God’s Prevailing Power

In celebration of this Easter season, the Octet Collaborative is grateful to share this sermon written by Rev. Mark Booker, Senior Minister at Park Street Church in Boston.

Today is the day we declare with confidence and assurance that light overcomes darkness, that life conquers death, and that we therefore have reason—whatever it is that we are going through—to rejoice. This confident declaration is rooted in the reality of this day and all that it means for our lives and our world.

The angel was the first to declare this reality to the women who had come to the tomb around dawn on the first day of the week: “I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said” (Mt 28.5-6). Today we celebrate that Jesus—the very same man who just a few days before was betrayed by a friend, abandoned by his companions, falsely tried and convicted though he was innocent, who was mocked, beaten, and lifted up on a Roman cross to die a most excruciating, humiliating, and dehumanizing death by suffocation and exposure—this man was bodily resurrected. This was not some magic trick—as centuries of post-Enlightenment philosophers and theologians have tried to argue—a kind of David Copperfield masterful illusion. No. This very same man, Jesus, who was publicly and shamefully crucified and then laid in a tomb outside Jerusalem (who was crucified, died, and was buried, as we say in the Apostles’ Creed), this man, as the angel says in Mt 28.6, “is not here, for he has risen, as he said.”

Impossible, you say? Yes, very much so, from our vantage point. Dead men don’t rise. Just like, more trivially, dead cars don’t start. This is something our family has more experience with than we would like to admit (and I trust we’re not alone here). There was that memorable morning of waking up with all the kids from a night of camping, and turning the key in our minivan and no response. We needed help—a spark, a boost of battery—from the outside, and in our case that morning it came, thankfully, from a kind camper nearby. But there is no spark, no boost, for 3-day old death. Nothing. This is, in fact, impossible. And yet, injected into this utterly hopeless situation is the power of the God for whom nothing will be impossible, as the angel Gabriel proclaimed to Mary in Lk 1.37. The power of the Most High will overshadow her—there is the spark—and life will be conceived in her womb. Life out of death. That same power is at work here. Fundamentally, the resurrection is a work of divine power…power for life. 

But this event represents not just life on the micro level, just life to Mary or to Jesus’s dead body in the tomb. The resurrection of Jesus, as his followers declared in their writings which we call the New Testament, was the first act in God’s long-promised work of new creation. Sin and evil marred the original creation and led to death, but God, the Creator God, the one who made you and me and the world in which we live, had long ago promised to renew and remake the world (in places like Isa 11 and Is 65), not by discarding this present world but by redeeming and renewing it. And Jesus’s resurrection is the first moment, preceding all others—right in the middle of history (and this was a surprise to all)—in the new creation, and it assures us of the future re-creation of our bodies and the world. He is the firstborn from the dead, as Paul declares in Col 1.18. Like the first bud to flower on a tree in springtime, the resurrection of Jesus is the first sign of the beautiful, glorious, life-saturated world that will follow, a world, as Revelation 21 declares, in which “every tear will be wiped away from our eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore.” The resurrection of Jesus says that life is on the move. Life is breaking out. Life is conquering death. The God of the impossible whose power prevails is a God of life. Maybe you have an uncertain and cloudy mind about Jesus and Christianity. Can I at least get you to be clear about the Christian claim—a claim I long for you to wrestle with—at the heart of what we celebrate today? That God is a God of abundant life, whose power is deployed for life. Whatever else you have heard about God, know that this is at the core.  

But as our text shows us, God’s power for life can either be opposed or embraced. Matthew’s account is unique in that he records opposition both before and after his account of the resurrection. We see opposition, at the end of ch.27, before Jesus is raised. The chief priests and Pharisees ask Pilate to set a guard at the tomb. They had heard Jesus say (27.63), “After three days I will rise.” Now that his death on the cross, from their perspective, had demonstrated that he was indeed an impostor (v63), they wanted to leave no opportunity for another fraud (stealing the body and claiming a resurrection) that would give any life to Jesus’s false claims to be the Son of God. So, what does Pilate say? “You have a guard of soldiers. Go, make it as secure as you can. So they went and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard.” This was not a halfhearted measure. The Roman guard (a minimum of four soldiers) was the best security available to the chief priests and Pharisees. It represented the superpower of the day, and these soldiers would stand watch with the authority of the empire behind them. This would be like dispatching a group of Navy Seals or Army Rangers or a well-trained SWAT team.

But what is the power of man against the power of the God for whom nothing will be impossible? “The weakness of God,” Paul writes in 1 Cor 1.25, “is stronger than men.” And here the best security topples like a house of cards when confronted with God’s power. As we read in 28.2-4, the earthquake strikes, the angel rolls back the stone and the sight of him was so glorious and marvelous that the guards, “trembled for fear of him and became like dead men.” The point here couldn’t be clearer: our strength is no match for God’s power. Sarah’s barren and post-menopausal womb conceives the son of the promise, Isaac, Pharoah’s pursuing army is drowned in the Red Sea, the walls of Jericho come crashing down by trumpet blasts, Gideon and his band of 300 defeat the Midianites, David, the shepherd boy, topples the giant, Goliath. What is Scripture if not one long record of the power of the God of the impossible and the call to place our trust in him: for forgiveness, for hope, for life…for resurrection? So go ahead, chief priests, Pharisees, Roman guards—make it as secure as you can.

It turns out, the only security they could find was in deception. The chief priests pay the guards to lie, to tell the people (28.13), “His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.” This is known as the conspiracy theory, but why would the disciples suffer and die for a hoax, as many of them went on to do? There are other lies: the disciples invented the resurrection decades after Jesus’s death, they experienced a hallucination, they were just so grief-stricken that they convinced themselves that Jesus was still alive. While these theories may sound convincing—especially if we’re convinced dead people can’t rise—none of them, upon further examination, have strong explanatory power of the historical data: an empty tomb (even many skeptical scholars grant this as a matter of historical record), the many different eyewitnesses who claimed to have an encounter with the risen Jesus (read 1 Cor 15.3-7), and, perhaps most of all (and this one is powerfully articulated by NT Wright in his masterful work on the resurrection: The Resurrection and the Son of God) the emergence of the new belief that one man was resurrected in the middle of history. The Jews who affirmed resurrection all understood it to be something which happened to everyone at the end of time. No one expected resurrection to happen to one man in the middle of time. But this is exactly what the Christians claimed and then built their lives around. One has to account for the emergence of this new and unexpected, unanticipated belief, and seemingly the only thing that can really account for that is that Jesus did, in fact, rise from the dead and appear to hundreds of people. I’m not suggesting we can argue anyone into having faith, but I do want everyone to understand that the Christian faith and belief in the resurrection is not irrational. It is reasonable, and the earliest disciples of Jesus, Paul especially, made this point over and over again.

Why the lie from the chief priests in Mt 28? Self-preservation. They knew the truth about Jesus would upset the present social order (in which they were on top) and therefore their lives. The lie protects the social order from revolution, and this keeps them in power. Plato develops this concept of the noble lie in ch.3 of The Republic. The ruling class tells the masses the myth of the metals, that the god made the ruling class with a bit of gold, the helping class with a bit of silver, and the farmers and other craftsmen with iron and brass. This myth, told by the rulers, will help each social class to play its role with contentment and thus maintain social harmony. It may be useful. It may even be somewhat believable, but in the end, it’s a lie, however nobly told. The purpose of the chief priests, here in our passage, is more sinister. Their lie is spread to preserve their place of power. That, of course, is built on another lie told by the father of lies himself, that being at the top of the social order, being in control, or being in power brings life. It doesn’t.

Our enemy, the devil, will use lies of any kind to keep us from the truth of the God of life. It’s been this way from the beginning. Did God really say? said the serpent to Eve in the garden. He lures Eve with promises of godlike flourishing, but he knew he was telling her a lie that would give him the upper hand. And he continues his work today, obscuring and attacking the truth. The Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2016 was an adjective: post-truth. They explain this as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’” Any attack on truth will do for our enemy. He’ll use philosophers, theologians, politicians, religious studies faculties, scientists, bankers, barbers, pop stars, advertisers, the voices in our head—and anything else that he can. So many of these lies sound so convincing, so noble, but they’re parasitic to the real truth: share your truth, believe in yourself, or be all you can be. Other lies are sinister but so tempting to believe: you’re worthless, you’re too far gone, you don’t measure up, you’re utterly and completely alone, God isn’t there and if he were he wouldn’t love or accept you anyway. Or it’s too late, you’ve lived too much of your life in a way that God could never accept you. 

These and other lies deceive, divide, and bind. Only the truth sets you free. And that truth is found in Jesus, the crucified and resurrected Lord, and in God’s testimony about himself and about us in what we call the Scriptures. Indeed, man does not live by bread alone, nor does he live by lies, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. We have inherent worth and value. We’re not alone. It’s not too late. God is there and he longs for you to turn to him for forgiveness and for life. If you’re unfamiliar with this word, I encourage you to explore it, to read it, and to find what so many have already found: that here is truth, liberating truth, robust truth, life-affirming truth, reliable truth. And this word testifies to Jesus rising from the dead and that one day every lie will be exposed and “every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2.. Will we believe it? Not just as a matter of cognitive assent but as an act of trust and embrace.

This is the other response, seen in the women that first Easter morning. Instead of opposition, we see embrace. In 28.9, “They came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him.” The worship here is a spontaneous acknowledgment that the resurrection authenticates Jesus’s claims to be the Son of God, the Messiah, who is one with the Father. The resurrection demonstrates that the cross of Good Friday was not a defeat but rather Jesus’s great victory over sin, evil, and death itself—and this for us. The Christian is the one who trusts in Jesus, who—like these women—takes hold of his feet and worships him, who says, “You are the living Lord of my life and I yield to you.” In that moment we are united with him, by the Spirit, and brought to new life. The deadness of our own hearts in sin is, by the grace of God, made alive together with Christ. He is the spark, the boost, from the outside. And in this new life under his rule, he now has THE say in my life—in regard to time, money, sex, career, and relationships—and everything else.

To those who take hold of and worship this risen King, to those who embrace him, there is a clear word in this text: “Do not be afraid.” Both the angel (v5) and Jesus (v10) say this to the women. Do not be afraid. Why not? Why shouldn’t we be afraid of failure, of loneliness, of sickness, of missing out, of death itself? Because this God of power whom we worship is a God of abundant life. Paul prays for the church in Eph 1.19, that the eyes of their hearts might be enlightened that they might know “what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead.” The power of this Easter morning, the power that brought Jesus out of the grave, the power that overwhelmed the Roman guard, the power that is working for life and new creation in a world of death, that power is at work in you: if you are in Christ that power has remade you, you are a new creature, and that power continues to work for life in you (in all your circumstances). So do not fear. For, “if God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom 8.31). And Paul will go on to say that amid great trials and hardships we remain more than conquerors through him who loved us and nothing—NOTHING! not bankruptcy, not divorce, not cancer, not chronic fatigue, not the premature death of a loved one, not a broken femur, not even death itself—nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. The resurrection of Jesus is the guarantee of all this. It is the first flower, the unmistakable sign that life prevails, that the power of God—the God of the impossible—is for life. Life does conquer death. Light does prevail over the darkness. So be not afraid, for in the words of Chrysostom (d. 407 AD): “O death, where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory? Christ is risen, and you are thrown down. Christ is risen, and the demons have fallen. Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen, and life reigns in freedom.” Amen.