The Resurrection of Christ
John 20:1-18
Main Idea: The resurrection of Christ means the curse is reversed and we have hope.
I. The Tomb is Empty (20:1-10)
Sunday morning begins with Mary Magdalene going to the tomb early in the morning while it is still dark on the “first day of the week.” John presents the resurrection as being the beginning of a new creation, with the “darkness” being pushed back by a glorious light.
Mary is presumably traveling to the tomb to mourn the death of Christ. Despite Jesus’ predictions that he would be raised, no one is expecting or looking for a resurrection. This did not fit into either the Jewish or the Greco-Roman worldview. Mary assumes a grave robbery has occurred.
As Peter and John show up at the tomb, they realize the burial linen cloths and the face cloth are both neatly folded up. Peter and John begin to “theorize” what has happened, and John himself “believes” as he steps foot in this empty tomb.
Acts 2:24: God raised him [Jesus] up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.
Isaiah 25:7–8: And he will swallow up on this mountain
the covering that is cast over all peoples,
the veil that is spread over all nations.
He will swallow up death forever;
and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces,
and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the Lord has spoken.
Though they do not realize it yet, Christ “must rise from the dead.” Everything hinges upon the resurrection, and the empty tomb is an invitation for us. “The reason the stone was rolled away on Jesus's tomb was not so that Jesus could get out, but so that we could get in.” ~ Tim Keller
“The truest fact of the universe is an empty tomb. The Resurrection is the only evidence that love triumphs over death, weakness prevails over strength, and beauty outlives ashes. If Jesus is risen in actual history, with all the palpability of flesh, fingers, bone, and blood, there is hope that our mourning will be comforted, and that death will not have the final word.”
~ Tish Harrison Warren
II. The Curse is Reversed (20:11-18)
This resurrection encounter shows us that the curse of sin and its impact on the world is being rolled back. We see this in three categories:
The Setting: Jesus is buried in a “garden tomb” (19:41); gardens have great significance in the Scriptures from the Garden of Eden all the way to the “Garden-City” of the New Heavens and the New Earth (Rev. 21-22)
The People
Angels: In the Garden of Eden, angels were placed by the Lord to prevent anyone from entering & accessing (Gen. 3:24); in this garden, the angels are welcoming Mary into the empty tomb
“The Gardener”
“Mary’s intuitive guess, that he must be the gardener, was wrong at one level and right, deeply right, at another. This is the new creation. Jesus is the beginning of it. Here he is: the new Adam, the gardener, charged with bringing the chaos of God’s creation into new order, into flower, into fruitfulness. He has come to uproot the thorns and thistles and replace them with blossoms and harvests.”
~ N.T. Wright
Mary:
Unlike Adam and Eve who hide from the presence of the Lord and his call in Genesis 3, Mary’s eyes are opened and her faith is ignited as the “Good Shepherd” calls her name. John 10:27: My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.
Eve is deceived in a garden by the serpent, and sin enters the world and spreads to all of creation. Mary, who had felt the full weight of the serpent’s schemes (cf. Lk. 8:2), is the first to encounter the risen Christ in a garden, and is commissioned to announce the gospel that will spread to all of creation.
3. The Message
Jesus did not want Mary to “cling” to him because his presence was going to come to be with them in the Holy Spirit. Christ’s followers would have an even greater intimacy and relationship with him through the indwelling Spirit, our great “Helper” (Jn. 16:7).
The alienation of the Garden of Eden between humans and God and humans with one another has now been solved because of the finished work of Christ: “go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
All of humanity is living in one of two story lines: we either walk out of a garden into a tomb, or we walk out of a tomb into a garden. By God’s grace and in the power of Christ’s resurrection, we are being invited to new life and into a “living hope” (1 Pet. 1:3).
