Why Do You Look for the Living Among the Dead?

Easter, 3/27/16
Luke 24:4-8


Why Do You Look for the Living Among the Dead?
I. Where else would Jesus be?
II. Look for Jesus in the right place.


Have you ever had trouble finding someone’s house? Imagine that you’re driving around and you keep looking at the printed directions in your hand or you keep glancing at your GPS device and peering at the street signs, but you just can’t find the house you’re looking for. You start to get a little frustrated and perhaps even less charitable toward whomever gave you the directions, positioned the street signs, or programmed the stupid electronic device that keeps leading you astray. Then you spot someone walking along the road so you pull up next to them and ask, “Can you tell me where so and so lives? Their house is supposed to be right around here somewhere.” The person looks all around him and the only thing he can see for acres and acres are tombstones. And he doesn’t know what to tell you because you’re looking for the living among the dead.

Do you think that you could ever be that lost? Probably not. But this morning in our reading from Luke’s gospel, we heard about a group of women doing that very thing. They were looking for Jesus in a cemetery and an angel asked them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Let’s ask ourselves that same question this Easter morning because, believe it or not, at times we do the same thing.

Part I.

It happens occasionally, but it’s a fairly rare occurrence, that a body in a cemetery gets moved. It happens when a body is exhumed for investigative purposes or when a construction project necessitates relocating some grave sites, but that’s about it. Otherwise, we can be absolutely certain that a body will be where it was buried. And if we were at the gravesite when the body was first placed in the ground, we know where to go if we want to visit it again.

The women who had closely followed Jesus the past three years knew where to look for Jesus. They had watched where Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea had laid the body of Jesus just before sundown on Friday. So, when the angel asked them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” the obvious answer is, “Where else would he be?”

You see, these women had made the trip to that grave early in the morning because they wanted to do for Jesus what they didn’t have time for on Friday. They wanted to carry out one more act of service to Jesus out of their love for him and that was to prepare his body properly for burial. While on their way to the grave, it dawned on them that the huge stone which blocked the entrance to the tomb would need to be moved, but how? When they arrived there, however, nothing was the way they thought it would be. The stone was rolled away and inside the grave were grave clothes scattered on the ground and a cloth neatly folded where Jesus’ head had been—but no body. That’s when two men in shining robes—two angels—appeared and said, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!”

Don’t those words sound like a rebuke? The angel makes it sound like these women should have known better than to come to the tomb looking for a dead Jesus. They imply that the women should have known he was alive. That’s due to the fact that Jesus had prepared them for his resurrection as well as anyone could. Again and again he had told these women and his disciples that he was going to rise from the dead after three days. So on the crack of dawn on that third day, that’s what he did. But, like the disciples, these women had failed to grasp what Jesus was saying. The angel was asking these women why they didn’t understand and believe what Jesus had told them.

We’re a little more sympathetic towards these women than the angels were. After all, angels are holy. They live in the presence of God. They have no clue what it’s like to be sinful, or doubtful, or to misunderstand God. But we do. We know what it’s like to be wrong about things—especially spiritual things. We can easily imagine ourselves sharing the same mindset with these women. After all, who comes back from the dead?

But they should have known better. A few weeks earlier Jesus had raised his friend Lazarus from the dead after he had been in the tomb for four days. I’m sure these women were aware of that miracle. They knew Jesus could raise dead people, but who was going to raise Jesus? The point of his miracles was to prove that he has power over death. The angels reminded them, “The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.” They should have known. They should have trusted. But they went to the tomb thinking that Jesus surely was still dead.

We can make all sorts of excuses for these women, but that doesn’t change the fact that God cannot lie. So when the Son of God says he is going to rise again on the third day, you can take that to the bank! It’s a done deal. Not even Satan will be able to stop it from happening. So why would we want to defend their sinful weakness of faith? That’s obvious, isn’t it? Because we likely would have done the same thing. Just like these women, we love Jesus dearly, but at times our faith is weak, it crumbles, and we fall. When we hurt, when life becomes unbearable, when our hearts have been crushed, when our lives are a mess, when nothing goes as planned, our natural reaction is simply to try to cope, to take care of the practical needs at hand, or, to curl up in a ball and wrap ourselves in aching sorrow. At that point the words and promises of Jesus are out of mind and out of sight. But remember what the angels said. “He is not here; he has risen!” In his great love for us Jesus did the impossible. He died for every sin of every sinner, for all the times we’ve doubted him and his word, for all the times when our faith was weak. And then he rose again just as he promised. And now not even death can separate us from our Lord and Savior. It’s the power of Christ’s resurrection that strengthens our faith even when life hurts and death arrives.

Part II.

If you needed something from me, where would you look for me? Well, probably right here or in my office. That’s where I spend most of my time. You might check for me at my house if it’s after 5:00 PM. But you wouldn’t look for me at the church across the street or at the daycare next door. I have no reason to be at either one of those.

When you need something from Jesus, where do you look? Well, when our faith is weak, when we’re not happy with life, when feel guilty, we tend to look for Jesus in all the wrong places. We want to find him in our feelings. We want to see him in little miracles that suddenly happen in our lives. We wish he’d speak in our ears. But he doesn’t. Those are not the places to find Jesus. That’s like looking for the living among the dead.

The place to find Jesus is in the gospel—the good news of our salvation through Jesus. We find that gospel in God’s word. We find the gospel in our baptisms which washed our sins away. We find the gospel in the Lord Supper where we receive our Savior’s very body and blood. And that’s where the angels pointed the women to early on that Easter morning. They said, “Remember how he told you while he was still with you in Galilee: The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.” That’s the gospel in a nutshell. That’s the greatest good news any sinner can hear. If these women and the disciples had understood and believed that message, life for them from Friday through Sunday would have been completely different. Instead of being huddled in sorrow, fear and dread, they would have been filled with joyful anticipation of seeing the risen Lord Jesus.

The crucifixion of Jesus had crushed them and all their hopes for Jesus. The last thing they wanted was for Jesus to die. They failed to realize that his death was the fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament and the means by which he would win forgiveness and eternal life for them. His sufferings and death were the gospel, the good news of their salvation! They just didn’t see it.

Likewise, the Lord Jesus had come to Jerusalem to rise from the dead. He had to rise or his sufferings and death would have been meaningless for us and crushing defeat for him. A risen Jesus means our sins are certainly forgiven. A risen Jesus means heaven is our home. A risen Jesus means we, too, shall rise from the dead on the Last Day with glorified bodies. Death is nearly certain for us, unless Jesus returns first. But death has no power over us because it had no power over our Savior. We die, but we live!

Luke writes this about the women, “Then they remembered his words.” The Holy Spirit was enlightening them, filling them with saving faith in their risen Lord Jesus, giving them spiritual life.

He’s done the same for us. We don’t have to go looking for Jesus, because he came looking for us in a spiritual graveyard. We came into the world spiritually dead, but the Holy Spirit made us spiritually alive by bringing us to faith in Jesus. So this morning, we didn’t come here to worship a dead Savior, but a living one, the One who lived and died and lives again so that we can be certain every day of our lives that our sins are forgiven and that heaven is ours. Find your Savior Jesus every day of your lives in that saving gospel. Don’t look for the living among the dead. Find Jesus in the Easter gospel. Christ risen. He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.