Materials
Temptations Of Christ #1
The Temptation To Be Certain
Matthew 3:13; 4:7
by R. Todd Bouldin
The story of Easter does not begin with everybody jumping to their feet to sing, “Christ the Lord is risen today!” The beginning portrays some women bringing spices to a tomb where the dead, decaying body of Jesus lay because they knew by the third day it would smell bad. They came early in the morning. They probably went early because they had been up all night. That’s what grieving people do. It isn’t a very pretty image, is it? Death never is. That’s we avoid trying to even think about it. But God won’t let us do that. That’s why there is a cross and Good Friday. He demands that you stare death in the eye so that he can give you a new life.
My grandmother and her generation talked about death all the time. I remember as a child waking in the morning at her house to a radio show called “Quartet Time,” in which the announcer would list all those who had died in the community the day preceding that one. The women would assemble food and make the calls to notify neighbors, and almost every day was a reminder of someone’s “passing away,” as they called it so to avoid the term “died.” Now, my grandmother’s society never mentioned the topic of sex in polite society, but they talked about death. By contrast, our society talks about sex all the time and never about death. Not until we are forced.
If you want to bring a dinner party to a halt, just bring up someone dying. Soon everyone will look at their watch and start explaining how the baby sitter is getting restless.
It used be that we thought of death as just part of the circle of life. Children grew up with it. I remember as a five year old looking into the casket for the first time, sitting up at the funeral home with the dead body, going to the gravesite and taking home a flower. The dead died in their homes, not in hospices or hospitals. Death used to be all around us.
In contemporary society we’ve been trying to get death off the stage. Though there recently is a move away from this, we isolate the dying into sterile rooms where they spend their final hours with experts. If you any of you have experienced watching someone die, it’s an awful thing to watch, and a humbling experience to care for the dying. Words seem to fail us, and all we can do is watch and love. There seems to be a horrible indignity, a fearsome intrusiveness about death that causes us to feel its presence more deeply because it is seems to rob us of everything life was meant to be. But we’ve been trying to get the death moved into its tomb in other ways too. We in southern California, and now people all over America, are consumed with rock hard abs, 32 inch waists, body tucks, face lifts and hair color changes. We don’t want our face or hair to look older, which really is to say that we are trying to put off our death where it will no longer have control over us.
As Ernst Becker pointed out in his groundbreaking work The Denial of Death, even our society’s obsession with sex is an attempt to make ourselves more than human, to achieve an experience that is “heavenly” as we call it or “sublime”. He says that our addictions, including sexual cravings, begin with a subconscious fear of death that builds up and takes over our passions, our thinking, and our lifestyles. Death, if it can’t be removed or taken away, at least is to be transcended. And if it won’t go away, well then that means we must just have fun while it can lasts.
The reason we want to remove or deny death isn’t because it is ugly, or smelly or painful. It is because it is the ultimate intrusion on our lives. It is the ultimate loss of control. And we just hate to lose control. We think that stinks! The writer of Hebrews calls it slavery. The Hebrews writer says in chapter 2:15 that Jesus came to free those who “all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.” Losing control is terrifying, and it can enslave you to all kinds of addictions and sin all in an effort to hang on to a life you are losing.
Death is one of the major characters in the biblical drama. In the Bible, people are dying all over the place. It’s just one “Six Feet Under” episode after another one. And the Bible doesn’t describe death with poetry or with sugar coating. Death is discussed with bluntness, with dust and hard reality. When Jesus began discussing raising Lazarus from the dead after he had been in the tomb for four days, the dead man’s sister exclaimed, “Oh Lord, don’t raise him now, he stinketh!”
There it is again! Death just stinks. But after September 11 and this war, we all have been jarred out of our pretense that we could hustle death off the stage so quickly and not have to think about it. Those events overwhelmed us. It was beyond our comprehension. We may have even turned off the television or ignored the newspaper because it is more than we could handle. Death is so unavoidable, and it’s unavoidable because it is woven into the grand design.
Everything is moving toward dissolution. Our scientists keep telling us that the earth will eventually run out of resources. Cancer patients will tell you that they do not learn how to live until they knew they were dying. Well, we all are terminal. All of us. It is just a matter of when someone signs the death certificate. All of your relationships are terminal. Your rock hard abs are terminal. Your job is terminal. You can try to hold on to those things for a while, but that’s really a silly way to live. In fact, it is to live a lie. If you live that way, you’re going to be worried about the day when you will lose it all or you’re going to have to pretend that you won’t lose it. In the words of the disciples today, that is an idle tale.
We owe it to those first disciples to understand their hopelessness. They had left their jobs, invested their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in what now appeared to be a mockery. They had seen their hopes and dreams ridiculed, scorned and spat upon by the entire city. Once they had basked in the celebrity of their Palestinian Idol, but now he had been judged a disgrace, a menace to society, a blasphemer, a pretender, a fraud, no better than two thieves. He was discredited, degraded and dead. His followers had broken ranks and were no where to be found. On Good Friday, all their hopes had died. There comes a time like that in every person’s life when your hopes of what Jesus would do for you have to die on the cross. Whatever it is you are afraid of losing, whether it is your job, or your stock, or your rock hard abs, or your relationship, you are going to have to lose.
Easter will not prevent your losses. That is the good news. Easter isn’t just another chapter in your ongoing drama to hold onto your life. It isn’t the next thing. Easter is a new thing. It is the only thing God can do in your life: God who breaks the power of death, and your fear and your loss. From it, he creates something new.
Our text today begins with the word “But.” I love that word when it appears in the Bible. Luke chapter 23 ends with Joseph of Arimathea wrapping up Jesus’ dead body and placing it in a tomb. Joseph thought he had reached the end of the story. “But” chapter 4 declares. “However.” “Nevertheless”. These are the words that declare that God has something else in mind. He’s getting ready to interrupt the way things are.
But on the first day of the week, the women came to the tomb and found it empty. Luke tells us that it left them “perplexed.” That is another word that in the gospels always signals that God is up to something. Then they saw two men in dazzling garments beside them, and they were “terrified.” Luke loves to use that word when God is invading someone’s life with something new. The women fell with their faces to the ground. Usually the angels break in about this time and say, “Do not be afraid.” But that does not happen here. Instead, the angels say something that is much more earth shattering, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, BUT has risen.” To say that Jesus is risen from the dead is to say that God reached into that tomb and into history, liftin Jesus up to new life.
The great thing about Easter is that God will do the same thing for you!
But now this is not initially good news. It is terrifying. Because in order to receive this new life, you have to stop clinging to the old one. You have to stop looking for the living among the dead. Stop obsessing over the right career move. Stop trying to protect your kids from every harm. Stop judging your whole worth by the hotness of your body. Stop seeking meaningless sexual fulfillment whenever you can find it. Stop living for a good drink or the pleasure of a weekend. Stop worrying over the worth of your estate. It’s all going to die. Just stop it. And go to the empty tomb, and there you will find the promise of a new life that will never die, and your life will no longer be held in slavery to the fear of death. It is a whole new day, and you can move past the fear to getting on with things that really matter like caring for the poor, adoring beauty, serving people, and worshiping God. It is life lived in light of the resurrection.
I have always struggled with Easter. The events of the previous week were so dramatic, so painful, so atoning. Then we get to Easter, and we are not sure what to do with an empty grave. Some of us are not even sure we believe it. The disciples, even the ones who heard Jesus foretell of his resurrection, thought it was just an idle tale that his body was gone. Perhaps you think the same. But it’s not just enough to hear the words, “The tomb is empty.” There are all kinds of possibilities that would cause the tomb to be empty. Perhaps the body was stolen. Perhaps the resurrected Jesus was just a dream or a theological symbol for life or some fantastical hope as the Christian community reflected back on their dead teacher. How can you know it’s true? You will never know it’s true because of any words. You’re going to have to encounter the risen Lord.
When Luke describes the appearances of Christ after his resurrection, there are no angels singing and lights all around. The appearances are so ordinary. One time he appears along a road. And to his disciples at dinner. That is how the risen Christ will appear to you as well. He breaks into the ordinary making it extraordinary.
Even when I find the faith to believe this story, I still struggle with Easter. I’ve heard “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” and now I have to get back to life. Good Friday seems to speak to the forgiveness of sins in my life now, but resurrection seems to be about death and what happens after my life but not about now. And I am just too busy to be thinking about what happens after death. I want to know how resurrection is relevant now. I think I misunderstand Easter. See, Easter breaks the power of death over my life now. It is something new, “a whole new world, a rich fantastic point of view.” To live consciously in a world lit by resurrection is very different than to not live in such a world. When you live in the light of the resurrection, in the words of Morgan Freeman in the movie Shawshank Redemption, you “can get on with living because you are through with the dying.”
All of a sudden resurrection becomes relevant and powerful. Resurrection will empower you to live at peace and put aside the pettiness. Resurrection will empower you to live a meaningful and purposeful life. Resurrection, Luke suggests to us, will cause the church to honor women because they too are among the close disciples of Christ, and the first to announce his rising. Discrimination, whether in society or in the church, is just another form of living in a world darkened by death and not lit by resurrection. Once you encounter Jesus, you can begin honoring, loving and serving people without regard to human labels. You can enjoy your life and your friends and your children, and all of life like never before. You might do something radical like giving your life to missions, or loving the poor. Everything is different after Easter.
Once you’ve encountered Jesus, you will know this is no idle tale. This is your saving drama. Will you join others to giving to Jesus the life you can’t keep to receive a new life you can’t lose? Will the resurrection drama break through again? It is really up to you. After Easter, God has offered you a new life. You don’t have to settle for the next thing. God wants to do a new thing. He wants to give you a life placed in his hands. But first you have to give him what is in your hands, you have to give him your death so that he can give you his life.
Perhaps some of you are struggling with Easter today because some loss or grief is weighing you down. The Easter message seems so distant because you can’t live for worrying about death, yours or someone close to you. If you have a terminal illness, or you just fear death, God has spoken a great word to you today. His Easter promise is that he will raise up your body again from that tomb and he will breathe life into you and you will live again! If you have recently sustained a loss of a mother or father, or a son or daughter, or a good friend – you may mourn, but those who trust in the Lord have a great hope. One day God is going to reach down into that tomb and he’s going to call them forth, and raise them up, and together you will be forever with the Lord. That’s not just an idle tale. That is the promise of God.
What God wants to teach you this Easter is that in life and death you belong to God. If you can’t believe that, then Paul says your life will be most “miserable.” (I Corinthians 15: 19). Why? Because death still holds you a slave, and you’ll spend the rest of your life living a lie about your future destiny. But if you can look death in the eye, if you can stare down into the depths of Ground Zero, if you can gaze down into the casket of your loved one, you’ll know the hunger for something more. For a new word. And Christ will appear to you. And you will know this drama is true. It must be true. And you will discover a new life that is no longer full of dead ends. No longer dull and boring. No longer consumed with grief or dread. Life lived in world lit by resurrection is bursting with life. It is alive. The promise of the gospel is this: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead also has come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.” (I Corinthians 15:20-22).
Happy Easter! Amen.
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