1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The message from God’s Word as we continue our summer sermon series, Defending the Christian Faith, is taken from Matt. 28:11-20, it’s entitled, “Stubborn Realities,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. Even when people ignore Scripture, certain realities remain. You might call them stubborn. They have to be faced. The empty tomb stands out among these stubborn realities. The easiest way for Jesus’ opponents to silence the proclamation “Christ is risen” would have been to take a field trip to the grave owned by Joseph of Arimathea and bring out the body of Jesus. But no one did this. Jerusalem was the spot where people began proclaiming that Jesus had risen from the dead. But Jerusalem would have been the last place in the world where anyone would have listened to such resurrection preaching if Jesus’ corpse went on display. Exhibiting Jesus’ dead body would have stopped the preaching of the Gospel message that our Savior had conquered death through His resurrection. Jesus’ opponents had every reason to stop this proclamation. But they never unearthed his body. Why? His tomb was empty.
3. In their own way, Jesus’ opponents insisted on this. Some of the guards who had been on duty at the tomb “told the chief priests all that had taken place” (Matt. 28:11). These men experienced the earthquake and saw the angel roll the stone back. They knew exactly what had happened. Now the religious leaders bribed them to say, “His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep” (Matt. 28:13). Matthew noted that “this story has been spread among the Jews to this day” (Matt. 28:15). About 120 years later, as noted by the Church Father Justin Martyr, Jewish authorities were still sending messengers around the Mediterranean world to spread this story. But this deception did admit that the tomb was empty when that first Easter morning dawned. The empty tomb proves to be a stubborn reality.
4. These days, more than two-thirds of the reputable scholars who publish in the field of Christian origins, historians and theologians, affirm that the tomb in which Joseph of Arimathea and others buried Jesus on Friday afternoon stood empty on Sunday morning. Over two-thirds! This statistic may seem surprising because such awareness of the empty tomb has not filtered down to a lot of textbooks and magazine articles, but the fact remains. Most scholars now say that the reality of the empty tomb shouldn’t be denied. It’s stubborn, all right. Now, the reality that the tomb was empty does not by itself prove Jesus’ resurrection. It does raise a question though: How did his tomb become empty? Two possibilities exist. The tomb was emptied either by natural or supernatural means. Over the years, many have come forth with what they deem as natural explanations for the empty tomb. After all, it seems reasonable that no one can rise from the dead.
5. The first natural explanation was the one reported in our text, the claim that Jesus’ disciples stole his body. But, the disciples had found themselves shattered and shivering, dispirited and despairing. Peter might have provided leadership in this situation, but his threefold denial of Christ sent him reeling. Would he have come up with the boldness to steal Jesus’ body in death when he couldn’t own up to being associated with Jesus in life? Peter was in no condition to conduct a Mission: Impossible–type operation. That’s what they would have needed to get past the guards who had been posted to prevent just such an attempt. Guards in the ancient world used to sleep in shifts. Even one alert guard could have easily awakened help at the first sign of grave robbers, to say nothing of the noise from rolling the stone away. Could the disciples have stolen Jesus’ body before the guards took their position? Possibly, but that would have been at the point of the disciples’ deepest shock, when they had the least time to plan some daring feat. The stolen body theory won’t hold water. Too many holes!
6. There are other theories. Maybe the women, who had witnessed Jesus’ burial, became confused when they came out early Easter morning and ended up at the wrong tomb—not the one where Jesus had been buried, but an empty one. Or maybe the gardener had planted lettuce around Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, and, disgusted with those who came to see the grave site of Jesus, this gardener removed the body and buried it elsewhere. But, either way, the resulting confusion could have been cleared up rather quickly. Jesus’ body would have been located. The “wrong tomb” theory and the so-called “lettuce” theory do not hold water either.
7. Then there is the “swoon” theory, which suggests that Jesus did not really die on the cross. He passed out but revived in the cool of the tomb. Then he somehow got out, saw several of his followers, and managed to convince them that he was just fine after all. But, remember that Jesus had been hanging on a cross not for a mere few minutes but for six long hours. That came after he had been savagely beaten, by Pilate’s order, early Friday morning. Recall, too, that the execution squad thrust a spear into his side to make sure he was dead. Roman crucifixion details did not leave survivors. That spear in Jesus’ side alone pokes a massive hole in the swoon theory.
8. But another theory starts the claim that Jesus’ followers experienced one or more hallucinations, and as a group. According to this theory, they wanted so much to see Jesus alive that they became convinced that they had seen him, one after another as the hallucination grew contagious. But far from having reached any height of expectation to see Jesus, these followers had all their hopes dashed upon his death. Besides, to account for the resurrection through hallucination would have required not one or two people to have “seen” Jesus, but groups as numerous as 500 and more (1 Cor 15:6), all seeing the same thing. Then they all stopped seeing him at exactly the same time, forty days later. But, a hallucinated Jesus could not have been touched and would not have eaten a piece of fish, as noted in our previous sermon. And the hallucination theory in no way accounts for the stubborn fact of the empty tomb. The hallucination theory and all the other “reasonable explanation” theories do not clear up matters as much as they open up problems. So what gives these theories their staying power? Experience, for one thing: people do not rise from the dead in our experience, so it becomes tempting to conclude that no one ever could. But, applied strictly, this kind of reasoning would rule out anything new ever occurring. This thinking begs the question, how often does something have to happen before anyone recognizes that it happened?
9. But there is more to the staying power of these theories. They result from stubbornness—the stubbornness of unbelief! They amount to stubborn attempts to account for the stubborn reality of the empty tomb. They try to evade the truth of the resurrection, and with it the truth that Jesus is God. Lest we become too arrogant, though, let’s recall that we Christians remain sinners in this world. We, too, try to evade God’s will and ways, starting with failing to trust him completely at every moment and with every step. But God’s law remains stubborn too. You can’t get rid of it by trying to explain it away. As much as with other sinners, our old Adam stubbornly wants to travel the road away from God, and by ourselves we would be powerless to head in any other direction.
10. Even though we do not deserve it, our God has come to us with his grace and salvation. Jesus Christ is Immanuel, “God with us” (Mt 1:23). He went through being abandoned on the cross—even crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46)—to take our place under God’s wrath and make it so no one has to be without God for all eternity. Then he rose. He rose from the dead in utter reality. In Lutheran Television’s old animated program Easter Is, a boy named Benji struggles with sadness when his dog Waldo gets lost a few days before Easter. Benji concludes that he’ll never see his beloved dog again. But on Easter Sunday morning, as the family walks out to their car to go to church, Waldo bounds up. What a reunion! The narrator tells us Waldo came back because of his love for Benji. There is the connection with Easter. Jesus, “God with us,” loved us so much that he could not stay away. Not even death could keep him from us.
11. The apostle Paul wrote by inspiration in Romans 5 that, “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son.” But what good would it do to be reconciled to a God who lies dead? As Paul went on, “much more, now that we are reconciled,” are we “saved by his life” (Rom 5:10). The risen Christ lets nothing stand between himself and us. Put differently, he is reconciled to us and the world. When this reconciliation becomes ours by God-given faith, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1). Jesus lives and personally imparts to us his peace.
12. Jesus remains determined in this. More than “determined,” we may call Jesus more stubborn than death itself! His gracious reaching out to a rebellious world turns out to be the most stubborn reality of them all. It has made all the difference for us. Even when unbelievers try to evade Christ’s forgiving love, Jesus graciously reaches out all the same. If people make it clear that they want to have nothing to do with you, how do you tend to treat them? But Jesus keeps on reaching out. The resurrection shows Christ’s stubborn love. No natural explanation can account for such love. It can come only from God. God’s love for undeserving sinners does not seem reasonable by any reason we know; it’s grace.
13. The Lord reaches out with his grace through means. Later in Matthew 28, Jesus told his Church to go and “make disciples” not only by “baptizing . . . in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” but also by “teaching . . . all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:19–20). The guards mentioned earlier were taught to spread a false natural explanation of the empty tomb. But, the Church teaches about the stubborn reality of the empty tomb by setting forth the true supernatural explanation. We do not omit teaching Christ’s strong and stubborn love either. With this love, his work, concluding in his resurrection, turns out not to be just news or really big news but the greatest Good News. It’s the word that makes disciples.
14. The false natural explanation that the disciples stole Jesus’ body was spread among the Jews, but the risen Christ wants his Church to take the true supernatural explanation to the widest circle, all nations. For “the gospel . . . is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom 1:16). Everyone needs Christ, and he came for all. He still comes, through his Gospel. Someone has observed that it takes more “faith” to believe any of the so-called natural explanations for the empty tomb than simply to acknowledge the eyewitness report that Jesus rose from the dead. The trouble lies not with the evidence for the resurrection itself. Hardly any other ancient event has such solid evidence. The apostolic proclamation “Christ is risen!” accounts for the empty tomb better than any other explanation. Troubles start when people make assumptions about what can and cannot happen, and then run with these assumptions.
15. When people take such evasive action, you can show them the holes in their natural explanations. But still more, spotlight the Savior, who loved even evaders so much that he came back from the grave. Although people stubbornly try to evade the reality of the empty tomb, the risen Lord keeps coming in grace through His word. Amen. May the peace that passes all understanding, guard your hearts, and minds in Christ Jesus until life everlasting. Amen.
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