Why Do You Look for the Living Among the Dead?

An Easter Sermon from Luke 24:5

They were witnesses. They had seen it all.

Mary Magdalene, a woman named Joanna, another woman named Mary, some others that had been, the text says, followers of Jesus since Galilee. They had come with him as he went around those cities of Galilee, teaching and doing signs of power. Somewhere along the way, as he picked up some disciples named Peter and James and John and the rest of those brothers, he picked up some sisters too—Mary, Joanna, some of these others. They became disciples of Jesus too. They left their lives, left their homes, and began to follow him.

They were witnesses of the things that he had taught. Imagine them sitting there on the mountain. Perhaps when Jesus gave those incredible words, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” you can imagine Mary nodding right along, or maybe Joanna’s jaw dropping in disbelief as Jesus proclaimed that those who were poor in spirit were the ones who were living the good life. Maybe they didn’t catch it on that mountain, but they caught it when Jesus said it in the Plain version that Luke records. Maybe they heard him teaching in the synagogue as it was his habit to teach there. Maybe the places that meant the most to them were the homes in which Jesus often found himself. Even though it wasn’t usually his house, he found himself hosting people. We know that once, Mary Magdalene of all people found herself a surprising guest. She wasn’t on the guest list, but she invited herself and found herself welcomed by Jesus.

They saw all of that. They heard all of that. They were witnesses to the deeds of power. In the book of Acts, when the apostles give their testimony about Jesus, they’ll say things like, “He went about doing deeds of power, signs of power, healing people, healing all the sick, and releasing people from demons.” This is the sort of thing that Jesus did as he traveled around the region of Galilee, and that kind of ministry led people like Mary and Mary, (it seems like there are a lot of Marys)—and Joanna to become his disciples.

At some point, maybe they saw something, or maybe they heard something, and they decided to be his disciples, his students. They decided, “That guy, this Jesus of Nazareth, that’s going to be my rabbi. I’m going to be his student. I’m going to follow him.” Maybe it was because he spoke, as the text often says, with authority, and they recognized within his voice the very voice of God. Maybe they perceived the wisdom of the things that Jesus had to say, or maybe they saw or experienced, even in their own bodies, some of that power of God, which was on evident display as Jesus traveled through Galilee. But at some point, they decided.

At some point they had seen enough—and knew that they wanted to see more. They had seen enough to follow him. And so they, like those well-known fishermen, left their boats too, and they became people that were completely sold out to follow Jesus.

They were witnesses when Jesus found himself teaching there in the temple or in the city of Jerusalem, as he finally made his way to what was the center of the Jewish religious landscape, the great temple of Jerusalem, a marker place in the story of God’s people. And they saw, they heard, Jesus getting into brawl after brawl with the theologians of his day, who would much rather that he followed every little letter, every suggested letter of the law, even if it meant excluding the great majority of the people.

They saw Jesus going toe-to-toe with the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Herodians—all the people who had power. They were there when Jesus gave them answer after answer that thwarted their attempts to discredit him. They were there when they saw Jesus getting the best of every objection. They were there—they were witnesses.

They saw Jesus turning over the tables in the temple. They saw Jesus standing up and proclaiming that even the sinners and the tax collectors would enter into the kingdom of God before all those power brokers. They were witnesses when it all went bad, when the crowd turned against him. The text is very careful to tell us that not all of the disciples ran away, and in fact, it was some of these women disciples who were the ones who watched every step of the way.

They were witnesses when the very crowd of people that had thrown their coats in the street on Palm Sunday became part of the mob that was shouting to crucify him. They were witnesses when Pilate washed his hands and said, “I’ll have nothing more to do with him,” but still turned him over. They were witnesses when Jesus was paraded through the streets of Jerusalem, carrying the cross on his back. They followed with the crowd—these women disciples who had come with him from Galilee were witnesses when Jesus was laid on the cross, when his hands and his feet were nailed to the cross, and he was lifted up. They were the witnesses that heard him say, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

How else would we know that he said things like “I thirst,” except for the fact that there were witnesses there watching and listening the whole time? And some of those witnesses—Mary, Joanna—they were witnesses when the empire murdered Jesus. They were witnesses to the brutality and dehumanization that came with the cross, which sought to strip Jesus, like it did all of its other victims, to strip Jesus of his last shred of human dignity, his very humanity. They were witnesses when Pilate, by the authority of Caesar, made this Jesus not a person anymore. They were witnesses as the blood, the precious blood of Jesus, the life blood, drained out of his broken body. They heard him say, “It is finished.” They watched as he gave up his spirit. They were witnesses of his teaching, of his deeds of power, of his incredibly unexpected embrace, and they were witnesses of his death.

Joseph of Arimathea, was on the high council but had disagreed with all of this, had objected when Jesus was being thrown before Pilate. He went to Pilate and said, “He’s died. Can I take his body and bury it?” And I don’t know if they were there for that part or not—I kind of doubt it—but they were witnesses when the body was removed from the cross. They were witnesses when it was wrapped hastily in a shroud as it was carried to a tomb cut out of rock.

The text is careful to let us know that they watched as he was laid in the grave. They knew, it says, how he had been laid in the grave. They watched. They saw him be buried. They watched as the stone was rolled across the face of the grave. Mary, Joanna, and their friends—they were witnesses that it was over.

When the long Sabbath had passed—a long Sabbath in which they had waited to go and finish the burial process of Jesus, to go and anoint his body, to spread perfume and ointments on his body as was the custom of that day to honor his body—these women had waited over a Sabbath, honoring God’s command. Even though they were desperate to go and pay their rabbi this great final honor, they waited through that night and the next day.

Luke says that in the last verse of Luke 23, “They returned and prepared.” They returned to their homes after the burial, and they prepared the spices and ointments. Imagine the scent of that, the aroma of that in the home. They prepared these burial spices, and it’s not something that just wafts out of the kitchen immediately, right? And I can imagine—it says, “On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment”—but I can’t imagine that being all that restful. Imagine a restless rest, a Sabbath in which there is no outward activity, but commotion in the heart, the sense of things that have been left undone that desperately need to be done, the helplessness of not being able to do for their rabbi that last great honoring task. And I imagine the aroma of the house that reminded them in every moment of where Jesus was, waiting for them.

But Luke says, “On the first day of the week at early dawn”—no sense in waiting around, right? At early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.

They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground in this angelic encounter where they are at the most confused moment of their lives. Their confusion turns into fear when they encounter the angelic. They are absolutely at their wits’ end in this moment, and they receive this word: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” He is not here, but he is risen. That’s what these witnesses were told in this critical moment that we come to celebrate even all these hundreds of years later—a moment in which the ones who were the very witnesses of his death are told that what they knew as bedrock reality—he was dead, that’s how people stay—in that moment, they are told that reality has been broken.

This question that the angels ask them I find to be a profound question, and not just for those witnesses, who were honestly just doing the best they could in the moment. Why were they looking for the living among the dead? Well, they didn’t know, right? Of course, I feel like the angels could have cut them a little slack in the moment. But there are still many, many, many people who look for Jesus among the dead, who still count Jesus as just one of the dead ones, one of the many, many characters of history who came, had something to say, did what he did, and died. And I would tell you, just as people who have bothered to come on this Easter morning to church, I would tell you that sometimes even we disciples do the same thing.

Just like these women, we can be people who are ready to celebrate the things that Jesus said or the great powers of the miracles that he performed. We might even think of ourselves as witnesses to the cross, as people who speak to the gift of Jesus’s death, where Jesus allowed his blood to be poured out for people. The church often gladly celebrates the cross, and yet sometimes I wonder if we might need to hear the question that these faithful witnesses were asked on that Sunday morning. We might need to answer the question about why sometimes we still treat Jesus like he’s dead—why he just came, and his life was taken away from him, and he was killed. He was poured out, and maybe we even act like that is the result. As a result of that death, we have been given our forgiveness. We’ve been given the grace that allows us to know that God still loves us.

I can tell you, you can know all of that, you can celebrate all that in the name of Jesus, sing songs about that, and still act like Jesus is dead. The Jews came to the temple all the time and gave things for sacrifices in which they were forgiven, and they didn’t expect any of those sheep or bulls to get up off of the altar. Jesus’s sacrifice, even for our sake, for our atonement, doesn’t necessitate Easter. For many, many people, I think they’ve treated our faith like Good Friday is enough without moving onto the rest of the story.

Jesus, the crucified Messiah, has become the living Lord. He is the king. He’s the one who is empowered and enthroned at the right hand of God. Jesus is not just a story of the way back when, but of living presence now. The story of Jesus is ongoing. We ourselves take on that story, even in our most common rituals. We say things like this from time to time: we come and we take the bread and the wine of the Lord’s Supper. In that moment, as Paul says, you “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes”. It is a recognition of the body broken. It is a recognition of the blood poured out, but it is also a recognition that Jesus lives and that we await his return. It is not just a memorial for a fallen teacher. It is anticipation of the living risen Lord.

Baptism also represents the death and the burial and the resurrection of Jesus, and I’m going to tell you, I think we’d have a lot harder time signing people up if it only represented the death and the burial. Like if you went into the water, and that was it—I just feel like the kind of baptism takes on a different tone! It is the rising up out of the water, the living in the new life as Paul says—to live, to rise, to live in newness of life, where the sinful part of us is laid to rest, and we seek to live to follow Jesus in his life and his new living resurrected life.

These rituals are just on the edge of it, but in all the other parts of our life, the same is true. Paul in Colossians is speaking to disciples and even recognizes their baptism in their resurrection in that moment. “If you have been raised with Christ”—that’s what Colossians 3:1 says, and I’m sure that that is about this baptismal moment. “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” In other words, he’s not saying don’t think about anything that is happening in this world. What he is saying is even as we live now, there is a way of life that is seeking the things of God even among this fallen place. Don’t go chasing death. Don’t seek death—seek now, seek life, seek the living Jesus. Seek the living Jesus here on Sunday morning. Seek the living Jesus tomorrow on Monday. Seek the living Jesus in your neighborhood. Seek him in your community. Seek living in Jesus wherever he can be found—in your family, amongst your friends and your neighbors. God is alive and is at work even in our city.

God is here in his presence. Yesterday, because of all the rain, (terrible on the day we were supposed to have our Easter egg hunt), we put a bunch of eggs all over this auditorium. I know that’s strange, after all, there’s no bunny in the Jesus story. There are no disciples looking for eggs. But I do like that there’s a seeking game in the midst of all this, and all those little rascals and youngsters who hopefully today have brought some of their candy to share with you, were seeking after Sour Patch Kids and Nerds and gummy sweets. .

Those kids that were seeking are a sign to all of us to seek Jesus—not a dead Jesus whose history has moved on, but to seek the living Jesus. I want to proclaim the gospel to you today that if you are seeking Jesus, you will find him. Even beyond that, I want you to know that he’s already started hunting you down.

The story goes here that the disciples, these women, at the tomb—they don’t meet him there, but they go with this message that he is risen. They go tell the disciples, and Jesus will show up there. In the meantime, as Luke tells the story, there are a couple of disciples who are just completely dumbfounded by all of this that’s happened, and they go on a journey back home. They’re going from Jerusalem. They’re leaving town. It’s all wrapped up and they’re leaving. Jesus finds them on the way, and that’s where the story will go from now. Now the seeking is being done by Jesus, and he goes on and he’ll find people all over Jerusalem that didn’t know to look for him. Then he’ll start finding people in the rest of Judea and Samaria.

They’ll tell a story about somebody who was on his way seeking disciples of Jesus to persecute—a man by the name of Saul—and it says that he was persecuting Jesus. He was persecuting disciples. One of my favorite little Greek flips in the whole New Testament is this: it says that he was seeking Jesus—seeking disciples—but in the end, it is Jesus that seeks him out.

In fact, Paul will use the very same word that he uses to talk about what it meant to persecute Christians—to seek them out and chase them down—in the book of Philippians, he uses the same word to talk about chasing Jesus, but now he is chasing Jesus quite differently. It says he reaches for Jesus—because Christ has already reached form. He says, “Not that I’ve already obtained all this or reached the goal, but I press on to make it my own, because Jesus Christ has made me his own.”

In that language, he’s saying, “I’m chasing Jesus. I press on for that for which Christ Jesus laid hold of me.” The gospel is that the living Jesus is now the one doing the seeking. He’s the one calling people to himself. And the cast of characters that he is calling to himself—just like it was with the Marys and with Joanna—are not the people that look like they fit in the story. But he is calling people, and he’s calling the outcast and the people that don’t fit in. Some of the people who are willing to lay down power and some of the people who never had it to start with—he’s calling all those people. He’s saying, “You will be my witnesses too”—not witnesses of the death of Jesus, but witnesses of his life.

And my friends, he is calling you to that very task. He is calling you who have come today to celebrate and honor him by singing about the living Jesus. He is going to send you from this place as his witnesses that Jesus, like the angel said, is risen, that he is alive.

For Paul, in places like the passage in Colossians 3 I was reading, that witness sometimes comes in very simple things, really normal things. It’s not in giving fancy speeches about Jesus or things like that, but in simply laying down some of the death stuff. Paul says things like, Put to death whatever is earthly: sexual immortality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed. Lay down things like anger and wrath, and malice and slander and abusive language. Right after he talks about being raised with Christ, he calls us to lay down all those things that were dead.

New life for Paul is the stuff like: as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion and kindness and humility, and meekness and patience. Bear with one another, forgive each other. For Paul, the witness to Jesus’ life sometimes is not in any dramatic turn. It’s in the simple trading of malice for kindness, bitterness for peace, deceit for truthfulness. And in all those things, all of those little decisions, we bear witness to Jesus.

Today, some of you have come into this place and maybe you just got dragged here by your grandma. That’s fine. Maybe you came because that religious friend of yours finally persuaded you: “OK, I’ll go and give it a crack.” Man, I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I know who’s looking for you, and Jesus is welcoming you into his people. He wants to give you life, the same life that God demonstrated in raising Jesus from the dead. Jesus wants to give that life to you. Come, come join in this group of witnesses. Join in the story of what the living Jesus is doing in the world. Stop looking for death. Stop chasing the dead things. Start chasing after Jesus.