Wingham United Church

April 20, 2025

Easter Sunday

The Heart of It All

Acts 10:34-43

Luke 24:1-12

The story of that first Easter morning is told in all four of our gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and death. The story as it is told in the twentieth chapter of John’s gospel is probably the best known and most often read on Easter morning, but I chose to use Luke’s account today. The various accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb differ a bit, which actually makes perfect sense. It was women who came to the garden on that first morning, but their stories were told by men – men who weren’t there to see what they saw. And women were notoriously unreliable witnesses, or so the misogynistic culture of the time suggested. This, perhaps, explains why the men had such a difficult time making sense of or accepting what the women were telling them. It is, after all, a pretty unbelievable story, yet it is the very heart of our faith.

The women came to show their love for Jesus, even in death, and they came to do for him what they would do for any loved one. Jewish custom demanded that the body be washed, anointed with spices, perfumes, and oils, then wrapped in linen before burial. Because Jesus died on the day before the Sabbath, these things were not done, for anyone who touched a dead body would be prohibited from entering the temple until a time and ritual of purification had been observed, and no one wanted to miss going to the temple at Passover.

The law in Jerusalem prohibited a corpse from being left within the city walls overnight, so Jesus’ body was temporarily wrapped up and placed in a borrowed tomb until it was possible to do what needed to be done, and it was the women in Jesus’ life who came to perform what they believed would be their final act of love and compassion for the One they called Lord.

Imagine their shock when they arrive at the tomb and find the stone rolled away and the body gone. As they stand there in wonder and bewilderment, trying to figure out what might have happened, they are visited by two angelic figures who wonder why they are looking in a tomb for someone who is still alive! Small wonder the apostles didn’t believe what the women told them. They could scarcely believe it themselves.

Peter, however, was not content to simply disregard the women’s story. He went to see for himself. When he arrived, he noticed the empty linen wrappings. You see, those wrappings are important. If someone had, for some reason, stolen the body in the middle of the night as some have speculated, they would not have taken time to unwrap it. They would have taken the wrappings with them. Still with far more questions than answers, Peter leaves the tomb still trying to understand what has taken place.

Later that day, Jesus appears to Peter, among others, and over the next few weeks, Jesus makes further appearances until, one day, he gathers his disciples for prayer and as he prays, he ascends into the sky and out of sight.

During this time, and through the events that follow, we see a change in Peter. He transforms from a man so scared that he denied even knowing who Jesus was as his friend and teacher was standing trial before Pilate to being the most vocal and confident of the apostles, standing to address the crowds at Pentecost, and, in our reading today, revealing that even now, all this time after his death, Jesus is still teaching him things about the Kingdom of God.

Until the time of our second reading today, Peter has been of the very firm opinion that Jesus came to bring salvation only to faithful Jews who accepted him as their Christ. It caused a great deal of conflict between Peter and Paul, who, from the very beginning, shared the gospel with Gentiles like us. But then Peter has a vision and he learns that he has been mistaken. That God shows no favouritism. In every nation, God accepts those who accept God, that revere God as their Creator and Guide. He knows this because Jesus taught him. Jesus also showed him what it meant to obey God and do what is right.

He knows this is right. He knows it because it was told to him and shown to him by the one God sent, and his evidence that Jesus had the knowledge and authority to teach them these things was what he had witnessed with his own eyes: Jesus, put to death on the cross, then brought back from the dead three days later. Peter and those chosen to be Jesus’ witnesses not only saw Jesus, they touched him, ate and drank with him, and were ordered to tell the world what they had come to know. Jesus is the one the prophets had been talking about all those centuries, and that those who believe what Peter has come to know will have their sins forgiven.

That is the truth the early church was built on. The central message of the Christian faith is that Jesus is the one and only one who came, was put to death, and rose from the dead. He is the Son of God. And, oh, by the way, we should love God and each other, we should seek justice and resist evil, we should help the poor, the sick, the oppressed, and share this great and wonderful knowledge with everyone we meet. Those are all important, but they are not the central message of the gospel. The heart of our faith is the knowledge that Jesus is the One, and through him, we are forgiven and welcomed into God’s Kingdom.

Without that truth, the Bible is nothing more than a guide to good behaviour, an ancient “Miss Manner’s Guide.” Everything else you have ever heard in church is empty of meaning without the Resurrection. In fact, there is no church without the Resurrection!

Everything else we enjoy here: the teaching, the music, the fellowship, and the opportunities to work together for a better world are all possible only because of what Jesus did for us, not only in dying, but in coming back. If he had simply died on the cross, we would not be here today. Peter, and the rest of the apostles would have gone back to their lives and continued to wonder what it had all been about. We would have never even known their names, nor would we know the name of Jesus. It is only in the Resurrection that Jesus’ story gains the power and momentum it needed to carry it forward through the centuries and continue to impact the world we live in today.

It is Peter’s confidence that inspires my own. I am a process theologian, meaning I don’t simply accept the doctrine and dogma of the self-proclaimed leaders of the church from hundreds of years ago. I need to think it through, to reason out the things that seem unreasonable. That doesn't mean I follow the Jesus Seminar folks like Crossan, Borg, Spong and others who accept only what they can prove through human intellect and historic record. I fully accept that there are things about God and Heaven and the universe that I will never understand. Still, however, I need to see some way that the pieces of the puzzle fit together, even if I don’t know exactly what the picture is.

So, while science cannot explain how Jesus came back from the dead, and historians question if He did, I can see no other explanation for the change in Peter or Paul or the impact their ministries had and continue to have in the world than that what they told us about Christ was true.

He died for our sins. He was resurrected for our salvation. Nothing else makes sense. That is the very heart of our faith.

Rev. Colin Snyder, MDiv