What Does Easter Really Mean

TRANSCRIPT

So it is Easter. It's such a special Sunday. Christians love two different days of the year. One is definitely Easter. Does anyone know what the other one is? Christmas. Christmas of course, is all fun and celebration. It's carol's. It's the birth of Jesus. It's the start of something awesome for the world.

Easter is a little different because there's a lot of weight and significance to what happened on the Easter weekend, and it's very personal significance for each person, so it is very special. And because of that, a little bit later we have something a little special and a little different that we're gonna do.

You might have noticed a couple of items on stage that are not normally there. That's coming later. So you have to hang onto your hats and wait and listen to me for a little bit longer before we get to that bit, but just letting you know that's coming up. So yeah, we are in this series. We're finishing up, investigating Jesus.

So over the last few weeks we've looked at really just literally investigating who Jesus was, what did he do, and looking at some of the context around that as well. And we've looked at the four gospels, which are four documents written by Matthew, mark, Luke, and John. They were written a few years after Jesus was on Earth, and they've been compiled as historical documents into the New Testament.

Part of the Bible, which is the part written after Jesus was here on Earth. And so we looked at these four documents in particular. We looked at Luke, but what's interesting is that Matthew, mark and John were disciples, so they were students of Jesus. They followed him around. They learned from him, and they wrote down what they saw and what they learned.

Luke was a little different because he wasn't one of the disciples. He wasn't even there at the crucifixion, but he was a very educated man and he wanted a document that really chronicled Jesus' life from beginning to end. So he went around and he interviewed eyewitnesses. He got together all these personal accounts, and he made a very chronological account of Jesus' life.

So we have these four gospels. And what we, the amazing thing about these four gospels is that we get such an incredible picture of who Jesus was, not just what he did, but who he was as a person. So what he did was, we know around a little less than 2000 years ago, he was in his thirties. At this point, he'd been traveling for about three years from two different towns and villages.

He went and he spoke in Jewish synagogues. He visited in people's homes. He stayed with people. He went and visited the people who were on the fringes of society, the outcast. And he loved on all of these different people. And then there were the miracles that he performed, and then there were the the healings that took place.

One of the authors of one of the accounts actually says, there's so much more. We, I just can't write it all here. So that's even really amazing that we don't even have the complete picture. We just get snippets of what Jesus did. And what he did was really incredible because he was so counterculture in a place where there were caste systems where people's value was nothing.

Women and children had no rights. Jesus came and said, Nope. Yeah, God loves everyone equally. You are all of equal standing women and children equal standing in God's eyes. This was revolutionary and in a time when it was all about oppression and tyranny in their government systems. Jesus was there saying, no, we're about humility.

We're about servant leadership. So he was truly revolutionary. But we also get to see, because these students and disciples, they were also his friends. So we get to see who Jesus was as a person. So we know that he had these friends, and even within these disciples, he had best friends who he called on the most.

We know that he had a family, he had a brother, brothers and sisters. He had a mom and a dad. We know that he was a carpenter and we know that he loved spending time with certain people were his who were his friends outside of that circle of disciples as well. And we know that he cried. We know that he felt incredible distress at people's pain and suffering, and we know that he felt angry about injustice.

We get to know who Jesus is as a person from these eyewitness accounts and and accounts that have been put together. When Jesus went to all these different towns and villages over these three years, he always did it with no fanfare. He would often just sneak his way in. He would hang out there for a while.

Often they'd end up being tens of thousands of people who wanted to hear him and be healed by him and things like that. But then he would generally just sneak out again except for one time. One time when he entered the city of Jerusalem in Israel and that time he went crazy and he said, bring me a donkey.

I'm gonna ride in on a donkey. Could have said, bring me an elephant. He says, donkey, that tracks for Jesus. That's just how he was. So he rides in on a donkey and the people of Jerusalem, they must have known, they have been waiting. He must have had a reputation that preceded him. They are so excited.

People are spilling out of the city gates. They are cheering, they are throwing their coats down on the ground in front of him as just a sign of honor and respect. Don't walk on the ground. Walk on this like red carpet. They were waving their palm fronds that they had cut from nearby trees. And we know all of these details from these four gospels, these accounts that were written and the people of Jerusalem were chanting, not chanting, cheering, saying Hosanna, blessed is the king.

Now we think we use today the word hosanna as. A sign of praising God. It's a praise phrase. We would say, hosanna in the highest you are the glory all glory to God. The actual original meaning of the word hosanna, as they would have used it in that town meant save us.

They were saying, save us Jesus. Blessed is the king. Save us. And that's because Jerusalem at that time, now, they were a nation that. Followed God. They followed the laws of Moses. They believed in one true God, but at that time, they were under the rule of the Roman Empire. The Roman empire was spreading everywhere they had taken over and they had taken over with all their pantheon of pagan gods.

So these people of Jerusalem, they are celebrating that Jesus is there because they think he's gonna come in and save them from this tyrannical Roman leadership that they're under. They're celebrating. If this is the big game, he's the star player, he's arrived, they maybe think he's gonna come in and just unleash this heavenly heman justice over everything, and they're gonna be free from Rome.

So they're expecting something really big. And they did get something really big, but it wasn't what they expected because a few days later, Jesus was arrested by Roman guards and then he is tried. He's found guilty of nothing. He did nothing. There was just an angry mob and there were jealous religious leaders, and there was a Roman governor who just wanted an end to all of it.

He didn't understand what was going on, but he's this cult thing is weird. Let's just get rid of Jesus. And the people voted, yes, let's get rid of Jesus. And so he was sentenced to death by crucifixion. Crucifixion was the absolute worst of the worst ways to die. It was reserved for the most horrible, worst of the criminals, and that's what Jesus got.

Even just the sign of the cross, the image of it struck absolute terror into the hearts of the people in that time, because it was so painful, so excruciating, and it was shameful. There was a lot of humiliation attached to the cross. That's the death that Jesus was given, this innocent man. The governor himself said, he's done nothing wrong, but that's what he got.

So the Roman guards, they beat him. They whip him, they make a crown of thorns, they drive it into his head, and they make this crown of thorns because they're making fun of him. They say, oh yeah, you're the king of the Jews. Save yourself. Come on, show us what you've got. And Jesus does nothing. He lets them do all of it, and then they hang him on the cross.

They nail him in by his hands and his ankles, and he hangs there and they're disciples. Must have been watching this. His followers and friends, all these believers, his own mother is there watching this. They must have been in absolute disbelief. How could this be happening? They were about to win and now he's hanging on a cross.

His mother, 30 odd years ago, angels came to her and said, you are going to bear the son of God. His name is gonna be Jesus. He's gonna save the world. And now he's hanging on a cross suffocating to death. Then he takes this last breath and he says, it is finished and he's gone. And these disciples, they have, they're his friends, but they've also followed him for years.

They gave up everything for him, and Jesus said things to them like. I am the way, the truth and the life. No one can get to the Father except through me. He said, put your trust in me. Put your faith in me. He said he was bigger than Moses. He said he was there to supersede Moses. He said he was bigger than the temple.

The holiest of holy places that people weren't even allowed into. It was so holy. Jesus said, I'm bigger than that. He said, I'm gonna build a church, but it's not gonna be a church in a building. It's gonna be a church of people, an army of people. He made all these big promises about new life and eternal life.

Now he's dead. He's been killed by human hands as weak as their own. Can you imagine what they must have been feeling? So crucifixion was such a terrible, shameful way to die. The normal practice was take the body down, chuck it out, and let the animals eat it. But two prominent people, men from the city.

They respected Jesus, I guess even if they didn't have any clue what was going on either. They went to the Governor Pilate and they said, can we at least have Jesus' body? And he said, yes. Maybe he was feeling guilty. I dunno. But they, he, they able to get his body, they're able to prepare it with the normal wave that they did back then with the spices and the oils.

And they wrapped his body and they put it into a cave that had been set aside. It was owned by a local family and put his body in there, rolled the stone in front, and that was it. Jesus was now dead and buried. So we're gonna freeze there for a minute because what we also know from these accounts, these four, Matthew, mark, Luke, and John, they wrote down Matthew, mark, Luke, and John.

Yeah. They wrote down. They also tell us what happened to his followers. In those next few moments, we know from these accounts that two of the disciples left Jerusalem and hot footed it over to a nearby town called Emmaus. We know that Peter, James, John, Nathaniel Thomas, and a couple of others, they also left Jerusalem and they went back to the Sea of Galilee and they went back to being fishermen.

We know that Thomas, who, even if you've never set foot in a church before, you've probably heard of doubting Thomas. Doubting Thomas disappears. We don't see him for over a week and a whole bunch of other disciples lock themselves into a room in the city for fear that they will also be caught and killed for consorting with this criminal Jesus.

We don't have a lot of information on the women. We know that there were women there, like Mary Magdalene and other women. There was his mother. We don't know. I'm gonna guess they're pretty devastated. I'm gonna guess they're pretty broken. And we know from other documents that are in the New Testament that there was a man named Saul, who at the time had been for many years, he was a very zealous Jewish leader.

And his goal in life was to stamp out the Jewish sorry the Jesus following. And he had persecuted Christians. He was out to just finish this whole cult of Jesus. He must have been absolutely celebrating that there would be no more uprising because the Jesus movement has come to a complete standstill at this point.

So why then? 350 years later. Did the Roman Empire, the same Roman empire that tortured and killed Christians, the same Roman empire that hunted down Jesus arrested him and crucified him, then make Christianity their national religion in three 80 a d. Why did Saul, whose mission in life was to end the Jesus following, change his name to Paul, plant a ton of churches.

Write most of the letters that ended up being part of the New Testament and spend the rest of his life telling people about Jesus. Why did the symbol of the cross go from being one of terror to being one of hope?

Why do millions upon millions of people gather every single year, 20 centuries later to remember at Easter, this man, Jesus? Why did all of these disciples who fled. Then end up being killed for their faith, their unwavering faith in Jesus. Obviously there's more to the story. There's a gap here. We haven't filled and I, when I was growing up, I didn't grow up in a Christian family.

I would say that's pretty much the point where that was the end of my understanding as well. That moment right there. That's all I really knew about Easter when I was younger. I went to a primary school in Victoria that had a church attached to it. You would walk in the door and then above the door from like halfway up to the ceiling.

It was a huge ceiling, and wall to wall was this enormous stained glass mural. And it had the picture on it was the, that whole scene we just talked about, it was Jesus hanging on the cross dark sky. There were silhouettes of people along the bottom, all in different poses of prayer and grief. And then there was two Roman guards with spears.

And I'm sure it was beautiful. I think if I saw it as an adult, I'd be like, wow, that is magnificent. Deeply sad, but so magnificent. As a 9-year-old going in for my assembly, you'd walk in and go, whoa, every time. 'cause it was pretty gruesome. And then at the front of the stage there was this huge cross it seemed huge to me.

Again, I was this big, but it's this huge cross with a stone statue of Jesus hanging on it. And in both depictions, Jesus was, if not right at death door. Maybe he'd already gone through it. He, it was just, it was very bleak and that was really all I knew. I knew from just living in the world that Jesus died for our sins.

I didn't even really know what sins meant, because that's a word we only use in the church. I knew that he was a guy who lived, he died on a cross. I got a four day weekend and some chocolate. That's what I knew. So there's a lot more to that story, and I'm gonna tell you the rest of that story. And finish off Jesus' story.

Now in this is what I promised you, it's gonna be a little bit different the way that we're gonna do it, and I'm gonna do it in a way that is almost a little bit like the way that Matthew, mark and John wrote their accounts. It's my eyewitness account of Jesus' story. So I'm gonna take a second to prepare, but please just sit back, listen, and let's finish off and celebrate the rest of the Easter story together.

Thank you.

I grew up staring at Jesus, not the Jesus who walked on seas, who calmed a fierce breeze, who laughed with friends and healed the hurts of men and women and children. No, I grew up staring at a Jesus who hung, nailed. Bleeding eyes closed, head low, a beaten savior trapped in colored glass and stone, a broken king hanging on a mocking wooden throne.

I saw people on their knees in fear, a mother's hands locked in prayer. This bewildering act of dishonor and shame that shattered and scattered those who followed Jesus' way, his broken body. Laid in a tomb. The stone rolled over the entrance, slammed and sealed by Roman hands, a savior who saved us, but didn't save himself, killed by vengeful humans.

That was Easter as I knew it. 10 years later, I found four books in my hands, Matthew, mark, Luke, and John. Men who pinned the tales of Jesus, who watched in Wonder Witnesses and scribe. And I read about Jesus' life, the miracles, the magic, the revolution, the transformations, the changing of hearts, the arrest, the trial.

Peter's denial, a crown of thorns, coins tossed the cross, the sigh, his final breath. It is finished a scene for a stained glass window.

But that wasn't the end of the story. Matthew, mark, Luke, and John had more to say. The truth unfolded page by page. The cross was not the final stage. The grave was not the goodbye because on the third day, the stone rolled away and Angel sat atop the grave, and Mary heard him say, the one you are looking for is not here.

His body is not here. He is no longer in the grave, and Mary saw Jesus standing, breathing alive. And she ran to her friend and fell to her knees and clung to his feet to weep and stain the earth with her tears. But not because she grieved, but because she believed. She saw and felt and touched and clung to this man who had hung from a cross three days before.

Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, a death defeater, a grave cheetah. A Messiah who fulfilled his promise, saved us on the cross, and true to his word, came back alive and triumphant because no power is greater than that of God himself, the holy one here on earth as Jesus the sun, and it hid my heart like an arrow.

Jesus wasn't just the crucified savior. He was the resurrected king, a king for all who came to earth born a human birth to love the world like no other. King of the unexpected, champion of the rejected, the one and only Messiah, the king of kings, A king who loved me, who on that cross thought of me. Who on that cross knew my name, who loves me still today.

And he may not walk the earth these days, but he lives in us still. The spirit, a sense and a knowing, comforting and guiding, hiding, tucked in our heart. But as big and as mighty as the lion he is named, he is that outpouring of grace and compassion. He lives in all our words and actions, our interactions and our passion to show others who he is.

Jesus can live today in you too. Can you feel it? Can your heart feel it? When you think of him on that cross, for you knowing your name, can you feel it? When you think of the scars on his hands and feet, your scars made whole for you. Can you feel it?

And when you see him standing triumphant alive, risen from death's, empty tomb. Smiling hand outstretch to you. Can you feel it? That's your heart. Embracing hugging clasping, earnestly grasping the supernatural, powerful, precious love of Jesus. A heart wrapping itself around his love like Mary's arms around Jesus feet, ready, willing, wanting his love, ready to be washed in his kindness.

Lost in his comfort and held strong by his promise to walk with us in us beside us every day. He is the only way.

The cross was brutal. And the grave was real and his pain was deep, but he did it all for his lost sheep. He knows your name,

and my heart is so full of gratitude for that son of God, him a humble king who paid a price, a sacrifice in a divine plan. The lion and the lamb made triumphant for all time.

Who still even then loves me, who knows me and you through and loves you still. So today, Easter Sunday, we don't mourn the death, we shout. Thank you for the freedom of the cross. We don't stay sealed in a tomb. We rejoice in the power of the resurrection, and we don't fear or hide from the uncertainties of life.

We stand in the power of a risen king today. We celebrate the life and the love of Jesus and the life that he gave for us and to us because he lives. We are so loved because he lives, we are made new because he lives we are truly alive. So if you believe it, let his people say amen. Amen. Let his people say amen.

Amen.