We all love the Christmas message, which is that there is a God of love who cares about this world enough to be with us. And now we find out something more, what we find out is that God doesn’t just love us. In the end, God wins. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to us. Like at Christmas, the signs of this aren’t always spectacular. There is just an empty tomb, and the reports of people who are absolutely certain about what they saw and experienced, which is that someone they knew and loved was fully alive and present in a completely new way that no one ever experienced before. They didn’t see a ghost, but a risen person, a person who still had wounds, but those wounds had no more power over him. So when we say we believe in the resurrection, we’re really saying that we believe these women and men, that they were completely rescued from despair and misery in a way they never expected, they knew that they had been rescued, and they believed it for the rest of their lives.
What does it really mean for our lives that they saw this? First, it means that if we think there is no new life possible for us we’re wrong. God is not defeated, ever. God does not forget anyone. The last word on everything is that there is always new life awaiting us. Behind all of the pain in this world, there is nothing that is going to conquer us in the end, the evil in this world is not all-powerful, the people in this world who are powerless and need a champion still have one. We have a God who can and will bring anyone to new life.
And of course what it also means is that this same Jesus is alive for us now, not in the future at some point, but now. He is present the way that he promised, and what he told people back then was something they didn’t understand, that the way he would be present after this resurrection would be even better and more powerful than when he walked this earth. When we pray sometimes we find this out, that what we call his real presence is real, and we know that he is available to us, that he will listen to us no matter what we need to say, that he has a way for each of us to follow him.
And the last thing it means is that sometimes if we look around we see God at work in people in this life who have risen from the dead, we see prisoners who have found new lives, we see people who have been liberated from someone or some thing that had them in slavery, we see people who have turned away from a life of anger and fear. It’s a sign that the power of Jesus and this resurrection can re-create anyone, in this life or the next one.
If you’re here today feeling held captive to something, or weighed down by loss, this is not a day where anyone can tell you those aren’t real. The cross and the resurrection can’t be separated from one another, that’s the story of the past three days we’ve just experienced here. But the resurrection story is that God will overcome anything to be present with us. He will give us the power to take down any barrier that is keeping us from him. Death couldn’t defeat Jesus in the end, the empire of Rome couldn’t, and even the religious leaders who couldn’t see anything clearly couldn’t. Anything that holds his people back from life forever with God can and will be overcome. Jesus brought our liberation from what oppresses us, and he won’t fail us now.