If Christ is not risen…

Sermon for Quasimodogeniti – Easter 1

1 John 5:4-10  +  John 20:19-31

As St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty…If Christ is not risen, then your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. We could add to that list. If Christ is not risen, then Jesus was a liar. If Christ is not risen, then He is not the Son of God, not the King of anyone, not your Savior from anything. If Christ is not risen, then evil truly does triumph in the end.

Those thoughts must have hit Jesus’ disciples like a ton of bricks on that first Easter evening. In their minds, there was no “if” about it. Christ had not been raised. Being raised from the dead, especially on a permanent basis, wasn’t a thing, even though Jesus had prophesied that very thing on several occasions, even though the women had seen Him alive that morning, even though Peter, apparently, had seen Him already, too. In a way, it’s hard for us to comprehend how they could still be in disbelief. But that’s only because we have gotten so used to this story. And we have seen how the Church of the risen Christ has spread throughout the world—spread, largely, by men who believed so strongly in the resurrection of Christ that they were willing to abandon their homes, willing to be hated by their countrymen, willing to be tortured and killed for His name’s sake. We haven’t seen the resurrection, but we’ve most definitely seen the effects of it. Those first disciples had only the word of Jesus, and of the handful of people who had seen Him that day—which should have been enough! But wasn’t.

So they were gathered together in that locked upper room, fearing the Jews, because if the Jews could crucify Jesus, they could certainly crucify His disciples. And they weren’t wrong! The Jews eventually did persecute Christians and have them stoned and imprisoned and put to death. But the only reason to fear any of that is, if Christ is not risen.

Or, if you don’t know or believe that He’s risen from the dead, which was the case with most of Jesus’ disciples on that first Easter day. But unbelief and fear were soon replaced by astonishment and joy when the Lord Jesus appeared out of nowhere in the midst of that locked upper room and said, Peace to you!, and showed them His pierced hands and side, no longer painful wounds, but signs of the death that had now been overcome.

Peace to you!, or Peace be with you! More than just a Jewish form of greeting. On the night before He died, Jesus had told His disciples, Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. If Christ is not risen, then that peace that He left with them and gave them is worthless. But if He is risen, then it changes everything. It means that God is reconciled to sinners through Christ, that we have peace with God through faith in Christ Jesus. And, since Christ is risen, He is able to maintain that peace forever and ever. What do you think it means to have peace with the God of the universe? What do you think it means to have peace with the One who holds the keys of eternal life and the keys of eternal condemnation?

Speaking of keys, Jesus said again to the apostles, Peace to you. Then He said, As my Father has sent me, so I also send you.” We’ll get to the keys themselves in a moment. First, how had the Father sent Jesus? The Father had sent Him to accomplish a mission. Several missions, actually. He was sent, for example, to die for our sins. But that mission was accomplished. Jesus wasn’t sending the disciples to do that. What was the mission, then? It was to reconcile sinners to God, just as St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. Through Christ’s preaching, God the Father was reconciling sinners to Himself, calling them away from their sins to faith in Christ Jesus. The apostles were ministers like that, sent like that. More than ministers. Ambassadors for Christ, sent out in His name to reconcile sinners to God. That’s how Jesus proceeded to send them, the authority Jesus went on to give them:

And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit.

Jesus wasn’t at that moment breathing the Holy Spirit onto the disciples. (Remember, the word “spirit” means “wind” or “breath”). He was showing them, vividly, that He would soon (50 days from then, actually) send the promised Holy Spirit upon them in a special way, to enable and empower them to carry out this ministry in His name, which is summarized in what He said next: If you forgive the sins of any, their sins are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, their sins are retained. This is basically a restatement of what Jesus had already said to His apostles earlier: I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. The apostles were sent out with these keys, with this office of the ministry, directly by Jesus. The ministers after them are sent by Jesus through the call of the Church. But the ministry is the same: to preach the Gospel, to baptize and forgive the sins of those who repent believe, and to pronounce judgment and the non-forgiveness of sins to those who don’t believe.

Now, the ministry of Christ, the ministry He has given to men, includes preaching and teaching the whole counsel of God. It includes teaching people the story of the world, from creation to the coming of Christ in humility to His coming again in glory at the end of the age. But the message centers in the preaching of repentance, which would be useless without the authority to forgive the penitent. And Christ’s authority to forgive sins to the penitent is useless, if Christ is not risen from the dead.

So Thomas was still in a bind. He wasn’t there to see Jesus alive again, or to hear Him speak. Worse, even though every one of the other ten apostles gave him their eye-witness testimony, he refused to believe and spoke those bitter but famous words of unbelief: Unless I see the nail prints in his hands, and put my finger into the nail prints, and place my hand into his side, I will not believe.

Now, if Christ is not risen from the dead, then a person certainly can’t be faulted for not believing in something that isn’t true. But if it is true, if Christ is risen from the dead, if He who has never once lied to you did exactly as He said He would do, and if the people you trust most in the world are all assuring you that it is true, that Christ is risen from the dead, and you still refuse to believe, whose fault is that? It isn’t God’s fault. Or the fault of the witnesses. It’s your fault.

Thomas, on this occasion, exemplifies the atheistic scientific age in which we live. I just watched an interview with a man who is trying to cheat death itself. He believes that, with the right scientific measurements and the right diet, suggested by science, and with the right scientifically developed therapies, he can solve the problem of death. When it was pointed out to him that Christians think they have already solved that problem, through faith in the risen Christ, he replied, “Show me the evidence.”

Dear friends in Christ, God has shown mankind a lot of evidence, both of His existence and of His faithfulness to His promises. But I ask you, when has it ever been enough? Adam and Eve walked with God and yet still rebelled against Him. Noah’s sons walked off the ark God told them to build and within a generation their offspring worshiped pagan gods. The Israelites who walked through the Red Sea on dry ground were worshiping a golden calf within two months. The Jews saw miracle after miracle from Jesus and still kept insisting. “Show us a sign! Show us the evidence that You are who You say You are!” You and I can see the universe in all its complexity, the human body and the human mind in all their wonder. We can comb through the Bible and see how everything that’s verifiable in it has been verified and yet the vast majority of the world continues to insist, “Show me the evidence!” The problem has never been a lack of evidence. The problem has always been blind unbelief.

So you can’t blame God for refusing to perform when people have demanded it of Him, can you? “Show me the evidence!” over and over again, even as they completely ignore His Word and His faithfully-kept promises. No, God chose not to reveal the risen Christ to everyone. As Peter says in the book of Acts, God raised Jesus up on the third day, and showed Him openly, not to all the people, but to witnesses chosen before by God, even to us who ate and drank with Him after He arose from the dead.

Thomas was one of those chosen witnesses, so Jesus mercifully showed him the evidence He demanded. Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put your hand here and place it into my side, and do not be unbelieving any longer, but believing.” And Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” And then Thomas, and the rest of the apostles, went on to become witnesses in all the world of Christ’s. And the only evidence they were given to pass on was their own eye-witness testimony, combined with the words and promises of God in Holy Scripture which pointed to Jesus as the Christ. And that would be enough to convince everyone who could be convinced.

Jesus said to him, “Thomas, because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.” In other words, blessed are you when you stop demanding more and more evidence, when you hear and believe the Word of God, which is the word of all the witnesses who saw the evidence firsthand, from Moses to the apostle John. More than that, it’s the word of God. Let it be enough! As St. John wrote,  To be sure, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, by believing, you may have life in his name.” If Christ is not risen, then it doesn’t matter what you believe. But if He is, then it matters more than life itself. So believe in Christ Jesus, risen from the dead. Put all your hope in Him. Because He is risen, and one day you will see Him, too, just as Thomas did. All men will see Him. And all who have believed, all who have been born of God, who have already been victorious over the world by faith, will sit down with Jesus at a feast that will never end. May God grant that we be among them! Amen.