Sermon For Easter Sunday Service

The Morning That Changed The Shape Of Everything

Brothers and sisters, we come this morning to the oldest and most astonishing claim the Christian faith has ever made. Not a metaphor. Not a symbol. Not a feeling that spring produces in the human heart. A claim about a body. A specific body, in a specific garden, on a specific morning, that was dead and then was not.

Paul puts it plainly in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, and plainly is exactly how he intends it. He says: "Now I want to make clear for you, brothers and sisters, the gospel I preached to you, which you received, on which you have taken your stand and by which you are being saved." He is not easing us into a devotional thought. He is reminding a congregation of what holds them up. He is saying: this is the load-bearing wall. If you remove it, the house falls.

So let us stay inside these two texts this morning, because what they say together is more than sufficient for Easter Sunday. They tell us what happened, why it matters, and what it asks of us now.

What Actually Happened

John's account of that first Easter morning is one of the most carefully observed pieces of writing in the New Testament. It reads like the testimony of people who were there and could not quite believe what they were seeing, even as they saw it.

Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb while it is still dark. That detail is not incidental. Darkness is the right atmosphere for grief. She has come to complete the burial rites, to do the last thing one can do for someone who is gone. And she finds the stone moved. Her first instinct is not resurrection. Her first instinct is theft. She runs to Simon Peter and the beloved disciple and says: "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him."

The two disciples run. John outruns Peter but stops at the entrance. Peter goes straight in, as Peter always does. He sees the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth that had been on Jesus's head, not lying with the other cloths but folded up in a separate place. John enters, sees the same things, and the text says simply: "He saw and believed."

That detail about the folded cloth has drawn attention for centuries, and rightly so. Grave robbers do not fold. Whoever left that tomb did not leave in a hurry and did not leave as a corpse. The arrangement of those burial cloths is the first quiet piece of evidence that something ordered and intentional had taken place, something that transcended the ordinary mechanics of death.

But it is Mary who receives the fullest revelation. She stays. She weeps. She looks into the tomb and sees two angels, and even that does not move her from her grief. She turns and sees a man she takes to be the gardener, which is a detail worth sitting with. The risen Lord of all creation is, in the first moment, mistaken for someone who tends a garden. And then he says her name. "Mary." One word. And she knows. She turns and says to him in Aramaic, "Rabboni," which means Teacher.

This is not a vision. You do not argue with a vision about where the body has been taken. You do not reach out to cling to someone who is not there. Mary's response is the response of a person encountering a physical presence, a real voice, a familiar face. Jesus then sends her: "Go to my brothers and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." She goes and announces to the disciples: "I have seen the Lord."

That is the testimony. Not I have felt the Lord. Not I have remembered the Lord. I have seen him.

Why It Matters

Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 is writing to a congregation that has begun to waver on this very point. Some among them are saying there is no resurrection of the dead. Paul's response is not to soften the claim or find a more palatable version of the gospel. He doubles down with the logic of a man who knows the stakes.

"If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain, and so is your faith." And then he goes further: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins." And further still: "If we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone."

This is not the language of a man who thinks the resurrection is one doctrine among many. Paul treats it as the doctrine on which every other doctrine depends. If Jesus did not rise bodily from the dead, then the cross accomplished nothing lasting. If the cross accomplished nothing lasting, then sin has not been dealt with. If sin has not been dealt with, then we are still under its weight and its consequence, and the whole Christian life is, as Paul says, a kind of elaborate self-deception.

But then Paul turns the argument: "But as it is, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep."

That word firstfruits is doing enormous theological work. In the Old Testament, the firstfruits offering was not the whole harvest. It was the first portion, brought to God as a pledge and a promise that the rest was coming. When Paul calls the risen Christ the firstfruits, he is saying that what happened to Jesus on that first Easter morning is not an isolated miracle. It is the beginning of a harvest. It is the guarantee that what happened to him will happen to all who belong to him.

This is why the resurrection is not simply good news about Jesus. It is good news about us. It is the anchor of every Christian hope. Not hope in the sense of wishful thinking, but hope in the biblical sense of confident expectation grounded in what God has already done.

Some of you came this morning carrying things that are very heavy. A diagnosis that has not changed. A relationship that has not mended. A grief that is still fresh, or perhaps a grief that is very old and has simply become part of the furniture of your life. The resurrection does not make those things disappear this morning. Paul is honest enough not to promise that. What it does is change the frame around them. It says that the God who raised Jesus from the dead is the same God who holds your life, and that death, in all its forms, does not have the final word.

What It Asks Of Us

Paul says something at the beginning of this passage that is easy to read past. He says the gospel is that by which you "are being saved." Present tense. Ongoing. Not simply a transaction completed in the past but a living reality that continues to work.

The resurrection is not only an event to believe. It is a reality to inhabit.

Mary Magdalene is sent. She does not stay in the garden holding the moment. She is commissioned: go and tell. The resurrection immediately produces witness. The women in John's account, the disciples who will follow, the apostle Paul who will carry this message across the Mediterranean world, all of them are people who have been encountered by the risen Christ and sent outward. The resurrection is not a private spiritual experience. It is news, and news is meant to travel.

For those of us who have been following Jesus for some time, this morning is a call to return to the center. It is easy, over years of faithful churchgoing, to allow the resurrection to become familiar in the wrong way. Familiar the way a great painting becomes familiar when you pass it every day without looking. Paul's language will not allow that. He says he received this gospel, he passed it on, and he calls his readers to stand on it again. To take their stand. There is something active in that phrase. Not simply to believe it passively but to plant your weight on it and refuse to be moved.

For those who are here this morning as guests, or who are somewhere between belief and unbelief, I want to say something directly. The Christian claim is not asking you to feel something. It is asking you to consider something. It is asking you to look at the evidence that Paul lines up, the appearances to Peter, to the twelve, to more than five hundred people at one time, to James, to Paul himself, and to ask what best accounts for it. The disciples did not go to their deaths proclaiming a metaphor. They proclaimed a man they had seen alive after he had been killed, and that proclamation turned the ancient world upside down.

You are not required to resolve every question this morning. But you are invited to take the testimony seriously, to sit with it, to bring your honest questions to it. The risen Christ who called Mary by name is not threatened by your questions. He is patient with them.

The Firstfruits And The Harvest

We will shortly come to this Table, and what we do here is inseparable from what we have heard this morning. The bread and the cup are not memorials to a dead teacher. They are the feast of a living Lord, proclaimed, as Paul says in his earlier chapter, until he comes. The Eucharist looks backward to the cross and forward to the resurrection harvest, and it locates us in between, sustained by the one who has already passed through death and come out the other side.

The stone has been rolled away. The grave cloths are folded. The gardener has spoken a name. And the firstfruits have been offered, which means the harvest is certain.

That is the gospel on which we take our stand. That is the hope that does not disappoint. That is the word this morning asks us to carry back out into the world when the service ends and the doors open and we return to the ordinary days that follow Easter.

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.

Sources Consulted

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Holman Bible Publishers, 2017. 1 Corinthians 15:1-20; John 20:1-18.

The Book of Common Prayer. Church Publishing, 1979. The Easter Vigil and Easter Day liturgies.

Gordon D. Fee. The First Epistle to the Corinthians. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdmans, 1987.

N. T. Wright. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 3. Fortress Press, 2003.

Richard Bauckham. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Eerdmans, 2006.

Raymond E. Brown. The Gospel According to John XIII-XXI. Anchor Bible Commentary. Doubleday, 1970.