TEXT: Matthew 28:1-10
If you ask the average Christian what the most significant day in the life of the church is, most will say Christmas or Easter. And you might even get a lively debate over why one is more important than the other. And yet, in my experience the two things that are held up as “most important” are the birth of Jesus (INCARNATION) and the sacrificial death of Jesus (ATONEMENT/JUSTIFICATION). I happily say both are important and central to God’s story in Jesus Christ.
Other than ON Easter, what I don’t ever hear people talking about is the importance of the RESURRECTION of Jesus. We might say Easter is so important, but what we often are thinking about is Easter weekend and the crucifixion on Good Friday in particular.
Ultimately, my goal today is not to assign any kind of relative importance to the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. They are all of greatest importance. What I want to do is try to explain and illustrate why the resurrection is important and the difference it can and should make in our day-to-day lives.
Good Friday: Saving Death
Good Friday and the cross are certainly crucial to understanding and Christianity and salvation. In fact, our word ‘crucial’ comes from the crucifixion; it is a central, foundational, of-greatest-importance thing. On the cross Jesus took the sin of the world onto himself. He took your and my sin, disobedience, unrighteousness, and ungodliness and exchanged his goodness, obedience, rightness, and godliness. In Christ and because of his saving death, your sins and my sins are forgiven! That’s the Gospel, literally “Good News.”
One way I’ve illustrated this before is with a guitar. Any guitarist (or instrumentalist) will tell you that instruments go out of tune. It’s in their nature. Age and environment and physics mean that every instrument is always de-tuning. Human beings are like that. Our imperfections, our surroundings, and our own choices are constantly at work to de-tune our lives. God is like that musician or master-tuner who brings us into alignment, into tune with His holy will. Devices like the tuner on my guitar are kind of like God’s Word, the Bible, showing us what that right tuning is. [I tune my guitar as I’m saying all this.]
In fact, one of my favorite hymns uses the phrase, “Tune my heart to sing Thy grace.” This isn’t a complete illustration of what Jesus’ death means for us, but it is a helpful one. On the cross God has set us right!
In his letter to the Romans, Paul explains the importance of Christ’s death in this way:
“Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death… that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for the one who has died [with Christ] is freed (acquitted) from sin.” (Romans 6:4,6-7, selected)
Jesus died so that our sins might be acquitted, forgiven and set right with God. And then they laid him in the tomb. [I put my guitar back in it’s case and close the case.]
Easter: New Life
But what of Easter? If our sins are forgiven on the cross and we are made right with God, why is Easter so important?
I just read part of those verses from Romans 6. Between those ellipses Paul also speaks of what Christ’s resurrection means for us:
“Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would not longer be slaves to sin; for the one who has died [with Christ] is freed (acquitted) from sin.” (vv.4-7)
Through faith in Jesus Christ we are not just joined to his saving death, but joined to his resurrection
