Alleluia! Christ is risen!

And so it is that we are gathered here on this beautiful spring morning, to praise God for the Great Victory won for us on the Cross and in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Alleluia!

This, friends, is the bedrock of our hope. As St Paul says, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died…. for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.”

Because we have been “made alive in Christ,” we no longer live “for this life only.” No more do we set our hope on the things that this world values: wealth, power, success, beauty, material possessions, honors, titles and distinctions. These things, as valuable as they may be, are passing away. We have a far more precious possession: a citizenship in heaven, where Christ now reigns with God in glory. In the words of St Paul: “…if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God.” We who have been baptized into him, have died with him and now share his risen life.

It was this same hope, this same confidence, that infused the disciples of Jesus following the Resurrection.

“One of the reasons for the remarkable rise of Christianity in its earliest centuries,” writes Timothy Keller, “was that it offered resources for hope in the face of the numerous urban pandemics that were devastating the Roman world.” Keller quotes historian Kyle Harper, who was asked how Christianity kept thriving and growing in the bleakness of those times:

“For [the early Christians,]” Harper replied, “[Christian faith] was a positive program. This life was always meant to be transitory, and just part of a larger story. What was important to the Christians was to orient one’s life towards the larger story, the cosmic story, the story of eternity. They did live in this world, experienced pain, and loved others. But the Christians of that time were called to see the story of this life as just one of the stories in which they lived. The hidden map was this larger picture.

That ”larger story” – the story of what GOD had done and was doing – gave them hope, a hope that sustained them in their own individual journeys. The biblical word is elpida, translated in English as the weaker word hope. Elpida means profound certainty. This “larger story” gives us a hope – a profound certainty – that is rooted in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In today’s gospel lesson we hear the story of how this elpida, this profound hope the early Christians offered to others, came to be. “On the first day of the week, at early dawn, [a small group of women] came to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body.” They had witnessed Jesus crucified and buried. Now they came to the tomb bearing spices, hoping to properly embalm the body for permanent burial. But the tomb was empty! The body wasn’t there!

The empty tomb doesn’t in itself prove the resurrection. But it is a crucial piece of evidence. Added to it is the witness of the women. Within the tomb they encounter “two men in dazzling clothes” who say to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” Then the women remembered Jesus’ words and ran immediately to tell the disciples.

Repeated encounters with the Risen Lord solidified the message and offered further confirmation: Jesus was alive! Not just one person or two, not just the chosen twelve, but “a large number of people, across a diversity of circumstances, testified that they had seen the risen Jesus.”

Further evidence is offered by St Paul, just fifteen to twenty years after Jesus’ death, when he writes to the Christians at Corinth,

“I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive… Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all… he appeared also to me.”

There are hundreds of eyewitnesses still living, Paul says. If you doubt our testimony, speak with them.

We have the witness of the empty tomb. We have the testimony of hundreds of eyewitnesses. And we have the witness of completely transformed lives! At one moment, the disciples of Jesus are in hiding, utterly defeated, confused and broken-hearted, and terrified that the authorities who put Jesus to death will now come after them. A few days later, they are standing in the Temple and in the marketplaces and in the streets, proclaiming that Jesus has risen from the dead! Boldly, fearlessly, willing to suffer whatever consequences might come their way. And many of them would pay a very steep price, even giving up their lives, for the truth they proclaimed.

What accounts for this boldness? It is one thing, says St Paul, to know the resurrection; it is another to live in the power of the resurrection. That is what they are doing: living into the larger story, the great story of how God gained the victory over sin and evil and death through the death and resurrection of his only Son.

For some Christians, this larger story is primarily about our continued life with God in heaven after death. But, in fact, it is about much more than this. It is not just about us as individuals or even as communities of people. This larger story encompasses the entire universe, every living creature, all that God has made. It promises that God is at work, making the whole creation new! In the same way that God brought life out of death on the Cross, God is renewing the entire created order. There will one day be a “new heaven” and a “new earth,” where there will be no tears, no pain, no suffering or loss. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is a foretaste, the “first fruits,” of that promised renewal.

Can you imagine yourself living daily within this larger story? Can you imagine trusting God to bring about God’s purposes in God’s time and as God wills? When we choose to live within that larger story, we can view our fears and worries from an entirely different perspective. We will continue to work tirelessly on behalf of God’s kingdom, protecting the weak and vulnerable, loving our neighbors and our enemies, making peace and promoting justice. But our efforts are only a small part of God’s larger story. Our hope is in God.

Presbyterian pastor and teacher Timothy Keller tells us that the New Testament speaks of two kinds of hope:

“When it comes to hoping in human beings and ourselves,” Keller writes, “our hope is always relative, uncertain. But when the object of hope is not any human agent but God, then hope means confidence, certainty, and full assurance… If I believe in the resurrection of Jesus, that confirms that there is a God who is both good and powerful, who brings light out of darkness, and who is patiently working out a plan for his glory, our good, and the good of the world (Eph. 1:9-12, Rom. 8:28). Christian hope means that I stop betting my life and happiness on human agency and rest in God. Our hope is not based on what we have done, but on what God has done.”

This Easter Day, lift up your eyes to see the larger story of which your life is a small part. Let that story fill you with hope, with profound certainty! Trust that the God who raised Jesus from the dead will bring you and the whole of creation to a perfect end. Christ has been raised from the dead, and with him you have passed through death and have been raised to newness of life. This is the foundation of our profound and certain hope.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!

I Corinthians 15:19-22