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Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-18
We are gathered here today to celebrate the life and mourn the passing of Jesus of Nazareth. No, that is not the story. Not the real story.
The real story is: Death is dead. Death is over. And it’s all because of him.
What do people commonly think about life and death? Many think: “Eat and drink for tomorrow we die.” Of course, this way of thinking is nothing new.
People today are basically the same as they have always been. Look at what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:32: “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die.’” In the First Century that’s what people commonly thought. And he is quoting what was said centuries before him, in Isaiah 22:13. “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die.” Death is the end, that is it.
People say that death is natural, like the seasons. Plants and animals come and go. The cycle of life and all that. As it says in Ecclesiastics 3: “For everything there is a season . . . a time to be born and a time to die.” This view is a certain kind of fatalism. When your time is up, your time is up.
Or people imagine that they go on to another life. They are so centered on themselves that they believe they will continue on no matter what.
We who are Christian try to express what Easter is about. We use metaphors like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. But that image really doesn’t work. It is still just part of the cycle of nature.
Over against that is the basic Christian message: Death is dead. God has done something that is even more than reversing the second law of thermodynamics. Death is dead.
How did that happen? How was it accomplished? God himself came to be one of us. And not only came to be one of us but truly died. That does not work in any kind of category that we know. That’s not part of the cycle of nature or anything natural to this world. No, death is conquered. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:23: “The last enemy to be conquered is death.”
And death isn’t just natural. As it says in Romans: 6:23: “The wages of sin is death.” And: “The sting of death is sin” (1 Corinthians 15:56). The sting refers to the sting of the scorpion. The cause of death is sin.
In the cross and resurrection death is conquered and also therefore sin. God settles his own accounts with himself. He makes it right again. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the holiness (righteousness) of God.”
What does it mean for you and me? That’s really, of course, what we want to hear about.
It is for us as it was for Mary Magdalene. She knew him when he called her by name (John 20:16). That then is the same for you and me. It says in Isaiah 43:1: “Fear not for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.”
That happens for us when we’re baptized. There the Lord calls us by name and says: “You are mine.” As it says in Romans 6:5: “For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”
And in Colossians 3:3-4: “For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” Holiness, forgiveness, life forever. It’s beyond even our imaginations. And yet that is the promise. Where he is and as he is, so shall we be, too.
On Easter Sunday it is common all over the world for Christians to greet each other with the refrain: “He is risen. He is risen, indeed.”
Another way of saying what it’s all about comes from the words at the end of Jesus’ life, where on the cross he says: “It is finished” (John 19:30).
As we know, in the Gospel of John words there have several layers of meaning. “It is finished” means: This is the end. The cross is over and done.
“It is finished” also has another meaning. It means: “It is completed. It is accomplished. All has been taken care of.”
What we have in his death and resurrection is that it’s all been taken care of.
It is finished. It is finished, indeed. He is risen. He is risen, indeed.
And it is summed up in 1 Corinthians 15: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting? . . . Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Amen