Chapter Two

A Good Ending

I think there’s two kinds of movie watchers. I’m afraid I’m in the latter category.
The first kind watch the movie and quite like the suspense of wondering what’s going to happen next. And then there’s people like me who quite like watching a film with someone who’s seen it before so that I can ask them as we go along, “What’s going to happen next. What the ending is going to be.”
I don’t know if you read books, you might be someone who reads a novel. And when it gets all a bit tense, you turn to the final page just to check the all is going to be well. Well, if you’re like that, Christianity is such good news, because Jesus has risen from the grave and shown us the end of history today.
Here and now we can know where our lives are going. We can know that the end is good because of Jesus.

Sin, failure, death, they don’t have the last word. Things looked, in history, to be heading all in the wrong direction until Jesus came. Jesus came and we found a God who identifies with us. That’s what we look at at Christmas time. God with us, God one of us, God just like you and me. But the Gospel doesn’t end there. The Gospel is that God doesn’t only identify with us, He intervenes, He changes the course of history. The cross is God’s ultimate, yes, to humankind. Jesus willingly, identifying with us, dying in our place in love. But it’s also about an intervention. On the cross we also see a no, God’s no to sin. On the cross, Jesus bears the cost of all our sin, all our failures in life. He bears that no for us.

And the question left on Food Friday as we gathered just two days ago. Is that the end? Jesus’ life had seemed to be all about new beginnings, new starts for people, healing, freedom, but the disciples left on that Good Friday wondering “Is this the end?” They got to the tomb on that third morning with the same question, “Is this the end?” And they discover the greatest divine intervention in all of human history. God has raised Jesus from the dead. He said no to death. He says no to sin on the cross, Jesus bears that for us. And in raising Jesus from the dead, He says no to death, no to sin and death, having the last words, no to the cross being the end of the story.

Resurrection

It’s so important that we know this word that we use in church. Resurrection. It’s so important that we know what it means. Jesus raised some people from the dead like Lazarus, but they died again. Jesus’ resurrection is a wholly new thing. Jesus totally died. He was dead and buried and God raised Him resurrected Him from the dead, never to die again. Death defeated. In that complete end, it had to be a complete end because of our sin to get it dealt with. It made a way for a truly new beginning, a new birth into a living hope, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.
Therefore Paul can say “Where oh, death is your victory? Where oh, death is your sting.” The sting of course a death is our sin. If Jesus hadn’t paid for our sin on the cross, death would be the end for us. But with it paid for, death has no sting because it’s not the end. There is resurrection. It hurts now to lose those we love, but there is no sting in death for those who believe in Jesus, because he has paid the price for sin. Death is not the end. The resurrection of Jesus showed that the cross was not a defeat, the cross was a victory. God’s ultimate yes to us, to life with Him. The resurrection is His yes to eternal life for us. Paul writes, sorry. Peter writes in the New Testament. He says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In His great mercy and His great love, He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

A Living Hope

It’s a living hope. It’s a hope that we can know today. So often we think of hope as something aspirational, something that we want in the future. Christian hope is a living hope. It’s a hope that lives in our hearts. It’s something that we can know in our lives. So many people today live without hope. Feeling like life has a grim inevitability to it. There’s things that they regret, that they can’t un-change, they can’t change, and they think, “Well life can’t get better because I can’t change the things I wish I could.” Or perhaps things have gone wrong for them and have closed down their horizons and they think there’s no hope. Life without hope is a dark place. It’s the place that Mary is in as she arrives at the tomb that Easter morning. John says nothing by accident and he says it was still dark. Her heart was still heavy. She was still wondering, is there hope? But Jesus meets her there. He says, “There is hope. There is resurrection. God has intervened. I’m alive.”
As Raniero Cantalamessa says, he’s the preacher to the Pope. He gets the job of preaching to the Pope. That’s quite a scary job, isn’t it? And he said, “Easter is the birthday of hope.” It’s when hope is born. There’s not much mention before that of the word hope. But after that, in the pages of the New Testament, you find hope on almost every page because it was what we were waiting to know, that death is not the end. Our fears are not the end of the story. The regrets that we have, that we can’t change, they’re not the end of the story. God has intervened.

Karma or Grace

There is a different outcome to what we think is inevitable. I’ve read recently an interview with Bono, the lead singer of U2. He said something fascinating to me. He said that all religions, except belief in Jesus Christ just basically mimic the way the physical universe works. In the physical universe, there’s cause and effect, you act and something happens and then you can’t do anything about it. You basically get the results of your actions, the consequences of your actions. He said, that’s the basic idea of karma. What you put out comes back to you, but he says, grace, what God does for us in Jesus Christ offers us something completely different. He says, this “Love interrupts. Love interrupts the consequences of your actions, which in my case is a very good news, indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff. I’d be in big trouble if karma was going to be my final judge. I don’t excuse my mistakes, but I’m holding out for grace. I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the cross because I know who I am.”

He knows what he’s like. We all know what we’re like. We need something better than karma. What goes around, comes around. We need a God who intervenes. A love that interrupts our consequences and turns them into something utterly new, utterly unbelievable to us before Jesus rose again, that there could be such a new beginning, such hope. If you’re here today and you’ve given up hope that life can be that much different to what you’ve experienced so far. This is the good news of Easter morning. Easter Day is for you. Easter Day is the day to realize afresh that when Jesus rose from the dead, the situation that looked beyond all hope, Be brought hope into all of our lives. He brought an excitement that we can know, whatever we face, that love can come into our lives and change that reality. Eternally, because death is not the end, but here and now because Jesus has given us His Holy Spirit, we can know the same power, this is what it says in the New Testament, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead in our hearts, in our lives today.

And I want to finish this talk by looking at how. We see how in this passage, we see what happened to John and to Mary. There’s a poignant moment in that interview with Bono where the interviewer stops him. And he says, “The Son of God who takes away the sins of the world, I wish I could believe that.” Bono understands, he doesn’t brush that question aside. He says, “When I look at the cross, what I see up there is my sin.” Actually use a different word, but it’s asterisked out, so I’m going to use the word sin. “What I see up there is all my sin and everybody else’s. So I asked myself a question that a lot of people have asked, who is this man? And was He what He said He was? And there is. And that’s the question and no one can talk you out of it and no one can talk you into it.”

It’s true. No one can talk you out of or, into believing in Jesus. Because believing in Jesus is too important. If God’s death on the cross and his resurrection was His yes, to us, believing in Jesus is our yes, to God. It’s our way of receiving everything that He’s made possible on the cross. He’s never going to force that upon us. He’s not going to talk us into it. He wants us to see it and believe it to receive it.

In John 20, we see how this happens. Let’s look at what happens to John first. Mary goes to the tomb, she sees it empty apart from the linen. And she goes to Peter and John, she says, “They’ve taken the Lord away. I don’t know where they’ve put him.” Peter and John run to the tomb. And I love this. This is John’s Gospel. And John makes it very clear that he got there first. We read both were running, but the other disciple, that’s Jesus, outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He comes back to that again. He wants us to be really sure that he’s the faster runner. And Peter finally arrives, I honestly have sympathy, he’s my namesake, puffing, and blowing. But he goes past John and he goes into the tomb. And in verse six, we read that he sees the strips of linen that were wrapped around Jesus’ body, lying there. He sees the cloth that was around his head folded to one side.

Seeing with the Heart

And what we read there in verse six, if you see where it says he saw the strips of linen. That word for seeing the verb is basically, it means to observe, to take note of. It’s the kind of seeing where we take information in, but simply that, we just take in what we see. But then look at what happens next. Finally, the other disciple, John who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. And the word that he used is there for saw is a different word, it’s the same word in English, but it’s a different word in the Greek. And it means inward perception. Seeing with the heart. He saw the same facts that Peter saw. He saw the same scene, but in his heart, something said, he knew Jesus is alive. He believed. He didn’t have answers to all his questions, we read in verse nine, that he still didn’t fully understand, but he saw and he believed.

And that process of moving from information that we take in about Jesus, to transformation, where we see with our hearts is what is happening all around the world every single day, thousands of new people becoming Christians, as they see. And they don’t just hear about it, they don’t just see it as in an informational way. It transforms their lives. It’s that same process that Bono talked about. We look at Jesus, we look at the cross, we look at the evidence for the resurrection and we ask ourselves the question, “Who is Jesus?”
It’s what we do every Alpha Course, we go on that journey. If you’ve never done the Alpha Course, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Because every course that I’ve ever done, I did it myself as a guest 14 years ago, and I’ve done it pretty much every year, since at least once. I know I love it because I see people, myself included, going on this journey of seeing that transforms the heart. It’s why John wrote his Gospel. In verse 31, we read, these are written. These things are written in this book that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. And that by believing you may have life in His name. Believing is the way to have life in Jesus.

The Holy Spirit helps us with that. Because looking at who Jesus is isn’t just a historical exercise. We can look at the historical evidence for the resurrection. It’s what we do on week one of Alpha. It’s there in the Bible. It’s in other sources. But we’re not just historians because the resurrection isn’t just a past reality. It’s a present reality. It’s a future reality because Jesus is risen, never to die again, He’s alive. And you can experience that He’s alive here and now by His Holy Spirit. That’s how we know.

Knowing Hope

Listen to this prayer of Paul in Ephesians 1. He says, I pray, this is to the church, that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints and His incomparably, great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of His mighty strength, which He exerted in Christ when He raised him from the dead and seated Him at the right hand in the heavenly realms. The power of the Spirit is the same power that raised Jesus from the dead. And we can know it in our hearts here and now.
This isn’t triumphalism, it’s not saying that we’ll never suffer as Christians, that we’ll just go through life just pushing out all before us. This is a power that we can know in the midst of whatever situations we face. The same power that overcame death lives in us. And so we need not fear anything, whatever we face. It’s about a power, as Paul says elsewhere, that’s made perfect in weakness, resurrection power. Jesus looked to all the world utterly helpless as He was nailed to the cross. He accepted that for us, but it gave birth to a power greater than we could imagine as God raised Him from the dead. That power is [inaudible 00:21:19] by believing in Jesus.

The Chilean miner, Jose Henriquez. Do you remember him? He was trapped with 32 others. He was number 26 to come out of the grounds. He was trapped underground for 69 days. And for many days it looked like this place where they were, it was like a tomb, was going to be their grave. But he never lost hope. He led many people to Christ underground because he knew of a rescue greater than the rescue that they were all praying for. The rescue that was wrought by God when He raised Jesus from the dead. He knew a living hope in the darkness. He preaches the same message above ground in the light as he preached in the darkness.

He said this in a talk in London, recently, “Young people, you have to receive Christ. There’s no other way. There’s no better life. Here on earth, there is no better life nor in the world to come. Jesus Christ is offering an eternal life, an abundant life. But this is for those who believe in Him, who dare to believe. God didn’t send His son to die for nothing. He didn’t die for nothing. He came to die for you and for me, Jesus gave himself for us, as a rescuer. He is the real rescuer. He can save our lives. You can’t lose out young people. You have to accept God, He’s offering eternal life. He loves you.”

It’s the same message that Bono said to that interviewer, love interrupts. It interrupts the courses of our lives that seem to be hopeless and it brings a living hope. The love and the grace of God. I’ve run out of time. But I want to speak to anyone here who hears this and who says, “I feel like I’ve heard this a lot. I feel like I’ve done a lot of searching in my life for Jesus, but I haven’t found him. I hear talk about God’s love, but I don’t know what it means to experience it.” Take encouragement from Mary. Mary is the last at the cross, she’s the first at the tomb. She’s a very special person. And yet she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t even get it when angels speak to her, she doesn’t get it when Jesus speaks to her and says, “Who is it you’re looking for?”
It’s such a searching question. It’s a question basically, that is saying, are you really looking for me, Mary? Or do you want to find a dead body? Because if you’re looking for me, you should be looking for someone who’s alive. It’s not a critical question, it’s a loving one. But you know what turns everything around for her? It’s when she hears one word, she says to who she thinks is the gardener, “Sir, if you’ve carried him away, tell me where you’ve put Him And I will get Him.” Jesus said to her “Mary.” She turned towards him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” which means teacher.

John writes that word, Mary in Aramaic. He’s put her name in Greek all the way through, but he wants her to know, he wants the reader to know that Jesus calls her by name personally, in the way that he spoke to her all through his life. Jesus will speak to each one of us, personally. He calls us by name. It says in the Old Testament that He’s graven us on the palms of his hands. I like that phrase because I think that’s what happened on the cross.