In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m Pastor Brian. I’m the local manager of this branch of the worldwide Christian church, which is the largest organization in the world. And the best thing about this job is that my boss is the wonderful creator of the Universe.
Do you realize that over 1/3rd of all the people in the world claim to be Christians? Do you realize that 5 out of 6 people in America claim to be Christian? Do you realize that there are more than twice as many United Methodist Churches in the United States than there are McDonald’s Restaurants? There’s a little over 14,000 McDonalds, but there are over 32,000 United Methodist Churches.
And it all began about 2000 years ago just outside the walls of Jerusalem.
Most of us know the outlines of the story. A man named Jesus was born to Joseph and Mary of Nazareth, a tiny village located near the Sea of Galilee in what is today northern Israel. Jesus grew up extraordinarily wise, recruited a dozen followers, and taught them for about three years around the years 30-33 AD. Then, he was executed by crucifixion on a cross. And….
Well, those are the outlines. Let’s look at the details that make this Jesus story a bit unusual.
Around Jesus, there were always unusual claims. So four men wrote down separate accounts of Jesus’ life.
First, there was Mark. Mark, or John-Mark, traveled with both Peter – Jesus’ leading disciple or student – and with Paul, a man who wrote most of the scrolls that eventually became the New Testament. Mark was a teenager when Jesus was killed on the cross. But he had traveled with Jesus some and he relied heavily upon Peter’s memories when he wrote down his Gospel of Mark. Mark wrote for a skeptical Roman audience, people like us who really didn’t understand the Jewish religion.
Matthew was the second writer. He had been a tax collector for the Romans when Jesus asked him to follow Jesus and become his student. Matthew was Jewish, and he wrote for a Jewish audience, so his story took Mark’s outline and added details Matthew remembered, and also added a bunch of Old Testament prophecies that referred to Jesus.
The next man to write was Luke. Luke was a medical doctor, a Greek Jewish friend of Paul’s who met Paul while Paul traveled through western Turkey about 15 years later. Luke traveled with Paul back to Jerusalem and wrote down a journalistic account of what happened by interviewing Peter, Jesus’ mother Mary, and several other eyewitnesses. He also had the opportunity to read Mark’s account and probably Matthew’s account. Mark, Matthew, and Luke all completed their accounts in the 50’s or 60’s – within 20 or 30 years of Jesus’ ministry.
And then, there was John. John was a very close friend of Jesus, one of His first followers, and John wrote down many details the others had skipped over. John was more philosophical than Peter – who had been a fishing boat captain – or Matthew, the tax collector. And John took time to not only put down what happened, but why it happened. And he wrote later, probably in the 70’s or 80’s.
So if you really want to know the details about Jesus’ life and teachings, unless you have a strong understanding of the Old Testament, you probably should start reading with the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John, and then go back to Luke and finally Matthew. On Wednesday evenings at 6:15, we will be studying in detail the Gospel of John, looking at what this close friend of Jesus had to say about Jesus and his life. You are welcome to join us. We’ll even have a free dinner starting at 5:30 that you’re invited to.
As we read these Gospel accounts, several things strike us as we go along. First, Luke makes a series of extraordinary claims. In the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel, there are a series of angelic appearances, first to the Zacharias, the father of Jesus’ cousin who would eventually become known as John the Baptist, and then to Mary, Jesus’ young mother to be, and then to Joseph, the man who would raise Jesus.
Luke soon claims that the twelve-year old Jesus is holding deep theological discussions with leading priests at the great Temple in Jerusalem, displaying a wisdom far, far beyond His age.
And then we have Jesus’ life of ministry. Apparently, Jesus was simply known as a solid, hard-working, intelligent and wise man until He was about thirty years old. Then, he starts to teach people. His major message was that the Kingdom of Heaven is coming soon!
Jesus begins to teach as one who has real authority. Unlike most teachers of the time, he didn’t hem and haw and defer to others, saying, “Well, Gamaliel says we should and Joshua says we shouldn’t, but on the whole it appears that Plato has the best view.” Uh-uh. Jesus says, “You have heard A, but I say B”.
For example, he says that you’ve been told to love your friends and hate your enemies, but Jesus says, “But I say love your enemies, too.”
He tells people that it is not enough to avoid murder, but we must avoid even the thoughts of violence. It is not enough to avoid adultery, but even the thoughts of adultery must be avoided. His teaching is deep, amazingly deep, and wonderful with the way it makes sense, ties all together, changes our lives and gives us peace that the world’s ways don’t give us. He is perhaps the sanest man who ever lived, confident and yet not arrogant, gentle and not bullying, peaceful and yet never timid. He shows us the way out of the insanity that is in the world, in places like Syria, in Libya, in North Korea. He shows us how to live together in sanity.
And then Jesus makes repeated claims to be God.
What? Jesus claimed to be God? Where?
In many different places in Matthew, and particularly throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus claims rights and powers that only God should have. For example, Jesus claims the right to forgive people’s sins – something only God can do. The people standing around recognize this claim and get very upset at Jesus for his cheekiness.
Jesus claims that He was living when Abraham, the great ancestor of the Jews, was alive – over a thousand years earlier. The people listening get upset.
Jesus claims that “I and the Father are one.” And people pick up stones to stone him for blasphemy. He even claims that He has come to fulfill the Law, the great moral law of Moses. He is claiming to be God Himself, so why should we believe Him? Yet his teaching is so sane!
But also, with these claims to be God, he performs miracles. Now, my college education was to be a physicist, more specifically, an astrophysicist. I know that miracles are when the laws of science and the Universe break down. Miracles are not supposed to ever, ever, ever happen. But then again, once in a while, it appears they do happen. That’s why we call them miracles. They are events that would never happen in a world with only natural science at work.
Yet, I’ve needed $6000 to pay my bills in a month and had no way of earning the money and seen my credit card limit increased the day after I prayed by $6000.
I’ve needed $300 to pay the rent, prayed, and caught a friend putting a $300 check in my front screen door.
I’ve needed $741.53 in money by 4:30 pm, prayed, and received exactly $741.53 at 4:10 pm that afternoon.
I’ve seen a man die three times over a month and after prayer be brought back to life each time and live another 18 months. I watched the WVU-Notre-Dame basketball game with him, talking and chatting, last month and finally buried him two weeks ago. These are miracles, things that aren’t supposed to happen.
Yet miracles can and do happen – things that scientific laws say can’t and won’t happen. And Jesus performed miracles.
In a time with primitive medicine, Jesus cured blindness, deafness, paralysis, and repaired lame legs. He opened up a withered hand, he turned water into wine, and he walked with his student Peter onto of water. He even brought a man who had died, been buried for four days back from the dead.
And so, when He claimed He was God, there were people who were beginning to believe him.
And some people say He couldn’t be God because God doesn’t exist. Yet many of those same people believe in ghosts, in spirits, in vampires, in zombies, in all sorts of supernatural things. If Jesus was not divine, then why are vampires afraid of crosses??? Well, the fact is that if a single supernatural thing exists, then God exists, because God is the supernatural cause of all things, including natural laws. If you believe in a mind or consciousness, then you believe in the supernatural for a biochemical computer cannot be naturally self-aware.
Either you believe in a totally natural universe, a place where your mind is simply a biochemical computer, where love is just another set of chemicals, where hate and envy are other chemicals, where everything follows step-by-step without consciousness – or you believe in a world where there is a mind that is greater than the brain, in a consciousness which is greater than your nerve cells, in love that goes beyond estrogen, in emotions that are more than a chemical mix, in the supernatural idea of a perfect triangle with 180 degrees, in the supernatural existence of number that have more zeros than there are atoms in the Universe, in short, in anything that doesn’t follow rigidly from the rules of natural law, and therefore you believe in the supernatural which means miracles and a God who created everything natural and supernatural.
One day, Jesus was arrested and executed for the crime of blasphemy, for the crime of claiming to be God to the religious authorities of the day. He was beaten and put on a cross to die a slow death by blood loss and suffocation as his body weakened and he could no longer hold himself up. And so he died and a Roman soldier stuck a spear in his side to make sure he was dead. And there was nothing special about this, to the Romans he was just another troublemaker, executed efficiently and quickly, put on a cross to die, he died, we double-checked, he was dead.
Because of Jewish burial customs, his body was taken down before sunset and he was quickly mummy-wrapped and buried in a tomb carved in the rock and a large 2000 pound boulder was rolled into a trench in front of the tomb. Then, everyone went home because the Jewish Sabbath was approaching at sunset. Plans were made that the women would come back early on Sunday morning to clean his body and properly rewrap it in a mixture of spices and ointments, as was the custom.
Friday night came and went...
Saturday came, it was an ordinary Sabbath day, more people in town than normal, but it was the Passover festival weekend. People slept in, went to the synagogue, ate lunch, talked to relatives in town for the festival, had evening dinner and went back to sleep...
Early Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene and several other women had agreed to meet at the tomb to clean Jesus’ body.
Let me take the eyewitness account from John, who soon arrived with Peter. (NIV 2011 version).
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, [John,] the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.5 He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.
Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”
“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).
Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.
Mary’s brief meeting with Jesus was just the first meeting Jesus had with his followers. That afternoon, a stranger joined two disciples walking about 5 miles home toward the village of Emmaus. They talked and decided to eat together. As the stranger blessed the meal, they realized he was Jesus and then he vanished. They ran back to the house where the disciples were staying in Jerusalem.
That evening, most of the disciples were there and Jesus walked in with them and talked with them. A week later, he came back to the group and had Thomas the disciple who had not believed in the first appearances put his finger into the hole in Jesus side where the spear had stabbed him.
Over the next month, there were a total of eleven appearances, in different places at different times to different people. Jesus walked, talked, taught, and ate with his friends. He cooked several breakfast. Once, over five hundred people saw him. And then, after giving further instructions, He went back to heaven.
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ that we celebrate today proved that what He had been saying was true – Jesus was indeed the Son of God, God Himself walking upon this earth, and so everything He said was of utmost importance to us because God had created the Universe and us, so who will you listen to for lessons about how to live your life?
The Jesus movement exploded. Within a month there were over 3000 believers. Within a year, there were followers in Damascus, Syria, and in Lebanon, and further up the coast. Within twenty years there were churches established on the Island of Cyprus and throughout Turkey and Greece, in Egypt, and even in Rome and Iran and India and Ethiopia. Within two hundred years, Christianity was the dominant religion of the Roman Empire and there were Christian churches in France and Britain and across North African and in Spain. And today, there are Christians in every country on earth, and it is the dominant religion in the Americas, in Europe, in Russia, in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Korea and the Phillipines, in Australia. Substantial and fast-growing Christian minorities live in India and China.
Christianity is the world’s most widespread and most populous religion and has been shared by some of the greatest men and women of history, including scientists like Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, the discoverer of genetics, Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan, writers like Harper Lee and Dorothy Sayer and Emily Dickerson, leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr and Tony Blair, and generals like Omar Bradley and George Patton. Movie stars like Bing Crosby, Mel Gibson, and Tom Hanks. In every field, intelligent, smart, and wise people have investigated the evidence and found that Jesus was indeed God walking upon this earth.
And now, you have a choice to make. For, as C.S. Lewis said, every person must look at Jesus Christ and make a decision about who Jesus is.
· Was Jesus a liar every time He said He was God, a man who duped everyone around him into thinking he could perform miracles?
· Was Jesus a crazy nutcase, a lunatic who just thought He was God and who stumbled onto the most sane teachings anyone has ever given the world?
· Was Jesus the Lord of all Creation, proven by coming back from the dead?
· Or Was Jesus just the most sane, wisest teacher that we’ve ever seen?
Our reason says to go with the last choice, to declare that Jesus was the greatest teacher, the wisest man, nothing more – and nothing less. That’s what everything we learned in school, in college, on television, in books wants us to declare, to believe, to shout!
But Jesus did not leave us with that option. He did not intend to give us that choice. For He plainly said, “I and the Father are one.” He plainly said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus claimed over and over again to be God walking on earth, so it leaves us in a pickle. You have a decision to make.
Was he lying? Was he a lunatic? Four separate men wrote down his life’s story and each one included his teachings, his actions, his miracles, and his Resurrection. The miracles and the Resurrection were the reasons the Jesus Movement grew in the first place. If we accept his teachings, we don’t have any reason to deny his miracles or his Resurrection except our own bias, our own blindness, our own fear of Someone who is far more than we can ever be!
Liar? Lunatic? Or, just possibly, perhaps most probably, Lord of all Creation?
And now, you have a choice to make. For, as C.S. Lewis said, every person must look at Jesus Christ and make a decision about who Jesus is.
· Was Jesus a liar every time He said He was God, a man who duped everyone around him into thinking he could perform miracles?
· Was Jesus a crazy nutcase, a lunatic who just thought He was God and who stumbled onto the most sane teachings anyone has ever given the world?
· Was Jesus the Lord of all Creation, proven by coming back from the dead?
· Or Was Jesus just the most sane, wisest teacher that we’ve ever seen?
Our reason says to go with the last choice, to declare that Jesus was the greatest teacher, the wisest man, nothing more – and nothing less. That’s what everything we learned in school, in college, on television, in books wants us to declare, to believe, to shout!
But Jesus did not leave us with that option. He did not intend to give us that choice. For He plainly said, “I and the Father are one.” He plainly said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus claimed over and over again to be God walking on earth, so it leaves us in a pickle. You have a decision to make.
Was he lying? Was he a lunatic? Four separate men wrote down his life’s story and each one included his teachings, his actions, his miracles, and his Resurrection. The miracles and the Resurrection were the reasons the Jesus Movement grew in the first place. If we accept his teachings, we don’t have any reason to deny his miracles or his Resurrection except our own bias, our own blindness, our own fear of Someone who is far more than we can ever be!
Liar? Lunatic? Or, just possibly, perhaps most probably, Lord of all Creation?
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