He Is Risen, Indeed

Happy Easter! Or as the followers of Jesus say, “Christ is risen!” To which we reply, “He is risen, truly,” or “He is risen, indeed.” We say this not because it makes us feel good, not because we think it sounds like a nice story, not because it’s what we’ve always said. We say it because we believe it happened. Listen to this eyewitness account of that event, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, as recorded by one of his ancient biographers, Matthew, one of Jesus’ first followers.

Matthew picks up the story in the last chapter of his Gospel, chapter 28. He tells us that after the Sabbath Day had passed, that is the Saturday following the Friday when Jesus was crucified, dead, and buried, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, the day we call Sunday, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, two of the followers of Jesus, went to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake because an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone from the tomb and sat on it.

Now, the angel’s appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him, the guards;—the soldiers the religious leaders had requested from the Roman governor for them to stand guard in case some of Jesus’ disciples came to try to steal the body away;—for fear of the angel, the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angels said to the women, “Do not be afraid for I know that you seek Jesus who is crucified. He is not here because He was raised just as He said. Come see the place where He used to lie. Then go quickly, tell His disciples that He was raised from the dead. And behold He is going before you into Galilee. There, you will see Him. Behold, I have told you.”

So they, the women, went quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy and ran to tell His disciples. And behold, Jesus met them, saying, “Hello.” And they came near Him and took hold of His feet and they worshiped Him. Jesus says to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell My brothers to go to Galilee and there they will see Me.” While they were going, behold, some of the guard, the soldiers who had fainted, they went into the city and told the chief priests, the Jewish leaders, all that had happened. After they, the chief priests, had assembled with the elders and had taken counsel, they gave a significant sum of money to the soldiers and said to them, “Tell people His disciples came at night and stole Him away while we were asleep. If this reaches the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” The soldiers took the money and did as they were directed. And this story has been spread among the Jewish people until this day.

Now, the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw Him, they worshiped Him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and spoke to them saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations by baptizing them in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and by teaching them to observe, to guard all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you, all of you, all the days to the consummation of the age.”

Years ago, I was talking with someone who had heard about Jesus Christ. The man said that he was inspired by the life of Christ, but he didn’t think that Jesus was truly bodily raised from the dead. But still he thought it was an inspiring story. He saw the story of Jesus like someone sees a play as a member of an audience. He saw it through what is sometimes called the fourth wall. If you think of a set in a play, the rooms on the set usually have three visible walls, and the fourth wall is the invisible wall that separates the fictional characters on the stage from the audience in the real world. The audience peers through this fourth wall into a fantasy world to find some inspiration to bring back into their lives in the real world. But Matthew’s Gospel won’t let us hear the story of Jesus on those terms. Matthew eliminates that option by giving us a rival explanation of these events, the story, the religious leaders, and the soldiers decided to tell.

If what they say is true, then this can’t be a story of an inspiring human life. It’s just a tale of a Jewish lunatic who claimed to be God and got himself killed for it. And then His delusional disciples concocted a story to cope with it. The end. Now, I suppose that could be put into a play, but it wouldn’t be what you would call inspiring. It would be a bad joke, not worthy of great theater. Matthew won’t let us hear this account of Jesus and say, “Well, it’s still a beautiful story about love and forgiveness and devotion.” No, Matthew draws a line and says, “Either you stand with the opponents of Jesus or you fall down with the worshipers of Jesus and you devote your life to being His disciple and making more disciples for Jesus. There is no room for a neutral audience. Either Jesus is alive from the dead or He isn’t. It’s one side or the other.”

Crossing the line between the two is no small step. There was once a famous debate about Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead. A brilliant philosopher attended the debate and listened carefully to both sides. Afterwards, someone asked him what he thought. He said, “I can neither explain away the evidences for the resurrection nor can I simply agree with the skeptical position.” “So, does that mean you’re convinced of the reality of Jesus’ resurrection?” “No,” he said, “My personal bias is against resurrections.” In other words, though, the philosopher recognizes the compelling evidence for the resurrection and he sees the holes in the skeptics argument, he can’t get around the life-altering consequences of believing it. Because if I confess with my mouth and believe in my heart that Jesus has truly risen from the dead by God His Father, then I must fall down and worship Him and reorder my whole life and my values and my plans around Him.

If it’s true, then it can’t just be a play in a theater. As author Sheldon Vanauken said it, “The central claim of Christianity was and always has been that the same God who made the world had lived in the world and had been killed by the world. And that the proof of this was His resurrection from the dead. If true, it was very simply the only really important truth in the world.” Sheldon Vanauken, the man who wrote that, had been converted to the truth of Jesus resurrection when he was a student at the University of Oxford in England. The year was 1950.

The famous Christian author, C.S. Lewis, was an in-residence professor at Oxford at the time. Sheldon respected Lewis. He’d even read some of his books. He wrote Lewis a letter, explaining how he wanted to be a Christian but that he just couldn’t force himself to believe that these things had actually happened, that this was the true account of why we exist and where it’s all headed and what it all means. Sheldon wrote to Lewis, “I would like to believe that the Lord Jesus is, in truth, my merciful God. But I live in a real world of red buses and nylon stockings and atomic bombs. No angels, no voices, nothing … or, yes, one thing, living Christians. Somehow you, in this very same world with the same data as I, you accomplished this leap to faith. How?”

On December 14, 1950, Lewis wrote back. He begins saying, “My own position at the threshold of Christianity was exactly the opposite of yours. You wish it were true. I strongly hope that it was not.” Lewis continues, “The notion that everyone would like Christianity to be true and that therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires is simply nonsense. Do you think people like Stalin and Hitler would be pleased on waking up one morning to find that they were not their own masters, that they had a master and a judge, that there was nothing even in the deepest recesses of their thoughts about which they could say to him, ‘Keep out. Private. This is my business’? Isn’t the truth this, that it would gratify some of our desires;—ones we feel in fact pretty seldom and outrage a great many others?”

Then Lewis concludes, “I don’t know if any of this is the least use. Be sure to write again or call if you think I can be of any help.” Sheldon did write again. He wrote, “My fundamental dilemma is this: I can’t believe in Christ unless I have faith, but I can’t have faith unless I believe in Christ.” Lewis wrote back saying, “You can’t swim unless you can support yourself in water and you can’t support yourself in water unless you can swim.” Then he concluded, “But I think you are already in the meshes of the net. The Holy Spirit is after you. I doubt if you’ll get away. Yours, C.S. Lewis.” Lewis proved right. Sheldon did not get away. The Holy Spirit got him, and he became a Christian, documenting the experience in a book titled, A Severe Mercy.

Okay, let’s go back to the account of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel. This account, along with the other three canonical Gospels, present themselves as factual reports of happenings that remain true regardless of how we feel about them. But they are not merely factual, they are capable. Spend some time reading them, try it, and you’ll find them reading you, interrogating you, catching you in their net. Over the last few months, the team here at Lutheran Hour has been working on a couple of special programs for Holy Week. If you didn’t get a chance to hear them, you can find them online. The idea for these programs was simple. We said, “Let’s just retell the account of Jesus, His death and resurrection recorded in Matthew.” So we did and we put it all together in the style of an old-fashioned radio drama.

Working on this project brought me back to an experience when I was studying to be a pastor. Our professor challenged us to read the entire Gospel of Matthew, start to finish, three times a week for nine weeks. It was a major time investment. We were devoting eight to 10 hours a week to reading and listening to Matthew’s Gospel. Some weeks I didn’t get three readings in, but over the course of three months, I ended up reading Matthew’s Gospel 22 times. When you do something like that, you feel that this is more than just a biography. There is a living active presence in these words, a Person. Sheldon Vanauken, the man who had corresponded with C.S. Lewis, described his experience reading the Gospels in this way. He said, “The personality of Jesus emerged from the Gospels with astonishing consistency. These Gospels were written in the shadow of a personality so tremendous that Christians who may never have seen Him, knew Him utterly that strange mixture of unbearable sternness and heartbreaking tenderness.”

It was Jesus who was making Christianity seem not just possible but probable. The Gospels of Jesus in the New Testament, Mark, Luke, John, and Matthew, as I’ve experienced them, are factual and capable and personal. By personal, I mean that in the act of reading them and listening to them, a Person, a living Person, reaches out to you through the words. It’s sort of like how C.S. Lewis writes in one of his children’s books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. If you’ve read it, here and there throughout the book, Lewis breaks the so-called fourth wall of the story. Now, unlike the Gospels, in this book Lewis is explicitly writing fantasy. But he’s not just entertaining his reader. He is connecting with you, relating to you personally. How? Well, he’s going along, telling the story of the two brothers and the two sisters, Peter and Susan and Edmond and Lucy, and what happened to them when they stumbled through the wardrobe into that fantastical land called Narnia.

Then subtly at first, the author is speaking to you. He warns you and says, “And now we’ve come to one of the nastiest things in this story. It’s the part when Edmond lies to his older sister and brother because he doesn’t want to admit that Lucy, his younger sister, was right about the wardrobe and Narnia.” Then later in the story when, for the first time, the name Aslan, the great Lion, is mentioned, Lewis breaks in again and says, “Now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do, but the moment the name had been spoken, everyone felt quite different. At the name of Aslan, each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror.”

A little later, we get a glimpse of the author himself, who he is, what he’s like, when the four children are eating together hosted by a friendly Narnian family. They think to themselves that there is simply nothing that can beat good freshwater fish for dinner if you eat it when it has been alive half an hour ago and has come out of the pan half a minute ago. Our Mr. Lewis chimes in and says, “And I agree with them.” Finally, deep in the book, after Aslan, Christlike, trades his life for Edmund’s, sacrifices himself for the traitor, surrenders himself to evil and dies at its hand. Just before that great moment, when death is reversed and the wrong is made right, Lewis stops the story for almost a paragraph and relates to his reader in a tender voice. He says, “I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night when Aslan died. But if you have been, if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you, you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness; you feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.”

If you’re familiar with Mr. Lewis’ life story, you’ll remember that when he was a boy, his mother died of cancer, and he cried and God was silent, and he felt like nothing was ever going to happen again. It dawns on you that he’s not just sharing a story, he is sharing himself.

This Easter season, devote a few hours to reading or listening to Matthew’s account of Jesus from start to finish. His story is factual. Matthew, the narrator and eyewitness, one of the original followers of Jesus, he gives you the facts. He tells you the raw truth of what happened, and you’ll get a sense of Matthew’s personality through the story. But more importantly, you’ll meet Jesus. Or better, Jesus will meet you. He’ll meet you there on the cross when God is silent. He will meet you running from the tomb in fear and joy. He will meet you on the mountain in worship and in doubt. He shares Himself completely with you through the words of the Gospel, not breaking a fourth wall between fantasy and reality, but breaking into our delusion that we are alone in the world as if nothing was ever going to happen again. Jesus meets you even there and He doesn’t leave you there. He lives for you. He is coming for you. He’s coming for good, coming to stay with you, all of you, all the days to the consummation of the age. Amen.

No Reflections for April 9, 2023

Music Selections for this program:

“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.

“This Joyful Eastertide” produced by the Hymnal Project of the Michigan District LCMS. Used by permission.