Risen
Pastor Philip's sermon on Easter made me think about a sermon I preached several years ago. I thought I would share it today...
In order to completely understand what was going on at Jesus’ resurrection, we need to have a complete knowledge of the feast that had come to be known as Passover. This feast of the Lord was actually three feasts, Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread and the Feast of Firstfruits. Because they happened so close together, they were often combined in the minds of the Jews into one, week-long feast, called Passover. Here’s what would happen:
Four days before Passover, the people of Israel were to bring their Passover lamb into their house and examine it. They were also to cleanse their houses of all leaven, or yeast. It symbolized removing all sin from their homes.
Four days later, they would celebrate Passover, a feast of remembrance. They were remembering that God freed them from slavery in Egypt. Interestingly, all of the feasts are called by a particular name in Hebrew. The word literally means, “a rehearsal.” God calls His feasts a rehearsal. “A rehearsal for what?”, you might ask. We’ll see in a minute.
The next day began the weeklong Feast of Unleavened Bread, in which the people only ate unleavened bread.
The next Sunday after the Feast of Unleavened Bread began was the Feast of Firstfruits. After Passover, the High Priest would seclude himself in order to remain ritually clean. He would allow no one to touch him until after he had completed this task. At the end of the Sabbath, in the waning light after Sundown, some temple priests would harvest ten shocks of ripe barley, one omer each. They would bring these back and overnight, they would parch it, grind it, and bake it into loaves. As the sun rose the next day, the High Priest would take the loaves and wave them before the Lord. This was an offering of the first of the barley harvest as a promise from the Lord for the rest of the harvest. You can read about all of these in Leviticus 23.
Look @ The Book
Now, let’s look at a timeline of what we would call Holy Week.
The Triumphal Entry - Saturday, April 24, 28 AD
Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey. I talked about this last Sunday if you want to watch the video. He comes into His “home”, His Father’s house, as the Lamb of God and is examined for the next few days in the temple. This includes His arrest and trial. In all of this, no one was able to find any fault in Him, so false charges had to be brought in order to have Him crucified.
Passover – Sundown, Wednesday, April 28, 28 AD
Jesus is hung on the cross at 9:00 AM on Wednesday and dies at the moment when the Passover lamb is sacrificed in the temple. He is hastily prepared and laid in a tomb because sundown was approaching and Passover was about to begin. All of the feast days of the Lord were considered a high Sabbath, regardless of what day of the week they fell on, and all of the Sabbath rules applied to them.
Now you might be thinking, “I thought Jesus died on a Friday.” And indeed, this is what we have been taught, but it reflects a gross misunderstanding of Jewish culture, the feasts of the Lord, and the timeline. The misunderstanding comes from the fact that the Bible says that they wanted to get the bodies off the crosses because the Sabbath approached, and the Sabbath usually refers to Saturday. In the years following the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, much of this knowledge was lost and was not recovered until fairly recently. Remember how I mentioned earlier that the word we translate as “feast” literally means “rehearsal”? The people of Israel had been rehearsing the events of the coming of Jesus for millennia. All of the feasts were a foreshadowing, a picture, a rehearsal, of things that were to come.
So, there are three literal, 24 periods between Passover and Firstfruits. Jesus said that just as Jonah spent three days and nights in the belly of the fish, so the Son of Man would spend three days and nights in the earth. Just as the High Priest was secluded from everyone for three full days, so our High Priest, Jesus, was secluded from everyone for three full days.
When they removed Jesus from the cross, a Pharisee named Joseph of Arimathea took His body and placed it in his new tomb. Jews didn’t mix things, so they wouldn’t put members of different families into the same tomb. That made this an incredibly lavish gift and says something about Joseph’s relationship to Jesus. More about this in a second.
The Bible says that the tomb was sealed by the Romans and then guarded. The stone, which would have weighed 1-2 tons, was then sealed. To do this, the Romans would have made a hole in the stone wall, poured molten lead into the space, and then driven an iron rod into it. This lead and iron is still imbedded into the wall of the tomb today.
Once secured, it could not be removed. They meant this to be a permanent seal. No one was ever going into that tomb again. It would have required 90 tons of force to shear off the iron rod.
In addition, the Romans placed a guard. The words used in the Bible tell us that there would have been about 12 guards placed at the tomb. They would have rotated being on watch and resting, and they knew the penalty for dereliction of duty…crucifixion. No one was going to risk that over guard duty. So the tomb stayed permanently sealed for three nights and days.
The Feast of Firstfruits – Sundown, Saturday, May 1, 28 AD
(I am sharing these four passages in one narrative by combining the individual details together. I've marked them so you can see what portions come from which Gospel.)
Matthew 28:1-10, Mark 16:1-8, Luke 24:1-12, John 20:1-18
When the Sabbath ended, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome went out and purchased burial spices so they could anoint Jesus’ body. Suddenly there was a great earthquake! For an angel of the Lord came down from heaven, rolled aside the stone, and sat on it. His face shone like lightning, and his clothing was as white as snow. The guards shook with fear when they saw him, and they fell into a dead faint.
Early on Sunday morning, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene and the other women went to the tomb. On the way they were asking each other, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” But as they arrived, they looked up and saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled aside.
She ran and found Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved. She said, “They have taken the Lord’s body out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
The other women went in, but they didn’t find the body of the Lord Jesus. As they stood there puzzled, two men suddenly appeared to them, clothed in dazzling robes. The women were terrified and bowed with their faces to the ground, but one angel said, “Don’t be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive? He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead, just as he said would happen! Remember what he told you back in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and that he would rise again on the third day. Look, this is where they laid his body. Now go and tell his disciples, including Peter, that Jesus has risen from the dead and he is going ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there, just as he told you before he died. Remember what I have told you.” The women fled from the tomb, trembling and bewildered. Then they remembered that he had said this. They were very frightened but also filled with great joy, and they rushed to give the disciples the angel’s message.
Peter and the other disciple started out for the tomb. They were both running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He stooped and looked in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he didn’t go in. Then Simon Peter arrived and went inside. He also noticed the linen wrappings lying there, while the cloth that had covered Jesus’ head was folded up and lying apart from the other wrappings. Then the disciple who had reached the tomb first also went in, and he saw and believed— for until then they still hadn’t understood the Scriptures that said Jesus must rise from the dead. Then they went home.
Mary was standing outside the tomb crying, and as she wept, she stooped and looked in. She saw two white-robed angels, one sitting at the head and the other at the foot of the place where the body of Jesus had been lying. “Dear woman, why are you crying?” the angels asked her.
“Because they have taken away my Lord,” she replied, “and I don’t know where they have put him.”
She turned to leave and saw someone standing there. It was Jesus, but she didn’t recognize him. “Dear woman, why are you crying?” Jesus asked her. “Who are you looking for?”
She thought he was the gardener. “Sir,” she said, “if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and get him.”
“Mary!” Jesus said.
She turned to him and cried out, “Rabboni!” (which is Hebrew for “Teacher”).
“Don’t cling to me,” Jesus said, “for I haven’t yet ascended to the Father. But go find my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Mary Magdalene found the disciples and told them, “I have seen the Lord!” Then she gave them his message.
As the other women went, Jesus met them and greeted them. And they ran to him, grasped his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t be afraid! Go tell my brothers to leave for Galilee, and they will see me there.”
- The women went on the Friday between the Passover Sabbath and the regular weekly Sabbath to get the spices. Then they rested from Friday sundown for the Sabbath.
- At sundown that Saturday, Jesus rose! It was three days and nights. However, the women didn’t find it empty until Sunday because they needed to wait for the sun to rise in order to see. They didn’t have flashlights.
- Mary Magdalene and the other women leave Bethany to go to the tomb, where they arrive as the sun is coming up. They find the tomb empty. Mary runs to Jerusalem where Peter and John are hiding and tells them. In the meantime, the other women enter the tomb and have a conversation with the angel. They leave for Bethany, where the other disciples are waiting. After they leave, Peter, John, and Mary return to the tomb and have their encounter. The disciples from Bethany leave and return to Jerusalem to meet with Peter and John, and then Jesus appears to them all.
- Mary then has an encounter with Jesus. Why didn’t He want her to touch Him? He told her that He hadn’t ascended to His Father, but that doesn’t make any sense because the ascension was over a week later and He allowed the disciples to touch Him over and over. However, it does make sense when you remember what was happening in the Temple. Just like the earthly High Priest was preparing to leave his seclusion to present the Firstfruits offering, so Jesus as our High Priest was preparing to present the Firstfruits offering to God. “What Firstfruits offering?”, you might ask. Well, this answered a question I had for years. It relates to the events in Matthew 27:51-53. It says that at Jesus’ death, there was an earthquake, tombs were opened, and people were resurrected and were seen in Jerusalem. I had always read that and wondered what it was all about and what happened to those people. These people were the firstfruits of the resurrected, taken by our High Priest and presented to God, just as had been rehearsed for generations!
Took
I present all of this to you because it reminds us, yet again, that God has a plan. God had laid out these rehearsals thousands of years before Jesus, and Jesus fulfilled them all in detail. It is one of the most powerful evidences that He is exactly who He said He is.
One final note:
When you go back to Genesis 50, we see an interesting thing happen. Joseph is dying and he makes a prophecy about the time of slavery in Egypt. Then he tells his family that they will one day leave Egypt and when they do, he wants them to take his body and bury it in the land of promise.
We jump forward 400 years to Moses. He has left Egypt with all of Israel. Pharaoh realizes that his workforce is walking out and decides to chase them down and bring them back. But how did Pharaoh know that they were never returning? Moses never asked for complete freedom. He just asked to be allowed to go three days into the desert in order to worship Yahweh. How did Pharaoh know they were never returning? Because they had taken the body of Joseph with them. Pharaoh knew that when the tomb of Joseph was empty, the slaves had been set free.
Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, is placed in the tomb by a man named Joseph of Arimathea. He is never mentioned in the Bible except in this one place, providing a place for Jesus to be buried. Why is that? Because everything in Scripture is connected. God delights is revealing Himself in small ways, and just as Pharaoh knew that when the tomb of Joseph was empty, the slaves were set free, so we know that when the tomb of Joseph was empty, the slaves are set free.
So let’s live in that freedom, and let’s invite others to live in that freedom as well. Let’s live as a people celebrating the greatest news of all. Let us let our lights shine before men that they may see our good deeds and praise God. And, let us let our love for one another prove to the world that we are His disciples!
SONGS FOR SUNDAY
Glorious Day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gklJ2XZwDHc
Still God, Still Good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei8XWHpFDq4
Way Maker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29IxnsqOkmQ
I Exalt Thee