconscious by fear at the whole event.
How would you or I have reacted to this unexpected turn of events? We probably would have reacted the same way the women did: with fear and trembling. Thus, the first words of the angel to the women were very appropriate: Do not be afraid!
These are often the first words of angels, or of God, when either one appears to human beings in Scripture. But I must ask, “What fills us with fear more than anything else?”
I think the answer is: death, the idea that this life is all there is, that there is ultimately no meaning or purpose to life, that’s what makes us afraid. But the events of that first Easter morning provide us with a great antidote to fear.
In 100 Meditations on Hope, Wayne A. Lamb writes:
In the midst of a storm, a little bird was clinging to the limb of a tree, seemingly calm and unafraid. As the wind tore at the limbs of the tree, the bird continued to look the storm in the face as if to say, “Shake me off; I still have wings.”
Because of Christ’s resurrection, each Christian can look the experience of death in the face and confidently say, “Shake me off; I still have wings. I’ll live anyway.”
So, the first commandment of Easter is: do not be afraid! The second is: come and see.
The second command is: Come and see! The angel invited the women to come and see the place where Jesus had lain in the tomb so that they would be assured he was not there anymore. The resurrection of Jesus is not only an antidote to fear; it is an antidote to doubt. To have doubts of the resurrection is natural. Dead men don’t usually rise.
One day a father and his five-year-old son drove past a cemetery together. Noticing a large pile of dirt beside a newly excavated grave, the little boy pointed and said: “Look, Dad, one got out!” (Men of Integrity, March/April 2006)
The first disciples knew as well as that father that dead people don’t normally “get out”. And so, they were tempted to doubt just as we are. But the angel gives the antidote to doubt, namely, investigation. When we have doubts, we need to investigate the evidence for the resurrection.
A number of years ago, I read N. T. Wright’s 800-page tome, The Resurrection of the Son of God. Wright is one of the foremost New Testament scholars in the world today. Toward the end of the book he concludes,
Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which skepticisms of various sorts have been hiding. The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivalled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity.
“Come and see” is still one of the commandments of Easter that we need to heed.
The third commandment of Easter arising out of this text is: Go and tell! The angel said to the women: Go quickly and tell his disciples. If it really happened, then the resurrection of Jesus is the most astounding and wonderful news there is. How can we keep it to ourselves? The women hurried away from the tomb to tell others the good news they had received.
What do you do when you have good news? I’ll tell you what we did 27 years ago. It was the night before Easter. Actually, it was the middle of the night, or very early on Easter morning, long before dawn. I think it was about 3 o’clock in the morning. Becky nudged me awake in bed and said, “It’s starting.” She was beginning to have labor pains and our son James was born on Easter evening. But we couldn’t wait to tell others the good news. And yet we had to wait because it was so early in the morning. As early as we possibly could, we started calling family and friends. We couldn’t contain our excitement.
The mystery writer, Dorothy Sayers, once wrote,
“And the third day he rose again.” What are we to make of this? One thing is certain: if [Jesus] were God and nothing else, his immortality means nothing to us; if he was man and no more, his death is no more important than yours or mind. But if he really was both God and man, then when the man Jesus died, God died too; and when the God Jesus rose from the dead, man rose too, because they were one and the same person… There is the essential doctrine, of which the whole elaborate structure of Christian faith and morals is only the logical consequence. Now we may call that doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation, or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all.
This leads to the final commandment of Easter: Rejoice! When the women ran from the tomb and they were met by the risen Jesus this was the first word he spoke to them. In many translations it comes out as: Greetings! But the word is “Χαίρετε” and the literal meaning is: Rejoice!
Joy is the inevitable overflow of meeting the risen Christ. Once you have met him then you know that he has triumphed over sin and death and the devil. How can we remain depressed when we know in our heart of hearts that Jesus has won the victory?
As I shared recently, my father passed away in December 1997. During the first year following his passing, my mother felt especially close to him, and some unusual things happened. One night she was awakened in the middle of the night by his voice. He spoke only one word in that booming voice of his: “Rejoice!” It was so real that my mother got up out of bed and looked out the window to see if there were lights on at my brother’s house next door. She thought that he must have heard it too. Was it a dream or what? I don’t know. But she heard that voice and it filled her with joy.
I shared that story last fall at my mother’s graveside service. And I said, “I can’t wait to hear his voice again. I can’t wait to hear her voice again.” And I believe one day I will hear their voices again because of Jesus Christ who did indeed rise from the dead and who said, “Rejoice!”
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