C Cycle – Easter Sunday 22

Jn. 20:1-9

Luke’s account of the empty tomb reveals how our minds cannot comprehend the resurrection and yet we still can believe This is the challenge of faith, accepting what we cannot grasp because we have no experience of life after death.  The resurrection of Christ is God’s answer to the damage done to us by the sin of Adam.  We just did not lose the garden, we lost immortality, intimacy with God and a kingdom where all is in harmony.  The disciples could not grasp the meaning of the empty tomb, the burial garments neatly folded and left behind.  Mary Magdala believes someone took the body, but why leave the burial cloths behind?  

The disciple’s confusion while still believing are still evident today as many of us believe but fail to grasp how the death of Christ and his resurrection takes away the guilt of our sins.  We fail to comprehend how the penalty of our sins today can be forgiven when we have not fully shed the guilt of those sins.  We fail to comprehend who God created us to be, like him but with a body and spirit, heart, and soul bonded together to make us like God and in the image of God.  But God is pure spirit and Jesus set his divinity aside to take on our human flesh Jesus, shared out humanity and in the garden knowing death was imminent, he was in agony because he knew death not only ended life, but it separates the body and soul. 

God created those two parts of us to be in union with one another.  When Jesus resurrected, he defeated the death and sin that destroys our bodies.  His resurrection shows us what God promised us we would become, whole again with a new glorified body.  He was not the same Jesus and yet he was the same Jesus the disciples followed.  Mary Magdala did not recognize him until he calls her by name. The disciples on the road to Emmaus, did not recognize him until the breaking of the bread.  Christ invited Thomas to touch the wounds on his body, which were still visible on his resurrected body.  In the book the Shack, the scars of those wounds still were visible on the body of Christ and the Father.     

Yet he walks through closed and locked doors with this risen body and eats with his disciples with this heavenly body. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians wrote about his resurrection and im this chapter we have a lesson on what will be ours because Jesus made it possible.  I invite you to spend time reading that entire chapter but if you choose not to just focus on this one verse in your prayers: “There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one and the glory of the earthy is another” {1 Cor. 15:40.).

We must admit we like the disciples do fail to grasp the full meaning of the new life freed from sin which we have been offered today. However, there is also a new life offered to us when we die.  That one is because of we embrace and appropriate the grace won for us by Christ.  The one pours upon us when we open ourselves to the transforming power of the Spirit.  We must realize how much of what we do is to gain favor with God and realize how futile that is because we are already have God’s favor if we choose to embrace it.  It is time we embrace the transforming power of the resurrection and pray for the Spirit to begin to open our eyes to see and our hearts to respond. 

Jesus offers us a new life now, a life filled with the presence of God, the love of God, the forgiveness of God, causing our hearts to rejoice. But his resurrection is also for us to life the life he gave us today so we can experience that same joy of resurrection tomorrow.  Just as he surrendered his spirit into the Fathers hands, we too one day will surrender ours.  That day we will understand everything – the intimacy offered us at creation, the power of God to change us today, and the glory of our resurrected bodies in a place that is beyond our words to describe.  This day we celebrate the resurrection of Christ, but we need to stop looking at the empty tomb and look forward to encountering the risen Lord in this life and in the next.  This day I am thinking about those whom I knew and loved who are in that place, the most recent a gentle faithful servant named Al.