Contrary to Satyr’s constant reminders, today is not Zombie Jesus day, it’s Easter Sunday. Jesus is not a Zombie because 1) He never consumed human flesh just told his disciples to eat his. 2) He retained all of his mental faculties after the resurrection. So *phbbt* Satyr.
John 20:1-18; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; Psalm 118:1-2,14-24; Acts 10:34-43
Well, today is the day. Gone is the anticipation and anxiety of Maundy Thursday. Gone is the sadness and loss of Good Friday. Gone is the confusion and mourning of Holy Saturday. All that’s left is joy at the rising of our Savior this Easter Day. He IS risen!
The scene John paints for us comes with a whole lot of emotions – Mary and the women go to Jesus’ tomb and notice that the stone was rolled away, so she goes and gets Peter and John and the take off in a sprint to the tomb. John gets there first, with Peter following shortly after. Now I can’t imagine what they’re thinking at this point. Mary is convinced someone stole the body. John and Peter likely half think he’s been raised to life, with the other half having absolutely no idea what’s going on. Then Mary sees Jesus, recognizes him after some time, and goes off to tell the disciples what she saw and heard from him.
Now John’s Gospel tells us what happened, but doesn’t say a lot about what this all means. For that we have our lessons from Acts and 1 Corinthians. For the lesson in Acts, Peter had just received a summons from a Roman centurion to go and preach to him and his family. When Peter got to Cornelius’ house, Cornelius had gathered up all his friends and family to greet Peter. Cornelius wanted everyone he knew to hear what God was going to say through Peter.
And so our lesson for today is the message Peter shared – here’s the short version: 1) You’ve all heard about this Jesus guy. 2) We know that Jesus was crucified and rose again. 3) He told us to go and tell people about this. 4) Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sin through his name.
Number 4 is the key bit of information there. Often we misunderstand what sin really is. We think of sin as the “bad things” we do. But sin isn’t just behaving badly, though that is part of it. Put simply, sin is thinking that we know better than our Creator how to live our lives. Or in another way, sin is living our lives ignoring God. Sin is a lot simpler, and a lot more complicated, than we think it is.
And that is why we need this forgiveness so much. To paraphrase Paul in 1 Corinthians, because of Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden, we’re all stuck in the rut of ignoring God in our lives. But just as it only took Adam’s sin to make sin our default behavior, it only takes Christ’s sacrifice to pull us out of the ditch, so to speak. Because of Adam, we have to deal with death – remember back in Genesis, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” But Christ has conquered even death, starting with his own resurrection, and culminating in the resurrection of all those who died knowing him.
A little later in 1 Corinthians, Paul says, “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die”. But the dead ARE raised, and Jesus is first to be resurrected. We have reason to follow God, not because we have to, as if we can earn the forgiveness of our sins, but in an attempt to give back to God in thanks for forgiving our sin and giving us the gift of eternal life.