Sermon 4-20-25

Pastor Ray Lorthioir

Trinity Lutheran Church

W. Hempstead, NY

The Resurrection of Our Lord - Easter Sunday

The Upward Call

This Lent, as we worked our way through the greatest contest ever held, we’ve discovered numerous things. First, in the approximately one thousand year period between Moses and the final Old Testament prophets, Yahweh made known in the Word He gave to Moses and the Prophets that a Messiah, a savior, would come. In addition, Yahweh carefully hid a life-script for the Messiah in the Word He gave them. Moses got several parts of the life-script. This prophet got several parts and that prophet got several parts. Now, much information about Messiah’s life-script is in symbolic language. Therefore, without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, it’s difficult to string all these prophecies together to form a complete picture. Nevertheless, a complete life-script of Messiah can be formed. And that complete life-script Jesus, Himself, made known as He taught His disciples.

Why was it done this way? There’s a hint in 1 Corinthians 2:8, where St. Paul says that none of the rulers of this world understood the secret wisdom about Messiah that Yahweh had hidden in Moses and the Prophets. If they had been able to piece that wisdom together, then they would not have crucified Jesus. For, it was by stupidly crucifying Jesus that the rebellious principalities and powers of this universe sealed their own doom. Therefore, the life-script of Messiah was hidden in plain sight in Moses and the Prophets so that the evil ones of this universe would not fail to carry out the crucifixion.

Now, after Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection, Jesus and the Father poured out Lord Holy Spirit so that the Spirit could lead all who were and are being saved to the truth about Jesus of Nazareth. For the only way we can know for sure that Jesus is the Messiah, and not some other person, is by comparing His life to the life-script for Messiah written in Moses and the Prophets. If Jesus checks off all the boxes in that script, then He’s Messiah. And Jesus does check off all the boxes.

In addition, the life-script for Messiah tells us a key thing that Messiah must do that often escapes our attention. This one thing was summarized in an ancient hymn that St. Paul included in his letter to the Philippians. In that letter, the apostle was urging the Philippian church members to live like Christians. He urged them to imitate Jesus. So he used the hymn to stress his point in Philippians 2:5-11, “5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

We’re told in this hymn that in order to gain salvation for us and regain the Image of God for us, there was one key thing that Jesus COULD NOT DO. He could not grasp at equality with God in any way. This is to say that in order to win the contest with Satan, Jesus had to resist to His dying breath what Satan was offering Him — the right to abandon the script written for Messiah in Moses and the Prophets and then write His own script as Messiah.

If Jesus had gone off-script for even a second by asserting His own human authority and human will, then all would have been lost. But He didn’t. And how do we know that? It says in that hymn that because Jesus faithfully obeyed, even unto death on a cross, that God has highly exalted Him. And that’s what we’re celebrating this morning, the exaltation of Jesus to the highest position. He is the first real human to be resurrected from the dead in a live, immortal human body. And it’s the term immortal that makes all the difference. Jesus was not resuscitated back into one of these mortal human bodies. He was the first to be given a new body, an immortal human body — a body incapable of dying, growing old or being diseased. 

And there was one more glorious thing about Jesus’ resurrected body. Just as Jesus had been born in a mortal body without Original Sin, so He was resurrected in an immortal body without Original Sin. And that’s Good News for us. This means that those baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus and submitted to Him in life will be resurrected in righteous, immortal bodies like His — and without Original Sin.

And righteous is the key term. For many others will be resurrected in immortal and totally unrighteous bodies meant for nothing but evil. These will be receiving the reward they coveted in this life — complete freedom from Yahweh and His righteousness. So they will be the ultimate slaves to sin for all eternity. It’s a good thing they will be locked away for all eternity in that place called hell.

On the other hand, those resurrected into immortal, righteous human bodies will enjoy the glorious freedom of the children of God. They will be free forever from rebellion, evil and all its consequences.

The hymn in Philippians 2 unequivocally declares that Jesus was elevated to the highest place. But how could those who sang that hymn in the early days know this? How can we know this? The answer lies with the 600 witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection as well as the general news that Jesus’ tomb was empty.

I use the term 600 witnesses for a simple reason. Acts 1:15 tells us that the company in the upper room waiting for the Day of Pentecost was approximately 120 people. St. Paul tells us in 1Corinthians 15:6 that Jesus appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time. So, I add the numbers and and round down to 600. It doesn’t matter how accurate I am. There were about 600 people to whom Jesus revealed Himself physically and bodily resurrected from the dead. The Christian faith entirely relies on the testimony of these eyewitnesses. If they were all lying, then Christianity is nonsense. If they’re telling the truth, then it is everything. Your faith and mine entirely rests on the testimony of these eyewitnesses.

Now, since the 1700’s and especially since the 1800’s the eyewitness testimony has been severely challenged by a philosophical position called Materialism or Philosophical Naturalism. You may not know these technical terms for this position. But, if you were instructed in American schools since at least the 1920’s, you’ve been well indoctrinated in Materialism. This is the idea that the physical universe is all there is. There is no spiritual realm. There is no God and no supernatural. Every phenomenon has a “natural” explanation, can only have a “natural” explanation and, most importantly, must have a “natural” explanation.

The pressure of this position was so extreme that significant portions of the church caved in to it. In 1984 this congregation had no pastor and was interviewing candidates for the position. To their dismay they found that if they asked a prospective candidate, “What do you believe about the resurrection of Jesus Christ?”, the answer they would get went something like this: “Jesus wasn’t resurrected bodily, but his disciples had an experience of him resurrected.” Indeed, this was the instruction about the resurrection that I had received as well. However, thanks to the old charismatic renewal of the late 70’s and early 80’s I had been shaken loose from the Materialist position that I had learned even in seminary. I had come to accept that there is a supernatural realm. Angels and devils are real. Yahweh, the Creator God, is real. Jesus was indeed bodily resurrected from the dead. So, when I interviewed here in February 1985, I was the first candidate who could answer that I unreservedly believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. And I’ve been here ever since.

Forty years ago my faith in the bodily resurrection of Jesus was based on personal experience. But since then, something very significant has happened in world of biblical study. One of my contemporaries, a man named Gary Habermas, has just finished publishing the results of his life work in four volumes. That work has been to gather all the ancient testimony available concerning Jesus’ resurrection — especially from non-biblical sources.

When Habermas began his work with a doctoral dissertation in 1975, he estimates that only twenty percent of biblical scholars believed that Jesus was bodily resurrected from the dead. The other eighty percent considered the resurrection of Jesus to be a legend added to the gospels centuries after the life of Jesus. But now with the completion of his work, he estimates that a full three quarters of biblical scholars have accepted the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. His work has forced even the most skeptical biblical scholars to admit that within two years of Jesus’ crucifixion — and maybe less — the church was proclaiming the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. The resurrection was not an imaginary invention tacked on much later, as the Materialist position would have us believe.

The good news, then, is that we don’t have to park our brains at the door to enter a church. There is real reason to accept the testimony of the 600. The resurrection is not a fanciful myth created by the super-religious. It’s real history. And because the resurrection is real history, it has significantly changed real history for the last 2,000 years. Indeed, the resurrection may be changing history again in 2025. There is news coming in from many quarters that American adults are being baptized into the Christian faith in numbers not seen in quite some time. This includes the Roman Catholic Church.

In any event, the ancient real news — not fake news — is that the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth was found empty on Sunday morning. The Roman soldiers sent to guard it saw a terrifying sight early that morning as an angelic being came and rolled the stone away. The guards fled and reported what they had seen to the authorities. The authorities concocted the fake news that Jesus’ disciples had stolen His body. And that myth is retold to this day.

However, the women who had traveled with Jesus were the first to see Him alive. Then, two of the disciples had a long talk with Jesus that afternoon. They were kept from recognizing Him until the end. But all during the walk Jesus explained the life-script written for Him in Moses and the Prophets. Finally, that evening Jesus appeared in the upper room to all the disciples except Thomas. Thomas got a look at Jesus a week later. Forty days from that first Sunday, a gathering of disciples saw Jesus ascend into the heavens, to the highest place at the right hand of God. From there He will return.

And, so the ancient hymn of Philippians 2 tells us unequivocally that Jesus was absolutely successful in resisting the temptation to grasp equality with God. For resisting to the end, Jesus was rewarded with the highest place in the created universe. The resurrection is how we know Jesus scored the victory in the great contest between the Kingdom of this World and the Kingdom of God. 

Now, as I researched Scripture concerning  Jesus’ victory over the temptation to grasp at equality with God, I discovered some information useful for understanding the resurrected life both in the age to come and in this age. We turn to a passage we first looked at several weeks ago in John chapter 5. The context is the immediate aftermath of Jesus healing a crippled man on the Sabbath at the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem.

First, there’s this editorial in John 5:18, “This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him [Jesus], because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.” It sounds like Jesus’ critics were accusing Him of doing the very thing He had to avoid doing — making Himself equal with God. However, as I meditated on this, I realized that there are two very different “equalities” with God. One is true. The other is false. 

True equality with God is equality in righteousness. Yahweh is pure righteousness. And only those of His creatures that are purely righteous can stand in His presence without condemnation. That’s why we sinners can’t stand in Yahweh’s presence without condemnation. We all fall short of the righteousness of God which is also the glory of God. The only way we can stand before Yahweh in righteousness is through the forgiveness of sins won by Messiah Jesus.

But, notice, only those creatures equal to Yahweh in righteousness can stand before Him. This is the true equality — equality in righteousness. And by calling God His Father, Jesus, the son of Mary, was proclaiming Himself equal in righteousness to Yahweh. He was proclaiming Himself born without Original Sin.

If we were born without Original Sin, we also would have no problem calling Yahweh our Father. For, we would be in perfect harmony with our Creator. We would be equal to Him in the one thing He created us to be equal to Him — righteousness. But because of Original Sin, we can’t grasp this equality with God that we were meant to have. It’s out of our grasp. Therefore, Jesus had to grasp true righteous equality with God for us. And it’s through Jesus that in eternity we will finally have the righteousness we were meant to have.

It’s our sinful nature that makes us want to run away from our Father in heaven. And this brings us to the false equality Satan sought after and convinced Eve and Adam to seek after. For, this false equality causes all who seek after it to fall away from the righteousness of their Creator. It causes them to become their own gods, defining a “righteousness” for themselves that is no righteousness, but evil. For, any so-called “righteousness” defined differently than Yahweh defines it is nothing but evil. It’s contrary to the will of our Creator. And so, all who seek to go off on their own, attempting to escape their Creator and His righteousness and create their own private universe grasp at a false equality. There is no way they can be their own Creator. There is no way they can create the parameters of their own existence. Only Yahweh can do that. And that’s the thing about Yahweh that all rebels hate.

Jesus had true equality with God. First, because He is God. But, more important for us is that Jesus had the true equality with God as a real human. Jesus, the son of Mary, had true equality with God in righteousness. So, now we move on to Jesus’ explanation of how true equality with God works. John 5:19-20, “19. . . ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise. 20 For the Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing. And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may marvel.’”

As the human Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, did nothing without the Father. He did nothing on His own. He only did what He saw the Father doing. This is how a perfectly righteous creature of Yahweh is meant to behave.

So, this tells us two things. First, in righteous, resurrected, immortal human bodies, this is how things will be for us forever. Doing exactly what we see the Father doing will be the source of all our blessedness; all our glory; all our peace; all our pleasure and all our goodness forever. We will be just like Jesus. This is the paradise that Jesus spoke of to the one robber who was crucified with Him. 

Second, doing only what we see the Father doing for all of eternity is terrifying to our sinful nature. Meditate on it sometime and you’ll find your sinful nature hating the whole idea, maybe even hating God. But if you find this terror within you, you will then know what Jesus meant when He said in Matthew 16:24, “‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’” That thing that rises up in us against Yahweh has to die. It has to die with Jesus on the cross in order for us to even begin to do what we see the Father doing. It must die and something must be born in its place. This is what Jesus meant when He told Nicodemus in John chapter 3 that no one can see the Kingdom of God unless they are born again, and no one can enter the Kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.

Baptism puts that hideous thing to death with Christ as we’re plunged under the water. Coming up out of the water, baptism births new life — the resurrected life of Christ — within us. This is the power of Jesus’ resurrection. That rebellious sinful nature doesn’t easily die within us. So, as Martin Luther advises us, we must daily drown it in the remembrance of our baptism. And daily we must rise to the new life in remembrance of our baptism. But this is the cross that all who would follow Jesus must carry.

In conclusion, as I’ve already said in this series of sermons, three quarters of the contest has been played. It’s Jesus 100, lions nothing. Jesus is raised from the dead. The Kingdom of this world is doomed, as are all allied with it. The Kingdom of God is already champion through the completed work of the Lord, Jesus Christ.

The fourth quarter began on the Day of the Resurrection of our Lord. Now it’s Jesus sitting in the seats while we’re on the field. But at the same time Jesus and Lord Holy Spirit are on the field with us coaching us concerning everything that was done in the first three quarters. For, it’s only by believing in everything Jesus did that we can win with Him in the fourth quarter.

Just know that on this day of victory, you are called to share in Messiah’s victory. You can have righteousness forever; goodness forever. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been. It doesn't matter that the sinful nature drags you down where you don’t want to go. For, there is one greater than our sinful nature. He is the victor on the field. Therefore, humbling yourself under Messiah Jesus brings His victory into your life through the forgiveness of sins. 

On this day of victory let our attitude be like that of Jesus — just like it says in Philippians 2:5-11. But let our attitude also be like what Saint Paul said in Philippians 3:7-14, “7 But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. 8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith — 10 that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. 12   Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13 Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Amen.

All Bible quotes are from the ESV.