Bible Text: John 20:1-18 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: Easter 2022 | Alleluia. Christ is risen!
Jesus tells Mary, “Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.’” These are His first words to His disciples after His resurrection from the dead and they emphatically stress His human nature, that He is a man, that He is our Brother, that He is so completely one of us that He can call God His God. We would expect Him to stress His divine nature, announce to them what His resurrection clearly proves, that He’s God. This is exactly what Thomas finds so obvious a week later when He finally sees Jesus risen, “My Lord and my God,” are his words, not, “My brother and my friend.” And this is what we rightly stress, that Jesus’ resurrection proves He is who He says He is, and He said again and again that He is the great I AM, He is the eternal Son of the Father, He is the Creator, He’s our God. There’s no more obvious conclusion from His resurrection than this, as all His disciples show – they all immediately worship Him as God, not only Thomas, everyone – they pray to Him, they do miracles in His name, they baptize in His name, they say salvation comes only from Him, they insist that at His name all will bow, all will bend the knee, in heaven and on earth and under the earth and all confess that He is Lord, that He’s God.
But Jesus, when He rises from the dead, first stresses that He’s a man. And this is so gracious of Him, so kind that He would speak this first to us. Who conquered death on Easter? God did, yes. But He is our Brother. So Man conquered. Humanity won. Our curse was reversed. Our pessimism, that everything ends in death, that all is meaningless, is transformed into pure optimism, to joy at what the future holds for us. Man crushed the serpent’s head, man announced hell’s defeat, man passed through death, man lives forever, man overcame all sin and stands righteous, justified on this earth. That’s Jesus’ first announcement, His first preaching of who He is and what He’s done. This One who’s conquered death and lives forever, He’s a man; He’s our brother. See how God so identifies with us.
Because this is not simply an individual man’s triumph. It’s humanity’s triumph. This is what Jesus stresses with every word. He calls Mary by name. He calls his disciples his brothers. And He doesn’t claim God for His God alone. He calls Him our God and our Father. His claim isn’t for Himself; it’s for Himself and us, together. There is no Jesus alone. There is Jesus and Mary, Jesus and His brothers, Jesus and us. His victory is our victory. Pilate didn’t know what he was saying when he announced, “Behold, the man,” as Jesus stood there before the mob on Good Friday, beaten and bloody and about to give His life, but Jesus knew, and Jesus says it in the resurrection, “Behold, the man,” the man who stood in your place on Good Friday, whom God punished for your sins, who suffered your hell, who died your death, and see He is risen, and He is your life, He is your resurrection. Because He lives you will live also.
And this stands in perfect contrast to the pessimism of Jesus’ disciples. Mary and the women come to the grave expecting a dead man. When a dead man isn’t in the grave, they conclude not that the dead man is risen but that someone took His dead body away. Peter and John conclude the same thing – when our Gospel says that they looked and believed, it doesn’t mean they believed a dead man had risen, only that they believed the women, believed Mary, that His body was missing from the grave. And Mary is so focused on death, so sure that this can be the only possible scenario, that even when she first sees the dead man alive, she doesn’t recognize him – he can’t be alive, dead men stay dead men. It’s pure pessimism!
But this isn’t simply the pessimism of Mary and the rest of the disciples. It’s our gloom, it’s humanity’s cynicism. We simply expect death. It’s been this way since sin entered the world. If we confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean, we might as well add that we are by nature pessimists: we expect man’s death and not his life. This is the history of the human race. You can see it in every pagan religion – they might have half-believed in some sad, bodiless, shadowy pseudo-life after death, but there was no thought of resurrection, no thought of the triumph of humanity, of pure joy with God, body and soul, forever. There was pessimism. Especially about the body. That’s why they all burned bodies instead of burying them. Why even their most enlightened philosophers could never conceive of a resurrection from the dead. And you can see the same pessimism abound in our time, whether you look at the hopeless myth of evolution, which just assumes that we came from death and will end in death, or you look at the materialism of our world, where people live not for eternal life with God but for the accumulation of wealth or pleasure in this short life. It’s pure pessimism. It expects death. With maybe some irrational hope of a bodiless, God-less heaven added on.
And you’ll see this pessimism in yourself. The other day I was listening to a book and heard the dates of some man who lived from 1891 to 1976, and I immediately thought two things – first, that at least he lived for 85 years, that’s a long life, wouldn’t that be nice? And second, I thought, “But in the end he’s dead, no matter how long he lived,” and then the natural impulse of despair hit me for a second, “That’ll be me, I’ll die, no matter how long I live, I have to face it.” That’s what we’re talking about, this engrained pessimism. We all experience it. And the pessimism is actually well founded. What are sin’s wages? What do our self-love and our disregard of our duty to God and our neighbor deserve? Death. And eternal death, separation from God, the source of all life – and that is pure despair.
So the pessimism of Mary and Peter and John is not alien to us. We’ve participated in it. We’ve expected to find a dead body in that tomb. But there was no dead body in the tomb. Pessimism for ourselves, for our deaths, for the deaths of everyone else, these may be well-founded when we look at our world and at our own hearts, but not, not when we look at Him. This Man prevailed.
And because this Man prevailed, there can be no pessimism for the man who turns to Him. No pessimism for you who belong to Him. The wages of sin is death, yes, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. The response of Mary to Jesus calling her by name, His being so familiar with her, her response is pure joy. Rabboni, my teacher. No more thought of death. No more pessimism. The response of the disciples is pure joy. And they were glad when they saw the Lord. And this is not simply joy to see a good friend alive again, but to see their life in Him. Every promise He made to them made perfect sense now, was totally certain now; how He could have been so totally optimistic about life, about human life, about men living forever in Him, now they see before their eyes.
He told them, “Whoever believes in me, though He die, yet shall He live.” And now they see the truth of it with their own eyes.. He promised them, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” Now they’ve seen this body pierced for them, this blood shed for them, and the One who promised it to them alive, and so they’ll eat and drink that lifegiving body and blood every Lord’s Day for the rest of their lives. He assured them, “I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full.” And they see this life full and overflowing now in the One who, as soon as He conquers death, calls them His brothers, calls His Father their Father and His God their God.
This is how tightly the Son has united human nature to Himself. He didn’t take it up for 30 some years to get a job done. It wasn’t a tool. He didn’t dispose of it once it had served its purpose. He became a man. He remains a man. And as surely as He is God for all eternity, so surely is He now man for all eternity. Every victory that we can ascribe to God in this resurrection, we can ascribe to man. Every time the Father looks on His Son, whom He has loved for all eternity, He sees also Man, the Man who calls us His brothers and His Father our Father and His God our God.
Jesus’ resurrection is not, then, simply the negation of bad things. It is that, thank God. It is the conquering of death, it is the forgiveness of sin, it is the crushing of the devil, the closing of hell. But it is far more. It is the confirmation, proof, and certainty of everything positive and beautiful and good for the human race. It is life, life to the full. Life with God, knowing Him, loving Him, inseparable from Him, because Jesus is our Brother; and as God sees Jesus so He sees us, as the Father sees His Son so He sees us who trust in Him.
The resurrection of Jesus is not only God turning His wrath away from us, it’s God smiling on us in pure love. It’s not only that we are no longer far off, it’s that we have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Not simply that Jesus freed us from slavery to sin, but that He gives us new birth and makes us children of God. Not only that His blood cleanses our conscience from guilt, but that He gives us peace and honor with His Father. Not only that He removes the cup of woe from us, but that He gives us to drink of the cup of joy. Not only that He crushes the devil under us, but that He enlivens us with His own Spirit. Not only that He frees us from despair, but that He comforts us perfectly. Not only that He saves us from ignorance and uncertainty, but that He makes us know exactly who our God is and gives us complete confidence that His Father loves us, that He’s become our Father. So we are not only freed from pessimism, from dread for the future; we have excitement, eagerness for what lies ahead, life to live now in righteousness and purity before our God, life to live forever, because Jesus is risen, He is our Brother, and in Him we more than triumph.
Alleluia. Christ is risen!