It’s Easter Sunday! It’s one of the two
biggest celebrations Christianity has, along with Christmas. In fact,
some would argue that Easter should be the bigger celebration of the two.
He is risen! He is risen indeed!
So it seems strange that, in Matthew’s version of the
resurrection story, there’s a phrase that appears twice. That phrase is
this: Do not be afraid.
Do not be afraid? Christ is risen! He’s alive! He defeated death
itself! The one we thought was killed is
alive again! Why would we be afraid?
But they were. In fact, when the angel of the Lord
appeared, we’re told that the guards were so afraid “that they shook and became
like dead men.”
And we say, okay, well, sure. These were the Roman
guards. They did not believe in
Christ. They were not even Jewish.
They did not understand about God and about angels. Naturally they
were afraid.
But they were not the only ones. When Jesus appears
to the women, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, Jesus says to them, “Do not be
afraid.” Which means they must have been afraid, right? Jesus would not have had to say it otherwise.
Why were they afraid? Because they did not
understand. And we are quite often scared of things we don’t understand.
You know, sometimes we’ve heard
this story so many times that we forget how incredible it really is. Yes,
of course they were happy that Jesus was alive, but--how could this be? He was dead.
We saw him die. He was completely and fully deceased. There was no question about it. We saw his lifeless body. We saw him placed in the tomb. We saw
the tomb sealed. How in the world can he
now be alive?
If they’d thought about it,
they’d have remembered. They’d have remembered that Jesus told them this
was going to happen. They’d have remembered that Jesus said that he would
be killed, and then would rise again in three days. But they really had
not understood that when Jesus said it, and so they were scared. And when we’re scared, we don’t think
straight. And so, even though they were happy to see Jesus alive, they
were afraid.
But it was not just Jesus’
rising from the dead that scared them. His death had scared them,
too. In fact, death itself is scary to
us. And it’s scary to us because we really don’t understand it.
I mean, we obviously understand it in one sense. We
understand what it means not to be alive on earth any more. But that’s
not the thing we want to understand.
It’s what happens next. What happens after we die? Does anything happen after we die? Do we go to heaven? And if so, what
does that even mean? What does it mean
to say we go to heaven? What’s heaven
like? What are we like there? And
on and on and on. We have so many
questions, and we don’t have any answers. We have no clue about what
really happens when we die. And so,
we’re scared of it. In fact, you might
almost say that we’re scared to death of death.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. There’s an extent to
which a fear of death is natural and normal and in fact is a good thing.
God put a survival instinct into each one of us. God has plans for each of us while we’re on
earth. There are things that each of us is supposed to do while we’re
here. And it’s not for us to decide when
we’ve done them all. As long as we’re here, God has some reason for us to
be here. That reason may change over
time. The things we’re supposed to do
now may not be the same as the things we were supposed to do years ago.
The things we’re supposed to do years from now may not be the same as the
things we’re supposed to do now. But
still, as long as we’re here there are things we’re supposed to do, and only
God knows when we’ve done them all. So until that day comes, we’re
supposed to take reasonable precautions to stay alive and healthy so we can do
them.
But we can carry the fear of death too far. Because
the one thing we know about death is that it’s going to come to all of
us. Statistics show that, on average, one out of every one person dies at
some point. And if we spend our lives
afraid of that fact, it’s going to be a lot harder for us to do the things God
put us here to do.
And that brings me back to Easter. We speak of Jesus
dying so that our sins could be forgiven. And that’s true, but I don’t
know if we spend enough time thinking through all the implications of that.
It’s through our acceptance of Jesus Christ as the Savior
that our sins are forgiven. And because our sins are forgiven, we have
salvation and eternal life. We say that,
but really think about it. Because our sins are forgiven, we--you and I
and everyone who accepts Jesus as the Savior--have salvation and eternal life.
You know, Jesus had some fear of dying. Not fear of
death, but fear of dying. Because he
knew how painful his death was going to be. That’s why he prayed in the
Garden of Gethsemane for God to find some other way to bring salvation to
people. He knew the pain he was going to have to go through, and he was
wanting to avoid that somehow, just as anyone would.
Jesus was afraid of the pain he would have to go through in
dying. But he was not afraid of death itself. Because Jesus knew that death had no hold
over him. He had told the disciples where he was going. He was returning to God the Father. He did not fear death because he was going to
defeat death. And he knew it.
But here’s the thing. When Jesus defeated death, he
did not just defeat it for himself. He defeated death for you and me and
everyone else who accepts Jesus as the Savior. After all, that’s what
“eternal life” means! Yes, of course,
the time will come when we will leave this earth. We will die, in that
sense. But because of our faith in
Jesus, death has no hold over us, just as it had no hold over Jesus. We
will go to heaven to be with God the Father.
Jesus said that to the disciples. Remember, he said
that he was going to prepare a place for us in heaven. And when the time
was right, he was going to come back and take us to that place. And you
know that a place that Jesus has prepared, a place that’s in the presence of
God the Father--well, that has to be a pretty awesome place. It’s got to
be more awesome than anything you and I could ever imagine.
Because of what Jesus did for us, we do not have to be
afraid of death. Jesus has defeated death. Jesus did not just defeat death for
himself. He defeated it for us,
too. Because of that, we don’t need to have any fear, even of death.
But you know what else we don’t have to be afraid of?
Life! If we don’t have to be afraid of
death, then why should we ever need to be afraid of life? We don’t. And God does not want us to be.
Now, again, God does not want us to take foolish
chances. God wants us to act reasonably.
But what’s the most reasonable thing we can do? Trust God. Follow God.
Be faithful to God. Do the things
God wants us to do. Love our
neighbors. Love our enemies. Go
and make disciples. Those are the most
reasonable things that we, as Christians, can do. Because those are the
things Jesus told us to do. And if we do
those things, we don’t live our lives being afraid.
And that’s what we all want, right? To not live our
lives not being afraid. Because fear holds us back in so many ways.
Fear makes us cowards. Fear keeps us
from trusting people. Fear makes us selfish, because we’re afraid no one
will be there for us. Fear keeps us from trusting ourselves. Fear makes us hesitant to try anything,
because we’re afraid we’ll fail. And fear keeps us from trusting God. Fear makes us believe that evil will win,
that things will never work out right, that things will simply keep going from
bad to worse until the inevitable end.
None of us likes to feel that way. None of us wants
to feel that way. And because of Easter,
we do not have to feel that way. We do not have to live our lives in
fear. We can be confident in life. We can do what we know God wants us to do,
knowing that God will always be faithful to us. Knowing that if we do our
part, God will always do God’s part, and things will go the way they’re
supposed to go. And we do not even have
to fear death. We can even be confident
in death, knowing that Jesus has defeated death, not just for himself, but for
all of us.
Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid of life, and do
not be afraid of death. Jesus has defeated death. He is risen!
He is risen indeed!
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