The following sermon was presented by the Reverend John W. Howe, Rector of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia, on Easter Sunday, 1986. The title is, The Meaning of Easter. 

The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Luke, the last verse of the 23rd chapter. The women have seen where the body of Jesus has been laid. On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices which they had prepared. And 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, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, Why do you seek the living among the dead? Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified.

and on the third day rise. And they remembered his words and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles.

But these words seemed to them an idle tale and they did not believe them. The Gospel of the Lord. some weeks ago i had a very special privilege leighton chin invited me to come to one of the tips meetings the toro international program that involves students and others from around the world who come together roughly monthly for potluck supper and fellowship and just sharing together and he said i'd like you to come and explain the meaning of Easter. He said some of us, of course, are already Christians and others are not quite sure. And he said some will be there who have never heard the gospel of Easter clearly proclaimed.

And that was a very special evening to be able to try to share the most important news in all of history. And afterward, I had several people come to me and say I really wish that you would give that very same message on Easter Sunday morning at Truro for exactly the same reasons. Some of us need to be encouraged.

Some of us might not be exactly sure where we are, and it could well be that there will be folks present who have come with family or friends who in spite of the fact that they're probably Americans and have been raised with this all around them, they've never clearly heard it explained. Well, by God's grace, I'm going to try to do just that. The first thing it seems to me we need to be very much aware of is that Jesus' death came as no surprise to him.

It was not something that caught him off guard, a kind of tragic ending to his life at the point of its greatest fruitfulness, not that at all. Jesus had been predicting and explaining his death although very few people had any understanding of it they didn't receive his words he'd been explaining that for three years he'd been saying in effect I have come to die but also to rise again remind you of a time that he went with his friends to a place called Caesarea Philippi and that's interesting in and of itself because if you know anything about Israel or the Holy Land, you might be aware of the fact that the Jordan River, which supplies all of the natural refreshment to that whole area, everything is dependent upon the Jordan River, it bubbles up out of the ground in Caesarea Philippi. That's the headwaters.

That's where the mighty Jordan gets its beginning. And it's interesting that Jesus chose that place to ask his disciples a question that in many ways is the headwaters question. Everything else flows from this question.

Who do men say that I am? Well, there were a whole variety of answers. Some think that you're John the Baptist, somehow miraculously come back after having been beheaded by Herod.

Or some think that you're one of the great prophets of old, come back out of history, Elijah or Jeremiah. Who do you say that I am? Sooner or later, Jesus Christ asks that question of every one of us.

Who do you say that I am? And nobody else can answer that for you. Your parents might have brought you as a youngster to be baptized or dedicated to the Lord, but sooner or later, the time comes when Jesus says, and who do you say that I am?

Everything else flows from that. You're an imposter. You're a blasphemer.

You're a crazy rabbi. Or as Peter said, you are the Christ. The Son of the living God.

And Jesus said, blessed are you. Simon Barjona for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my father who is in heaven and then he said now that you understand who I am let me explain to you what I've come to do I've come to die I am the Christ and this is the kind of Christ that I'm going to be I've come to go to Jerusalem to suffer many things at the hands of the chief priests and the Pharisees and they're going to put me to death but after three days I'll rise again you know what Peter's response to that was God forbid Lord this will never happen to you because Peter and the apostles and virtually all of the Jewish folk in that generation had the expectation that when Messiah comes he's going to set up a kingdom here on earth he's going to overthrow Roman tyranny and oppression he's going to bring in the golden age and to say you are the christ and you're going to die is a self-contradiction it's a total impossibility god forbid lord this will never happen to you but if you read the account very closely you'll notice that it says from that time jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and die. From that time, from the moment that somebody saw, you are the Christ.

He began to try to explain what sort of a Christ he would be. I'm a Christ who has an appointment with crucifixion. They didn't understand it.

They wouldn't accept it. But that's where Jesus was coming from. On another occasion, you may remember, he went up to the temple in Jerusalem, the focal point of all of Jewish life and worship.

And he was incensed because he saw them buying and selling right within the courtyard of the temple itself. They were selling animals for sacrifice. That in and of itself wasn't bad.

But they were selling diseased and injured animals that should never have been used in the worship of God. They were charging exorbitant prices. They had turned the worship of God into the worship of mammon.

And this gentle Lord Jesus took some ropes and cords and made a whip and drove the money changers out of the temple. He overturned their tables, scattered the doves and the pigeons and whatever else, sheep and goats, terrible scene. Literally driving people out of the temple with a whip.

Well, you can imagine the reaction. Who do you think you are to do that? By what right do you come in here and disrupt our worship?

What sign will you give us for doing what you've just done? And Jesus' answer was fascinating. He said, destroy this temple.

And in three days I'll raise it up again. And of course they all thought that he was talking about the temple in which they were meeting. And they laughed at him.

They said, it took 46 years to build this temple. You're going to raise it up in three days? But John adds the footnote.

He said he wasn't speaking about the physical temple. He was speaking about his own body in which the Spirit of God dwelt and that made it a temple. And he said, you want proof that I am someone who has the authority to say your worship is totally wrong.

You have missed the point. You've got it backward. God is angry with what you're doing.

You want proof? Then destroy my body. and three days later I'll raise it up again.

And John says nobody understood that but after the resurrection they remembered his words and suddenly it made sense. You see Jesus' death did not catch him off guard. He came with that intention.

I've come to die. And so in thinking about these things you need to understand that there are two very different kinds of explanation of why it was that Jesus went to a cross. On the one hand, the authorities were trying to get rid of him.

Destroy him. He's a menace. He's a popular revolutionary figure.

The people are with him. On one occasion, he fed perhaps 20,000 people. It mentions 5,000 men.

Probably an equal number of women and who knows how many kids with a couple of loaves of bread. Can you imagine what that would do for your popularity? He's healing people up and down Judea and Galilee and all over the place.

He's performing signs and wonders. We've got to get rid of Him. The people are behind Him and He is a threat.

That's one level of explanation, but there's another. Jesus said, I came to die. Why?

Because you are guilty of sin. and the penalty for sin is death not just the death of your body but eternal death separation from God and I've come to take that sin and its penalty off of you onto myself you might picture it this way if if this little light up here represents the the love of God trying to come down upon us and let's just picture this bible as a burden of sin and here i am weighted down with sin and the the love of god can't get through to me along comes jesus who has no sin of his own and he says i'll take that onto myself and i'll die in your place so that you go free and he tried for three years to explain that yes I have come to set up a kingdom yes I have come to overthrow oppression yes I have come to bring in the golden age but it's not in worldly terms it's on a much more important level than that but his disciples didn't understand it and so right up until the moment of betrayal they continued to expect that when the crunch comes Jesus will lead a popular revolution in fact some folks think that what Judas was really about in betraying Jesus was attempting to force his hand he's got the people with him but he won't act how can I get him to act? I've got it I'll get the Romans to make the first move I'll force his hand maybe, maybe that's what was happening it's clear that in spite of everything that Jesus has said for three years Peter expected there was going to be a fight when the soldiers come to arrest Jesus he whips out his sword and lunges at the first one he can attack until Jesus says put away your sword Peter there is not going to be a fight and within minutes Peter is denying that he even knows this man so the death of Jesus was no surprise to him but it certainly was a surprise to everybody else who had trusted in him who thought maybe he is indeed the Messiah sent from God they didn't understand it they didn't believe it you see them fading off into the darkness wondering how they could have been so wrong and as we heard Phil read just a moment ago when the women had the encounter with angels on Easter morning who said why do you seek the living among the dead he's not here he's risen go tell his friends they went back and found the apostles and they told him and it said it seemed to them an idle tale and they didn't believe it they didn't have any expectation that there was going to be resurrection because they didn't understand there was going to be crucifixion.

They laughed. Please don't ever say the apostles were a bunch of gullible fishermen who were ready to believe anything. They didn't believe it.

Until Jesus began presenting himself alive in person. Encounter after encounter after encounter for a period of 40 days. He presented himself to the women.

he presented himself to a man named cleopas and a friend of his who were making their way sorrowfully back to their own hometown they'd been in jerusalem they'd witnessed the crucifixion they said we had thought he was the christ but obviously he couldn't be and suddenly there's jesus walking along with them and he says don't you see who i am then later that night still easter day into the evening jesus comes back and ten of his apostles are hiding in an upper room a locked room judas has already gone and killed himself. Thomas is away on business. We don't know where he was, but the other ten were there hiding out of fear of the Jews and suddenly there Jesus is in the midst of a locked room.

I'm alive. Touch me. The spirit doesn't have hands and flesh like I do.

Shows himself separately to Peter. What an encounter that must have been. A week later he comes back Thomas, Thomas said to his ten friends, can you imagine you've spent three years of your life with ten people sharing absolutely everything, and they say to you unanimously, he's alive, we've seen him, we've touched him, and he says, I'm not going to believe it until I put my finger in the nail print and my hand in his side.

Gullible fisherman, right? Comes back, makes a special visit, just to include Thomas. Here, put your finger in the nail print.

Put your hand in my side. And Thomas falls on his knees, my Lord and my God. Appeared to a group of disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee one morning and he cooked breakfast for them.

Appeared separately to James, his half-brother, son of Mary and Joseph, who up till that moment did not believe. and was so thoroughly converted by the encounter with the living Christ that he became the leader of the Jerusalem church. Paul, in recounting all this to the Corinthians, says, at one point Jesus appeared to more than 500 brethren at a single time.

Most of them are still alive. Go and check with them. 500 people do not simultaneously have a hallucination.

And then Paul adds, and last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. The risen Christ presented himself with certain unmistakable, undeniable proofs and turned things right side up again. what are the implications of all this Paul states them in an interesting kind of a way in a negative way in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 in essence he says if this were not so let me tell you what would follow if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is in vain you understand that we have nothing else to preach nothing else our preaching is empty if christ has not been raised your faith is in vain because whatever else you believe the heart of it is we believe that jesus walked out of that tomb alive and if that's not so your faith is empty worse than that we're even found to be misrepresenting god because we testified of him that he raised christ from the dead whom he didn't raise if Christ has not been raised.

You need to come to grips with that. Because oftentimes you hear people say, well, the disciples just stole the body and then cooked up this story. I ask you for what possible reason would they do that?

To get people to believe in God? But they already believed in God. To get people to believe in a lie.

Why? It's a blasphemous lie. if it's not true.

And we've seen people throughout history die for what they mistakenly believe, but have you ever seen a group of people die for what they knew to be a lie? The apostles risked everything for the gospel. They lost everything.

Virtually every one of them was martyred. Before that, persecuted, cut off from their families, cut off from the temple, cut off from Judaism for a lie. no if Christ is not raised we're found to be misrepresenting God because we testified of him that he raised Christ whom he didn't raise if the dead are not raised if Christ isn't raised your faith is futile and you are still in your sins because the whole point of it is that Jesus really did take your sins upon himself and you're freed from them if Christ isn't raised then those who have died believing in him have utterly perished and we are of all people most to be pitied but says Paul in fact Christ has been raised from the dead the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep he's turned it right side up He has been raised from the dead.

And you see that has tremendous implications for our lives. If indeed he's been raised from the dead, then he is who he claims to be. And he has a claim upon my life and yours.

Whether you ever thought of it before, whether you ever cared about it, whether you ever understood it, you asked for proof, here's the proof. Destroy this temple and in three days I'll raise it up again. I am who I claim to be.

and you've got to deal with that fact. Perhaps I could put it to you this way. If you opened up the Washington Post this morning and you found big headlines there that said the body of Mohammed has been found in the Judean wilderness.

You know what difference that would make to the religion that we know as Islam? Absolutely none. Well, Islam says that Muhammad was carried off into heaven on a stallion of some kind, but that is not the content of the religion.

Islam teaches a way of life. And if Muhammad never lived, it wouldn't make any difference to Islam. Because if Muhammad didn't teach about Allah, somebody did, doesn't really matter who.

If the Washington Post proclaimed this morning, Confucius never lived, do you know what difference it would make to the ancient Chinese religion of Confucianism? None. Because Confucianism is not about Confucius.

It's about a style of living, a way of life, an ethic. If the Post proclaimed this morning, Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha never lived, do you know what difference it would make to Buddhism? None.

Because if he didn't teach the four noble truths, somebody did. It really doesn't matter who. But if you opened up your paper this morning and it said, Jesus of Nazareth never lived.

If you opened up your paper this morning and it said, the body of Jesus has been found in a tomb just outside of Jerusalem, Christianity would crumble like a house of cards. Because Christianity is Christ. It's a living Savior who took my sins upon Himself, went to the grave, went to hell, and came back again and said, Behold, I am alive forevermore, and He who trusts in Me will share the gift of life eternal.

Oh yeah, your body will die. That's no big deal. That's like an old set of clothes.

When it's worn out, throw it away. But you, you'll live forever if you put your trust in me. Because that's what I've come to do, to make life eternal, available to all who would receive it.

That's the news of Easter. The powers of hell have done their worst. But Christ, their legions, hath dispersed.

Let shouts of holy joy outburst. Alleluia. He is risen.

Alleluia.