Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia. God be praised for this. This is the Sunday drive to church for Easter Sunday, Resurrection Sunday, March 31, the year of our Lord 2024. And dear saints of St. Paul, what a beautiful truth is confessed in those words, that Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. The firstborn from the dead. I was thinking about that a little bit, because there's other people who, who die and then come back to life, but they're not resurrected, not like Jesus. They have to die again.
[00:00:32] But when Jesus is raised from the dead, it's never to die again. And in that way, he is the firstfruits, the first one to enter into the life of the new heaven and the new earth, that eternal life that the Lord has made a way for all of us to enter into as well. God be praised for that. And there's two truths that I think are most important for Easter Sunday. Think about it a little bit. I think the way to start this drive to church is to actually fast forward to the proper preface. I'll dial all the way back to the beginning. In fact, whoops. I was thinking about that greeting. Christ is risen. He has risen indeed. Trying to figure out where that comes from. And that's as old as it gets. I mean, you look at some russian orthodox stuff, and they say that that was what Mary Magdalene said to the emperor Tiberius. She brought him an egg and said that Christ is risen.
[00:01:28] I don't know if that's where the Easter egg tradition comes from as well. That'd be interesting to track down. But that greeting, Christ has risen. He has risen indeed is ancient. Ancient. And I think one of the differences between the eastern tradition and the western tradition, remember that as the church grew up and it split in two, there was the eastern greek church and the western latin church and our, we follow that latin western tradition, it adds the alleluia. So in the east, it's Christ has risen. He has risen indeed. In the west, Christ is risen. He has risen indeed. Alleluia. We had that. Alleluia. God be praised. Now, though, the two truths in the proper preface, remember, the proper preface is that part right after the surtium Corday. Lift up your hearts. We lift them to the Lord. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It's right to give him thanks and praise. And then the prayer right before the sanctus, right before the Lord's prayer, right before the verba, the institution. So it's right at the kind of holy of holies of the liturgy. It rotates by season.
[00:02:31] And the Easter preface reads like this. It's truly good, right? And salutary that we should at all times and all places give thanks to you, holy Lord, almighty Father, everlasting God. And most especially, are we bound to praise you on this day for the glorious resurrection of your son, Jesus Christ, the very paschal lamb.
[00:02:54] Let me put a little asterisk by the paschal lamb there who was sacrificed for us and bore the sins of the world. By his dying he has destroyed death, and by his rising again he has restored to us everlasting life.
[00:03:12] Therefore, with Mary Magdalene, Peter and John, and with all the witnesses of the resurrection, with angels and archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify your glorious name evermore, praising you and saying, holy, holy, holy. Now, there's two things. Maybe let's make it three things.
[00:03:34] I'm adding one as I'm looking at it here. But the two first main things, and I'll tell you what I added, is that, number one, the spiritual, theological and practical significance of the death and resurrection of Jesus. By his dying he destroyed death, and by his rising again, he restored to us everlasting life. In other words, first, the death and resurrection of Jesus cannot be separated from one another.
[00:04:02] They belong as a peace, and that belongs to us. So that Jesus is dying in our place, suffering for our sins, enduring the wrath of God for us, so that we might have the happiness and smile of God, the forgiveness of sins, the sure hope of everlasting life. That Jesus, by his resurrection, opened to us the way to everlasting life, that he has done what he came to do.
[00:04:26] He is the savior.
[00:04:29] He is the one who brings many to salvation.
[00:04:34] He's done it. That's the first truth. And so the resurrection of Jesus is our hope of the resurrection, just as the death of Jesus is our hope of eternal life. That's the first thing. But the second thing that can't be lost is that it is a true event.
[00:04:52] That's what it says with Mary Magdalene, Peter and John, and all the witnesses of the resurrection. The resurrection was not an abstraction. It was not a mythological thing. It was not some sort of. It didn't happen on the spiritual plane. It happened in real life. 1991, years ago, I think the day was April 5. I gotta, I have to look up. We can date it back to the 17th day of Nissan. In the year 33 AD, this happened. Jesus walked out of the tomb, his body came back to life. It was the same body that was crucified. That was then raised. One of the little notes that you'll see on the left side of the page in your bulletin is a Wadsworth note, I believe, about how the linens that were wrapped around the body were that when they had the spices on them and the cloth, they would stick to the body. So they would mummify the body in that way. And you couldn't tear those, the cloth off without totally ripping apart the body.
[00:06:08] You know what I'm talking about? It would stick to the flesh. And so when Jesus, when he's raised from the dead, he leaves the grave clothes there to show that the body wasn't stolen, that that body is raised to newness of life passes through the grave. Clothes passes through the grave, appears to the women, appears to Peter, appears to the ten, appears a week later to the eleven, appears to over 500 witnesses at once. 17, I believe 16 or 17 times he appears to his disciples in the 40 days after his resurrection, that it's a true historical event. There's a danger. I remember this. We always have to preach against this. On Easter, there was a survey that someone did that said, if. If they found the body of Jesus, would you still be a Christian? And most Christians said, yes, that's wrong. You should say, no, no. If someone could bring the body of Jesus and say, look, he's dead, and he stayed dead, then what Paul says in one corinthians 15, that if Christ is not raised, our faith is futile.
[00:07:14] It's empty.
[00:07:16] Our faith is a confession of a historical fact that on the third day, the Lord Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, the same body that was born of the Virgin Mary, that walked on water, that was nailed to the cross, that was laid in the tomb, that that body, that person, that Jesus is raised and ascended and sits at the right hand of the Father, and there's eyewitnesses of this truth.
[00:07:45] So, number one, the first Easter point is the resurrection of Jesus is our life. The second Easter point is that it is a true event.
[00:07:53] We have to lean into that. The third thing in the preface is it pulls in this language of the paschal lamb.
[00:08:01] Excuse me. And that brings us to the very beginning of the service. It's a theme that runs all the way through all the ancient Easter liturgies. The Paschal. Paschal means passover. That's just what the word means. And it's probably connected to the old one year epistle lesson from two corinthians that talks about our Paschal feast. Celebrate the Paschal feast.
[00:08:25] It was on Passover remember Exodus twelve? The Lord instituted the feast of the deliverance. They would eat the lamb, they'd sacrificed the lamb, put the blood on the door, eat the lamb, eat the unleavened bread, think tortillas. Right? They would eat in, in quickness. Celebrating. How interesting. They were celebrating what the Lord was going to do tomorrow.
[00:08:52] The first Paschal feast, sacrifice, happened the day before the people were led out of Egypt.
[00:09:01] And it's an amazing thing that the Lord institutes a feast to remember the victory that he had not yet accomplished. That's how the Lord does things. He says, I want you to celebrate this every year, and you'll remember the thing that I'm going to do tomorrow. Jesus does the same thing when he institutes the Lord's supper. He says, I'm instituting this thing in remembrance of what I haven't done yet. You can't remember it because I haven't accomplished it, but tomorrow I will have accomplished it, and then you can do it in remembrance of me. And that's our new paschal feast, the supper of the Lord.
[00:09:35] So we open the service with this ancient hymn, christians to the Paschal victim.
[00:09:42] I think a good game to play when you can sing the hymn and you think to yourself, when did this hymn come about? Is this a four digit or a three digit hymn?
[00:09:54] Is it 1752 or is it 859 or something like that? And this one definitely has a three digit sound to it. Christians to the Paschal victim, offer your thankful praises. The lamb of sheep has ransomed. Oh, boy, I better not do that. That's a good thing. It's can't require. Christ is arisen from the grave dark's prison. So let our joy rise, full and free. Christ our comfort true will be. Hallelujah. That's the christians to the Paschal. Now that paschal victim is referring to the sacrificial lamb, so that Jesus is that lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And he is now the institutor of the new Paschal feast, the feast of the resurrection, which is the Lord's supper.
[00:10:47] This hymn, by the way, is not a three digit hymn, it's a four digit hymn. 1050 is the attribution, but it's pretty close to three digits. I mean, that's only 50 years later. So we'll process in while we hear this most ancient hymn, and then we'll be right into the liturgy. The invocation, exhortation, confession, absolution. Everything's decked in white. It's all glorious and beautiful. And then we get to the canticle that this is the feast.
[00:11:13] It's a beautiful hymn. This is the feast. It's interesting to me. It takes, we don't use it too often because it's in the place of the Gloria Celsius, and that's one of the major parts of the liturgy, the Gloria. And I think Jonathan and I both want to be very, very slow to change these ancient parts. But for the season of Easter, this is the feast really fits in well. This is the feast of victory from our God. It's part of the tradition, and it's a somewhat new tradition, but it's part of the tradition of grabbing liturgical elements from the book of revelation.
[00:11:48] Now, on the one hand, I absolutely love this. On the other hand, I'm a little bit wary of it just because I'm wary of everything that comes out of the sixties and seventies.
[00:11:58] But it's true that the book of Revelation gives us this glimpse into the heavenly divine service, and it's right for us to grab ahold of those hymns and canticles and the wisdom that's brought to us in revelation and bring it down into our worship today.
[00:12:13] So this is the feast goes. This is the feast of victory for our God. Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia. Worthy is Christ the lamb who was slain, whose blood set us free to be people of God. Power, riches, wisdom and strength, honor, blessing and glory are his. Sing with all the people of God. Join the hymn of all creation. Blessing and honor, glory and might be to God and the lamb forever. That's drawn from revelation five. Listen to how that goes, starting with verse eleven.
[00:12:42] Well, maybe even before that, John is weeping because there's no one who's worthy to open the book that's sealed shut. It's got these seven seals. But then the lamb comes to the throne and he's worthy. And so in verse nine, they say, worthy are you to take the book and break its seals, for you were slain and purchased for God with your blood. Men from every tribe and tongue and people and nations, you have made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God, and they will reign upon the earth. And I looked and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne, and the living creatures and the elders, and the number of them was myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands saying with a loud voice, worthy is the lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing and every created thing which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and on the sea and all the things that are in them, I heard them say to him who sits on the throne unto the lamb, be blessing and honor and glory and dominion forever and ever. And the four living creatures kept saying, amen. And the elders fell down and worshiped. Now just think that when today, in a few minutes when you're singing, this is the feast that you're joining in to this myriads of. Myriads of the heavenly song of praise to the lamb who is worthy to open the seals. And that book is the book of life. And he's worthy because he was slain.
[00:14:12] Oh, boy, that is just tremendous. And then we get to the collect. So let's pray it together.
[00:14:21] Well, I'll pray. You can't pray because you don't see it, because you're driving. But I'll pray it, and you can join me by listening.
[00:14:30] Almighty God the Father, through your only begotten son, Jesus Christ, you have overcome death and open the gate of everlasting life to us. Grant that we who celebrate with joy the day of our Lord's resurrection may be raised from the death of sin by your life giving spirit, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
[00:14:56] Amen.
[00:14:58] Jesus resurrection is our resurrection. Everything that Jesus does is for us. His crucifixion for us. His resurrection for us. And here's the amazing thing, that on Good Friday God died, and on Easter Sunday, a man lives forever.
[00:15:14] So that that death of God is the life of humanity, which we partake in now by the gifts of Jesus. That's what the scriptures are about. Isaiah 25 is the Old Testament reading.
[00:15:27] This is a funeral text. If you're doing your funeral plan, you haven't got it finished, and you're looking and you're like, all I need is an old Testament text. I got everything else. I got the hymns picked for my funeral. I got all the other lessons picked, but I don't. But I don't have the Old Testament. I just can't figure out which one I want. Well, here's a suggestion for you. Isaiah 25, six to nine. It talks about how the Lord is going to make a feast for everybody on this mountain. The Lord of hosts will make a feast for all people. It's rich food, well aged wine. And then the Lord is at the feast, and he's eating death. This is. This is so great. He will look at what it says he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that's cast over all people, the veil that's spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever. So the Lord comes to the feast. He says, you guys eat the fat, and you eat the wine, and you drink the wine and you have all the nice stuff. I'm going to eat. I'm going to get my own little dish over here. I'm going to eat death.
[00:16:24] Death is swallowed up in victory. That's the thing. Luther loves to preach this, the Lord, how the Lord devours death.
[00:16:32] The grave choked on Jesus, spit him up. And then Jesus turns around and eats. He is. So that Jesus is death's death.
[00:16:43] He is Satan's accuser.
[00:16:47] He will swallow up death forever. And the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces.
[00:16:54] The epistle lesson is one corinthians 15.
[00:16:58] Paul's great letter to the church in Corinth, which was a disaster. And some people there had stopped confessing the resurrection. The resurrection was a tough topic in the early church, especially for the Greeks, because the Jews confessed the Resurrection, especially the Pharisees. The Sadducees didn't, but the Pharisees confessed the resurrection. And so the idea that all will be raised on the last day and judged was a pharisaical doctrine. So that wasn't too hard for them. But for the Greeks, what?
[00:17:35] Your body is just your meat suit. They were gnostics. And when you die, you lay off the meat suit. Your soul might go forever, Plato thought, but your body, no, that's that. You're done with that. And in fact, in some ways, your body is imprisoning you, and death is the freedom from that. So the idea that you would be back in your body, that the body would be raised, is, for the greek mind, crazy. That's when Paul was preaching in Athens, and he mentions the resurrection. They say, what? What are you. Come on. So that Paul had to address the doctrine of the resurrection a lot in second Thessalonians. First corinthians 15 is a treatise on the resurrection. It's 58 verses, I think. The chapter or something. I better check on that. This will be a good chance to pause and also to make sure that. Oh, yep, I am still recording. That's good. Would you look at that? 58 verses. I was right. One corinthians 15.
[00:18:29] We just read the first eleven verses, but the entire chapter is on the resurrection. And that is your homework this week, is to read one corinthians 15 a couple of times, study. It's beautiful. Talks about the resurrection. That's where Paul says, look, if Christ wasn't isn't raised from the dead really, literally raised from the dead? It's nothing. We should just turn the church into a bowling alley or disco club. Are there still disco clubs? But Christ is raised from the dead. God be praised. So that's why we have a church. That's why we're Christians.
[00:19:00] That's why we have this hope, not only in this life. If our hope in Christ was only for this life, we would be, of all people, most to be pitied. That's how Paul says it there. But we have hope beyond this life. Our hope extends over the horizon of this life. We have this all the way into life eternal, this boundless, extended horizon of hopefulness.
[00:19:24] So Paul preaches. I delivered to you of first importance that which I also received. Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and he appeared to Cephas. That's Peter. And then to the twelve. Notice, by the way, he didn't. There weren't twelve that he appeared to, but he appeared to the twelve. So the twelve becomes a technical term for the apostles.
[00:19:45] He appeared to more than 500 brothers.
[00:19:48] Last of all, as one untimely born. He appeared also to me. Paul says so that Paul himself is a witness of the resurrection. It's great. Just great. It's amazing. That language, by the way, that Paul uses here, is a traditional rabbinical language for the passing on of the tradition. I delivered to you as a first portent of first importance that which I also received. So I didn't adjust it, I didn't change it. I received it and I passed it on to you. He uses the same language in chapter eleven when talking about the Lord's supper. It's great. Okay. Gospel mark 16, one to eight. Now, this is a little bit tricky because there's a text crit thing that happens in mark 16.
[00:20:33] When you look at your Bible, you probably will see after verse eight, there's a double bracket, and verse nine to the end of the chapter is double bracketed. And it'll say in most ancient manuscripts, this is omitted.
[00:20:46] That's true. It's true enough. The problem is the reason why those. Okay, here's my theory.
[00:20:55] You know what we have in the Bible today? So the King James and the new King James tradition comes out of what we call the majority text, or the textus receptus. It's kind of a received text that. That came into the church. We'll remember that. The Bible is a collection of 66 books. So it wasn't just written at one time by one author. It had to be collected over the ages. And so the Old Testament was collected. We presume and have good evidence for this, that there were the scrolls collected in the temple, and that became the canon, the collection of Old Testament text, the New Testament. These letters and the gospels were written and copied and spread all over. And then they began to be collected. Very soon, they began to be collected. So there was collections of these books in all the churches, but they were. Because they were copied and so forth and so on. There's a word different here, there's a conjugation different here, a name different here and there. And so what we can do is we can look at all these different manuscripts and try to say, okay, which one gives us evidence of the best original?
[00:21:56] At some point in the early medieval church, they said, we're going to receive this text, and that becomes the text of King James edition. It's a little. Well, it's not a little. It's a lot more complicated than that. The basic idea. But then a couple of centuries ago, maybe a century and a half ago, the guy said, we can do better. Let's go back to the ancient manuscripts and see if we can reconstruct the original text, the autographs, from all the different evidences. So they had a bunch of different rules that they followed. And there was a couple of manuscripts that they really leaned on, the Vatican text and the Sinai text, Textus Vaticanus, Textus sinaiticus. And those two were the oldest, most complete editions of the New Testament. One was found in a monastery on Mount Sinai, and the other one was found in the Vatican.
[00:22:50] And they found in both of those texts that the ending of Mark was missing. This is kind of a.
[00:22:58] This is kind of an agonizing thing to talk to on the Sunday drive. Oh, it's a good thing we get it over on the way to church so we don't have to talk about it in church. Okay, so this longer ending of Mark was missing from those two major documents. And so, like, the ESV and the NIv and all the modern translations will have it bracketed off. Like, we can't be sure that it's there now. I think a couple of reasons that this long ending of Mark ought to be there. First of all, the short ending doesn't make any sense. And they were afraid, and that's it. And it ends there. That's.
[00:23:34] You can't.
[00:23:36] You just can't. That's not. That's no place for a Christian to end a book.
[00:23:40] The second reason is that I think the logic is actually reversed.
[00:23:46] I think that the reason why the Vatican text and the Sinai text are so old, well, why they lasted so long is because they weren't used. And my best guess, the reason why they weren't used is because they, they were missing a page. They were missing the last part of the Gospel of Mark. If, for example, you were to look in my office and find the Bible that is the oldest, it's the one that I don't like because the ones that I like and I'm using all the time are getting worn out and they're falling apart. And so this is just true in the history of the church. So, so I think the fact that they lasted so long that they stayed on the shelf and they didn't get used up is because the church knew, hey, they're missing a page. In fact, verse eight ends on the top of one page. I went and looked at the facsimiles of these two texts, and one leaves open space as if they knew that it was missing. So anyway, I like the long ending of Mark, and I'm going to preach on the long ending of Mark. So we're just going to read mark 16 one to eight, but I'm going to preach on the whole chapter. That's my confession that this belongs in the scripture, especially because it has this beautiful passage, mark 1616. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved. Whoever does not believe will be condemned. And that's there in that long ending of the sending of the disciples in Mark. So we have in mark 16 the women going to the tomb, the angels sending them away, not to be afraid, but they went away afraid still. And then Jesus will appear later to the disciples. So we'll have that whole thing. Now, I should also note, and this is another good Sunday drive to church thing to do, that the order of events of Easter Sunday is very complicated. And if you would go and look at the four gospels and just put them down together and say, here's what's happening, it, it doesn't match up real clean and at first, and a lot of atheists who want to show all the Bible contradictions will say, look here, the Bible contradicts itself with all these resurrection accounts. Are the women, do they see the angel? Do they not? Do they see the empty tomb? What's going on? What's happening?
[00:26:05] But there is a way, and probably more than one way, but there's a way that we can rebuild these events. And it gives us some more details into the story and into this account. That's absolutely wonderful. There's an article by a guy who put a website, it's an answering Islam website that has diagrams about the events of the resurrection. And I'll put a link to that in the notes on today's podcast. I got to write a reminder for me to do that. I'll send it out, you know, when I send out the sea of Sunday here in a few minutes, I'll put a link to that as well. And I would, I would commend that article to you. It's really, it's really well done and really beautiful. So that'll be your second piece of homework this week. But this is the main thing about this text, is that the.
[00:26:58] The women go to the tomb. Why?
[00:27:02] To finish the work of burial.
[00:27:06] The people who were worried about the resurrection of Jesus is the Pharisees. They're the ones who go to Pilate and set a guard and seal the tomb because they remember that Jesus had said that he would be raised on the third day.
[00:27:19] The disciples are not thinking about resurrection.
[00:27:23] They're worried about their own crucifixion. The disciples, the guys are all locked in the upper room because they're afraid that they're going to be crucified like Jesus.
[00:27:33] The women are concerned about finishing the proper work of burial because they love Jesus and they want to care for him even in death. They're not thinking about resurrection. And that's a further proof that this is not something that they made up. It's not some plot. It is a truth.
[00:27:54] There was a grave.
[00:27:56] You got to go back 1991 years, and one day there was a grave in which the body of our Lord Jesus was resting.
[00:28:08] But the next day, it was empty.
[00:28:12] He wasn't there. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.
[00:28:17] And because of what he's done on the cross and his death and his resurrection, the victory over the grave, one day your grave will be just as empty as the grave that the women found on the first Easter.
[00:28:36] Phenomenal. All right, one more word. If you're still driving to church, if you got to church, you should make sure you just go in. It's great.
[00:28:45] The hymn of the day is the Luther's Easter hymn, which is. It's different than other Easter hymns. It's not as dun dun dun dun as the most of the Easter hymns.
[00:28:59] It's a wrestling hymn. Christ Jesus lay in death strong bands.
[00:29:06] But now at God's right hand, he stands and brings us life from heaven. And this is this idea that there was this warfare. When Jesus laid in the grave, it was a strange. This is stanza four, I think, my favorite. It was a strange and dreadful strife. When life and death contended, the victory remained with life.
[00:29:33] The reign of death was ended.
[00:29:38] Can you imagine that? Death was like a little tyrant that just had everybody in his kingdom eventually.
[00:29:45] But now his tyranny is over. This is Hebrews 214, that just as we partake of flesh and blood, he partook of the same, so that through his death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is the devil, and set us free from those who are in bondage to the fear of death. Holy scripture plainly saith that death is swallowed up by death. Its sting is lost forever.
[00:30:05] Alleluia.
[00:30:08] Here, our true paschal lamb, we see. See that theme coming in again here in Luther's him who God so freely gave us. He died on the accursed tree, so strong his love to save us see, his blood now marks our door. Faith points to it. Death passes over, and satan cannot harm us.
[00:30:25] Alleluia. Alleluia. Christ is risen. He has risen indeed. Alleluia. We'll see you soon.
