Luke 24b

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0:00 Luke chapter 24, this story that I told to the kids just now. We were looking at last week, we looked at the walk to Emmaus and how crazy it is that Jesus has done what he's done, gone through the whole week of the passion, the pilot trial, crucifixion, whatever he's doing in the tomb for three days, he's gone through that work,

0:36 and then he's come out of the tomb and death can't hold him, he's alive again, it's the turning point for all humanity, and the very first thing he does is obscure his identity and go for a seven mile walk with two of his friends, maybe some family members and explain to them who it is, who he is, and then right as they realize it's him in the evening at dinner time, they realize, oh my gosh, Jesus is alive and here he is in front of us, he leaves,

1:08 they turn around and go right back to Jerusalem, that evening, and when they get to Jerusalem, remember that they were there for the Passover, so there was a lot of people in Jerusalem already at the time of Jesus' crucifixion, and then the triumphal entry in the cleansing of the temple, there's all this upheaval in a really packed Jerusalem already, and then they're starting to scatter, like the people on the road to Emmaus, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, they had been in Jerusalem long enough to know that Mary and her sister had been there to the tomb

1:44 and found it empty, they knew the disciples went to the tomb and found it empty, and then they left, they're going home, and so the roads, excuse me, the roads leaving Jerusalem are probably pretty full, and the evening they're not, and so they get back to Emmaus, another seven miles in the evening, they get back to Emmaus, and the city is still kind of maybe quiet, it's evening, they go up to the upper room where they were, remember that the disciples were hiding in the upper room because the way that they arrested Jesus, they arrested him in secret at night,

2:16 they took him to a trumped up trial at night really quickly, then they took him to meet with Pilate, and so the church folks are like focused on squelching the way of Jesus, and these eleven are like the guys who have been following him, so they're afraid, and so they're hiding in the upper room, and so these two that come back from Emmaus, the seven mile walk, they go straight to the upper room where Jesus had washed the disciples' feet where they had the Lord's Supper, and they get up there and they're like guys we were on the road, we walked for seven miles, this guy like told us how the whole scriptures were fulfilled

2:54 in Jesus of Nazareth, and then when we had the meal we realized we had been walking with Jesus the whole time, and as soon as we realized it he left, and so we came right back here to tell you, we think that the reason the tomb is empty is because Jesus is alive, and they're back in the upper room telling them this, and that's where the story is in Luke chapter 24 starting at verse, I can't see what verse it is, 35, yeah, thanks.

3:26 It says, as they were talking about these things, as the folks from Emmaus were talking about what they had experienced, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, peace to you, this is the first part to think about, remember like Jesus, there's one story where I can't remember if it's, I think it's jarius, a Roman guy comes and says,

4:01 hey my daughter's sick, would you come and try and heal her, and Jesus is like sure, and he follows the Roman guy back to his house, jarius' house, and there's all these people out there wailing and crying, and like oh it's too late, tell the teacher to go home, she already died, and Jesus is just like, she's not dying, she's just asleep, send all these people home, and he goes in and he finds the girl on the bed, and this is why I like this story, he looks at the woman, or the little girl, gives her his hand,

4:38 and the text preserves the Aramaic, remember Jesus, the New Testament is mostly written in Greek, but Jesus probably didn't speak Greek, he probably spoke Aramaic, and in this story they preserve the Aramaic words of Jesus, so he goes to the girl in the bed and he says, tell the kum, little girl get up, and when Jesus commands somebody, when he announces like that, when he proclaims something,

5:12 it happens, the girl was dead, she's alive again, it's the same thing that happens when Jesus is standing outside of the tomb of his buddy Lazarus, and he's been dead for three days with grave clothes around him, and they've rolled the stone in front of his tomb, and he's done, he's gone, he says, roll the stone away, it's going to stink in there, he's been in there long enough that it's going to start to be smelling, and Jesus stands outside of the tomb and announces, when Jesus speaks, Lazarus come out, and Lazarus has been dead, but because the king, because Jesus told him,

5:47 come back to life, life reenters his body, and he walks out with the grave clothes on, right? And so I like to imagine these like, core group, like the 11 plus the two from Amaeus, so probably some other family members all crowded in the upper room, and they can remember being there with Jesus washing their feet, and having the Passover meal with them, and they are afraid, and confused, and some of them hopeful, and Jesus though they did not expect it appears in the room,

6:17 and there's all these emotions happening, all the complexities of life, where do we go, what do we do now, we gave up all our stuff, this guy is killed, maybe he's alive, what would that mean, who are we going to become, and in that moment Jesus appears there, and he just goes, hey, peace. I love to try and imagine what it would feel like to have the risen Christ command peace into the room.

6:48 All of the anxiety and fear, it's not that the issues go away, they're still there, but there's peace in spite of it all. It's not that now they understand everything, it's not that now they know what to do, it's not as though now they have no problems. Jesus announced peace and in spite of all those things, in spite of the confusion, in spite of the doubts, in spite of the questions, in spite of the fear, there's also peace,

7:22 because Jesus announces it into the room. First thing he does, he gives them peace, but they were startled, of course, and frightened, and thought they saw a spirit, and so he said to them, why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I, myself, touch me, and see, why did he say, see my hands and my feet? Later we'll find out, right, Thomas doesn't, Thomas isn't there, and he's like,

8:01 guys, this can't be true, and he's like, unless I put my hand in his side where the spirit touched him and put my fingers in the hands where the nails were. And this is crazy to think about, Jesus has been all the way through death and back into life, raised from the dead, right? Matthew says that when Jesus was raised from the dead, there were some that came up out of the graves and walked around. He's like this first, like, the end times coming in that moment for just a moment, where resurrection now is a reality,

8:34 where those who have been asleep waiting for the consummation of the Christ are brought to life again, like new bodies, eternal bodies. Paul will say later that the seeds that were so incorruptible are dead, but those that are incorruptal, will be saying when you are raised from the dead, you have this new flesh that can endure all things and exist for all time without decay. We have bodies now that are tied to decay, right? I can't swing bad as fast as I used to, right?

9:09 I can't run quite like I could. I've told this story before, but one of the sweetest people I ever knew was my dad's mom, Hazel. Hazel's named after her, Hazel Hoyer. Amazing lady, she would come and put us to bed and she'd have a little pitch pipe. She sang in competitive barbershop quartet music. Amazing, okay? She had a little pitch pipe. She'd put us to bed and make us sing songs with her. She'd play the pitch pipe and give us each our part.

9:41 She was four kids. She was like shorter than me. She was about as round as she was tall, maybe not quite as round as she was tall, but almost. Really sweet. Later in life, she had both knees replaced. She had bad knees. She was kind of bow-legged. Before she had both knees replaced, Meghan and I were going with to the state park that they liked. They lived out in the country of Missouri. And it was these old, like this guy tried to build a castle in Missouri on this bluff and he never got done and it was kind of looked like these ruins.

10:15 And they'd made a state park around it. There's this big open field with this like castle looking thing on this bluff in the hill country of Missouri. And we pull up, but they had one of those classic like cut lists, old mobiles that old people have where you're sitting on a couch. She had tissues, you know, in the tissue boxes. And they had little cup holders that hung on the window. You're old enough maybe to remember that. And so I'm like, grandma, sitting in the passenger seat, we pull up to Lake Minnehaha, this great field and these like, this castle in the distance on the bluff.

10:50 And I get over and I open the door for grandma Hazel and she looks at the field and she takes a big sigh. So grandma, what's wrong? Sometimes I just wish I could run, you know. I just want to get up and run through the field. Grandma used to be able to run, but she couldn't because our bodies. Grandma can run again, right? She's gone. New body.

11:23 The point of the resurrection of the dead is that I read an article by C.S. Lewis two weeks ago that talked about how the flesh, the bodies that we are born into, carried life descended down from the first ones. Remember the story of creation where it says that God got down into the dust and formed man and women out of the dust of the earth. In his image did he make them male and female did he make them and then he breathed into them the breath of life. Remember?

11:54 And then his image bearers up in the world and he gives them earth and he says, now be fruitful and multiply. Rule the earth and subdue it. Take it over, right? And they live then they end up because they feel like they can be God. He separates them out. He says, now you'll be separated from the source of life and you will die because you're separated from God, the source of life. You will die. And in those first years, you know, people live seven, eight hundred years, right?

12:28 And they live long lives that close. C.S. Lewis talks about how the life that we have in our flesh is descended down hundreds of generations from the originator of life. All this far that he hasn't recastituted life in our flesh. It's just the life that he gave at the beginning is so powerful it endures as a whisper of what it was, but 80, 90 years yet you can have. He says that this is like the body that you have, the flesh that you live that is decaying, like poor Grandma Hazel who can't run at Lake Minnie.

13:09 What's incredible is then Christ institutes a new source of life, unmitigated, unmediated, immediately delivered just to you. We see as that Pentecost where the spirit now is given again to all humanity released from wherever it's been kept infinitely, right? And it's released out into all people, men and old, young and women, dreamy dreams, seeing visions, life given again.

13:39 But what's so compelling to me, Jesus has new flesh, new body and old marks of the cross. They don't go away. To me that's fascinating. On the surface it's like of course, but on the next level it's like, but why?

14:15 Why would he still have those? Of course, what looked like his greatest defeat of course was his ultimate victory. I think he experienced it like a defeat. We know it was painful, super hard, right?

14:49 Like I don't know, the crucifixion is brutal, right? You get the nails and that hurts, of course. And through your feet that is painful. They put them on your feet because the reality is when you're hanging there that you get tired and the way they do it, your body sags like this hanging on these nails. And you have to push up in order to breathe because it's the way it pulls on your lungs.

15:24 And so they put the nail in your feet so you can push, your feet don't slide. And so then it would hurt to breathe because you'd be pushing down on this nail to get up to get your breath and then come back down. And so what would happen on the cross, they got really good, you know the Romans crucified a lot of people, thousands of people. They got really good at it but it would take a while for someone to die because in the end you don't die from the blood loss, you die from suffocation just waiting out there to where you finally don't have the strength or the energy to push yourself up and breathe again.

15:54 This is why it's compelling when Jesus dies early because he gives up his life and says nobody takes my life from me but I give it away. I'm telling you this to tell you what Jesus went through is painful. When he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He experiences God leaving him which you and I have never experienced. I'm telling you to say what Jesus went through was very hard, painful, isolating, lonely, confusing even though he was Jesus.

16:26 Remember in the Garden of Gethsemane he said, couldn't we do this some other way? Why do we have to do it this way? And then Jesus said, but Lord, do you know better than me? I'll do it your way. And it looked like, felt like and was death. And isolation, all his buddies left him. It was alone, even God left him.

16:58 And that's what he was given. And also, the reason he keeps the marks of the cross is because this is the greatest victory of all humanity for all time. What felt like the greatest failure became the marks of his greatest victory.

17:30 You and I, through the sacrifice of Christ and the goodness of God, have life eternal. We've talked about it. It looks like the great banqueting feast. Like I told the kids, real flesh and real bodies, real people, real places to explore, real food to eat, real people to enjoy, real fields to run. I'll introduce you to Grandma Hazel. We can all run together through the field of like, mini-ha-ha or whatever, right?

18:01 Real experience and life to come. But what the marks of the cross on the person of Jesus in the upper room tell us is we also have it now. You have real, full life now. With God, it starts now. It doesn't wait till you die.

18:33 And the choices we make now matter. The degree to which we are able to trust God now matters. And our relationship to God is not determined or even often evidenced by how easy life goes now. So that means hardship does not mean failure. Fear does not mean lack of faith.

19:07 Confusion does not mean ignorance, right? You can have peace amongst all of those things. And we can trust God despite all of those things. And what might look like our worst failures now become the marks of our victory. Your life will not be easy, but also it will not end in hardship.

19:37 It ends in victory. It ends in resurrection. It ends with eternity with God forever, and flesh and hoped. For me, this is really helpful because it casts life. It gives me a trajectory beyond this world and puts my life in the scope of something worth an adventure worth going on forever.

20:11 The idea that I will continue to exist with Christ in the resurrection beyond this world gives me the courage to act bravely in terms of justice, mercy, generosity, love, fidelity, faithfulness. Because I know that I don't have to just get whatever I can right now as though this is all there was. God has given me more, and he's in charge of how it's doled out.

20:46 So the story here of the upper room and the fish is so cool to me because it communicates one, the reality of the resurrection of the dead. And to the severity, the gravity of the life now. It's not as though this life doesn't matter, all that matters is the life to come. I'm on the trajectory of my life to come now. I've started it already, and we'll do it forever.

21:18 Let me pray that we could be people who believe in that good news. Hey Lord, thank you for the story of the Christ in his resurrection. Teach us what it means for us today. How might we live faithfully in light of the resurrection today? How might we take advantage of the gift of your spirit?

21:48 What is fidelity? What is justice? What is mercy? Look like for us today in light of your son Jesus Christ. It's in his name that we pray. Amen. I think it's a good question to think about as we move into worship for you guys this morning. It's like, what does justice look like for you today? What does mercy look like for you today? What does generosity look like for you today in light of the resurrection?