Luke 24
For Michael O’Neill of Middlesbrough, England, death was a holiday.
On June 2, 2008, Michael decided to take a last-minute trip to Australia to visit a friend and made his plans without telling anyone. His neighbors, who had seen neither hide nor hair of him for days, grew worried and called the police, who broke down the door of his flat only to find that he had disappeared, leaving behind no evidence of what had happened to him.
Honest mistake, right? But it gets weirder. A few weeks later, a death notice appeared in the local paper for a Michael O’Neill, another resident of Middlesbrough, who was about the same age as the intrepid traveler and who had brothers named Kevin and Terry. In a bizarre coincidence, the vacationing Michael’s brothers are also named Kevin and Terry.
Friends and neighbors of the very-much- alive O’Neill figured that their worst fears had been realized. That is, until one of them received a postcard from him, confirming that, while he was indeed Down Under, it wasn’t in the way they had thought. Michael arrived home on August 11 to find his front door smashed in, police watching the flat, and his neighbors, once again seeing him on the street, believing in ghosts.
“Everywhere I am going, people I know are grabbing hold of my hand, saying, I thought you were dead!’” O’Neill told The Daily Telegraph. “They can’t believe it’s me and I’m still alive. I’m a nervous wreck because everywhere I go people keep grabbing me!”
Reminds me that story that’s been floating around the internet for a while about a couple from Minneapolis who decided to go to Florida to thaw out during an icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Due to their hectic schedules, the husband left Minnesota and flew to Florida on Thursday; his wife was to fly down the following day.
The husband checked into the hotel and sat down at the computer in his room to send his wife an e-mail. However, he accidentally left out one letter in her e-mail address, and without realizing his error, sent the e-mail to the wrong address.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston, a widow had just returned home from her husband’s funeral. He was a minister who had passed away following a heart attack. The widow decided to check her e-mail, expecting messages from relatives and friends. After reading the first message, she screamed and fainted.
The widow’s son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and saw the computer screen, which read:
To: My Loving Wife
Subject: I’ve Arrived
Date: October 16, 2007
I know you are surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now and you are allowed to send e-mails to your loved ones. I’ve just arrived and have been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then! Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was.
P.S. It sure is hot down here!
It’s not hard to imagine the shock of seeing someone who’s “dead” returning from Down Under! Jesus himself experienced a similar reception when he, too, returned from the down under of the grave — except that his friends and neighbors had seen him die and it was no vacation.
The events of that Friday left Jesus’ disciples, his closest friends and his casual acquaintances no doubt shocked at the brutal, painful and shameful way that Jesus had died on a Roman cross. The only saving grace of the whole experience was that at least his body was allowed to be laid in a tomb by his friends instead of left hanging for days to rot in public humiliation, as was standard Roman practice.
But it wasn’t as if Jesus hadn’t told them where he was going. Unlike Michael O’Neill, Jesus was very clear with his friends that he would be taking a trip down the road toward the cross and the grave. In fact, Jesus had given them his fateful itinerary three times but “they understood nothing about all these things; in fact, what he said was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said” (Luke 18:34).
They were surprised, then, to find the tomb door open, the flat stone of his resting place empty and no indication of Jesus’ whereabouts on Sunday morning. Matthew even says that the Roman cops had been watching the place but to no avail (Matthew 27:62-66). Instead of being missing and presumed dead, Jesus was dead and presumed missing. No one needed an obituary to determine which Jesus bar Joseph of Nazareth had died, only where his body had been taken.
It was the angelic messengers who provided a postcard description of his whereabouts. Reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated, they said. “He is not here, but has risen,” they said, and then reminded the women again of his travel plans (Luke 24:1-12). Two disciples traveling on the road to Emmaus got the same reminder, only to find that it is the risen Jesus himself who was delivering it (Luke 24:13-26).
Now gathered together in Jerusalem, with the anxiety, grief and wonder of the last three days on their minds, all the disciples and friends of Jesus tried to sort out the evidence.
But then, suddenly, there he was among them saying, “Peace be with you” (Luke 24:36). Like the perplexed and astounded neighbors in Middlesbrough, the disciples thought they were seeing a “ghost” (v. 37). Death is a trip from which no one is supposed to return, so it’s little wonder that the disciples were “frightened” and that even “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering” (vv. 39, 41). Yet, unlike Michael, Jesus had no problem with people grabbing on to him to see if he’s real. “Touch me and see,” he says to his incredulous friends, “for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (v. 39). Luke makes it clear that this was no projection of imagination or collective fantasy. The risen Jesus was touchable and even hungry, asking his friends for a little fish on the barby (vv. 41-43).
These physical details about Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances are offered by Luke as a form of proof, cataloging and foreshadowing the essential thrust of the message about him that his disciples would carry into the world. It’s instructive for us to remember that the “good news” the disciples preached was not bound up in the teachings of Jesus as much as it was focused on the pivotal events of his death and resurrection. The risen Jesus, wiping the crumbs of fish off the table, reminded them that it was not a philosophy they were dealing with, but a real and resurrected person in whose name “repentance and forgiveness” would be proclaimed “to all nations beginning from Jerusalem” (v. 47).
Later, in the book of Acts, Luke tells us that the disciples did not go around the Roman world setting up Jesus memorial societies or simply repeating his parables.
Instead, they insisted that Jesus was alive, that his death and resurrection had ushered in the new age when God would set a fallen world to rights, and that they had been witnesses to the fact.
They also understood that, after his ascension, they were to continue to embody his scarred hands and feet, feeding a world hungry for the hope of salvation, wholeness and promise of new life made possible by his sacrificial death and bodily resurrection. They hadn’t seen a ghost or a resuscitated corpse (two of the most accepted ideas of life after death at the time). They had witnessed something utterly new, surprising and overwhelmingly joyful. No matter how bizarre their story seemed to be and no matter how much the prevailing powers tried to crush their movement, they continued to be “witnesses” to the reality of resurrection. We must not lose the connection here that the root of the Greek word for “witness” is the same as the root for “martyr” (v. 48).
There in Jerusalem, sometime on that amazing Sunday, Jesus mapped out for his disciples just how the journey had been leading God’s people to this precise point in history. He led them on a biblical travelogue through the liberating stories of the exodus, on to the warnings and exhortations of the prophets, and through the pain and hope of the psalms to his own journey to the cross (v. 46). His death had been an essential part of the journey and was now to be seen as a holiday instead of a day of mourning. Jesus had journeyed downward from heavenly exaltation into humanity, had taken the trip to the depths of pain and death, and had returned in amazing triumph. Because of him, death is no longer our final destination.
Jesus was the original dead man Down Under, but the passage of time since that Sunday can distance us from the feeling of surprise. Easter comes every year, but it usually finds Christ’s followers arguing and debating theological points and social issues among themselves while the rest of the world yawns in indifference. Perhaps that’s because we’ve forgotten the sheer, audacious surprise of the resurrection. We can become so enamored with our lives, our structures, our positions, and even the day to day work of our churches that we neglect the incredible claims of the gospel. We act as though Jesus has gone on some kind of long vacation, and while we do things in his name, we don’t usually expect anything to change as a result.
Coming back to these familiar texts reminds us, though, that the risen Christ is among us in the Spirit and will return to us and with us in his resurrection body to finish the work he began. In 1 John 3, one of this week’s other texts, the writer offers a word of encouragement and motivation for those for whom the resurrection is a distant memory or a theological conundrum.
“Beloved,” he writes, “we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he [Jesus] is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have their hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3).
The friends of Jesus came “looking for the living among the dead” that Easter Sunday. The promise of resurrection means that we’re always looking for the dead to come to the land of the living!
Now, it’s interesting to me how our culture sometimes perceives what this looks like, especially in these anxious times. When you say “coming back from the dead” to a lot of people these days, they think of being “undead” like a zombie or a vampire. Notice how many TV shows, books, and movies there are about the undead these days. The Walking Dead is a popular show on AMC, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” was a bestselling book as was the “Twilight” series about girls falling in love with vampires. Then there’s my favorite: The soon to be released “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” Yeah, now there’s some history for you!
But while the culture thinks of coming back from the dead as a bad thing, and that zombies and vampires signal the end of the world, the biblical view of coming back from the dead goes the opposite direction. Returning from down under isn’t the end of the world—it’s a new beginning for us and the whole creation.
The point of the resurrection is not simply that Jesus went to heaven when he died and, someday, we can too. No, it’s really about the fact that God is going to renew this creation and make it “good” again, as it was in the beginning. He is bringing new life to a world deadened by sin and brokenness. Jesus’ resurrection was the first sign that God’s Kingdom, God’s reign, God’s ultimate plan for the renewal of creation was becoming a reality—a reality that we pray for every time we say the Lord’s Prayer. “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done…where?...on earth as it is in heaven!”
Jesus rose from the dead to demonstrate to us what is possible for this world. Death will not have the last word. God will raise us all to new life—not just spiritually, but physically and wonderfully—a renewed people in a renewed creation.
In the meantime, we are to be living and working with that resurrection renewal in mind. This world matters to God—that’s one of the key meanings of resurrection—and if it matters to God, it should matter to us. Caring for the physical and material needs of others is a major theme of Jesus’ preaching. Being stewards of the earth and its resources was the first command to Adam and Eve in Genesis. Resurrection tells us that we are not a people whose religion is simply about qualifying for a ticket to heaven somewhere far away. It tells us instead that we are part of a movement that the Bible has been talking about all along and that finds its climax in Jesus—a movement that is all about making God’s creation “good” again.!
Jesus returned from Down Under, shocking the world. We are called to join him in a journey toward a new world full of God’s renewing grace—to shock the world with a message of renewal and hope in the face of death and destruction.
I hope you won’t leave here this morning thinking it’s just another Easter. This is the most important news the world has ever known. May you seek the living Christ—the one who returned from Down Under to bring us new life!
A very very good Easter Sermon! I mean very good!
Posted by: Brian Diggs | April 11, 2012 at 09:05 AM