Humanity’s greatest foe was conquered by a carpenter from Nazareth.
In Kendrick Lamar’s song “How Much Does a Dollar Cost” he tells the story is meeting a transient asking him for a dollar while he was getting gas. He dismisses the man as a druggie and a bum, but then it turns out to be Jesus Christ. It is so easy to miss Jesus when he appears in our mundane circumstances, in an unexpected place.
Different people have different perspectives on Easter. Even the gospels have different perspectives.
In Matthew, we hear about Mary Magdelene and Mary the mother of James and John visiting the tomb, but not before an earthquake strikes and the stone rolls away. The women are met by an angel sitting on the stone who tells them not to be afraid (despite the guards lying on the ground like dead men) and that Jesus had risen. He sends them off to tell the disciples, and they run off with a comingling of both “fear and great joy.” They meet Jesus himself on the way and worship him as God. They grab his feet – he is not a spirit or a ghost, but a man bodily resurrected.
In Mark, chapter 16, the perspective is similar, but with an additional woman mentioned, Salome. Like in Matthew, they came to bring spices and oils to anoint the body. This wasn’t about mummifucation, but rather to offset the odor, and as an act of respect and piety. As in Matthew, they are met by an angel who tells them what has happened and what to do. Here, the angel is within the tomb rather than on the rock.
In Luke 24, we get a similar story, but in this case with two angels. It may be that there was one on the stone and one in the tomb itself. They ask “why do you seek the living among the dead?” In this recounting, we also hear that a woman named Joanna who had been healed by Jesus was within the group, and possibly other women as well. Here we get the story of what happens when they tell the disciples – they dismiss the story of the angel and Jesus, and, like Kendrick Lamar, almost miss Jesus.
John is written latest, and gives us more of the story. When Mary Magdelene tells the disciples, Peter and John run to the tomb (and John makes it clear that he got there first). They see the empty tomb and the folded linens (!) and believed.
What do we do about these differences? Consider a football game, and different people sitting in different places around the field. They will each tell slightly different stories about the game, and those stories will also be different based on who they are told to. The big picture – the big picture, the teams and the score will be the same, but the perspectives will be very different.
We all have different perspectives on the Resurrection, and those can shift. Does our perspective put us at risk of missing Jesus, like the disciples nearly did?
Christianity is not just fire insurance. We become representatives of Christ and his kingdom today, in the here and now.
We all have access to the power that raised Jesus from the dead. It doesn’t matter what we have done in the past – all we have to do is believe. Without Christ we are dead in our sins, but his power of forgiveness gives us new life, just as Jesus himself rose from the grave.
As Philip Yancey wrote,
There are two ways to look at human history… One way is to focus on the wars and violence… and tragedy and death. From such a point of view, Easter seems a fairy-tale exception… There is another way to look at the world. If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those whom he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality. Hope then flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life.
– Sermon Notes, Dave Lester, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, April 21, 2019