Beyond The Cross: The Empty Tomb Matthew 28:1-10 (Easter Worship Celebration)

            
How many of you received an Easter Basket this morning?  If not this morning, how many of you have ever received an Easter Basket?  How many of you like getting or giving Easter Baskets or other “Easter gifts”?  I can hear some of your thoughts now, “Is the preacher really talking about Easter Baskets in our Easter morning sermon?”  The answer to that question is, “Yes I am.”  I will admit though, that there is a great deal of disagreement between Christians as to the appropriateness of Easter gifts.  Some see Easter gifts, Easter egg hunts, and the sort as simply harmless fun for the children.  Others see the giving of Easter gifts and the emphasis on bunnies, chicks, and flowers as participating in the pagan rituals of fertility seeking to ensure that the pagan gods will give blessings upon spring plantings and new life.  Some of those same arguments are made about Christmas and its celebration with trees and stockings and Santa.  What we often forget, though, is that while Christmas and Easter are Christian celebrations—their dating, Christmas on December 25th and Easter, on its ever-changing date based on the first new moon after the spring equinox, were both attempts of the church to Christianize pagan celebrations already in existence.  The church, in what some see as wisdom, though others would criticize, saw celebrations already taking place at those times and decided to co-op them and suggest a different reason to celebrate…a true reason to celebrate…the birth of our Savior and, later, His Resurrection.  Are Easter Baskets and gifts acceptable for Christians?  Well, in a sense, they are just as acceptable as Christmas gifts if they are offered not in celebration of a bunny but in celebration and in honor of the Lamb—the greatest gift ever given by the giver of every true and perfect gift.[i]
God has always given good and perfect gifts.  The previous six weeks we have been considering the gifts of God we find at the cross: the spit, the nails, the crown of thorns, the sign, the path, Simon’s shoulder, the thieves’ crosses, the tunic, the torn flesh, the wine soaked sponge, the hyssop branch, the blood and water, and the cross itself.  Yet, God’s gifts in Jesus didn’t begin at the cross…they began at the manger.  The gift of the manger…the gift of the birth of Jesus…is God saying, “I have come to live among you.  I have come to dwell with you.  You are not alone.”  And, just as God’s gifts in Jesus didn’t begin at the cross, they didn’t end at the cross as well.  To truly see all of God’s gifts, we have to move beyond the cross to the empty tomb we celebrate today.
Early in Matthew, in the second chapter, in fact, we see the wise men bring the perfect three gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh—marking Jesus as King, Priest, and Martyr.  In the empty tomb, we see God completing his perfect trinity of gifts marking Jesus as Emmanuel, Savior, and the Firstborn from the Dead[ii], the Resurrected One.
Any one of these gifts without the other would be meaningless.  Without the gift of the manger, there would be no Jesus to endure the cross and come from the tomb.  Without the gift of the cross, we would still be enslaved to sin, forever marked by our inability to escape its grasp, and we would have had a teacher, who went push came to shove, abandoned what he had taught.
Last year at Christmas we had a set of wrapped gifts in the middle of the floor.  We took turns opening that set of gifts.  The first thing that was opened was a set of game controllers.  We were like, “Okay, but they won’t work on our Wii.”  Then Joshua opened another package and it was filled with Disney Infinity figures and games.  He was confused.  Pretty nice gifts, but we had no way to use them.  Nice on their own, but at this point they were pretty much useless.  It was only when the third gift was open that it revealed the WiiU game system that made the first two gifts meaningful and useful.
So it is with God’s gifts.  It is the final gift…the gift of the empty tomb…that gives significance to the other gifts.  Without the empty tomb Jesus is nothing more than a baby who was born, grew into a man, lived, and was put to death for taking a stand against the hypocrisy of the religious elite.  Without the empty tomb, Jesus was nothing more than a martyr who died for what he believed in, but whose promises of life everlasting were but hollow noise.  Without the empty tomb, as Paul would put it, we are wasting our time here:
Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain. For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures…Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.[iii]
However, Paul says, we have not wasted our time, for “in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.”[iv]  It is with this final gift that everything else makes sense.  It is with this final gift that we finally come to understand the significance of the manger…that Jesus was not just another baby born to an unwed mother in a small rural town.  It is in this final gift that we understand the significance of the cross…that we are freed from our sins and can now truly live.  It is in this final gift that all of what Jesus has done and said has been validated by the God who sent Him to save us.  It is in the gift of the empty tomb that brings us to celebrate today and gives reason why some exchange Christmas gifts…it is the gift of the empty tomb that gives reason to why some will give Easter baskets…for after all, today is not about the bunny… it is about the Lamb…the Lamb that was slain…and the Lamb that now lives forevermore.
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.



[i] James 1:17
[ii] 1st Corinthians 1:18
[iii] 1st Corinthians 15:1-3, 12-19
[iv] 1st Corinthians 15:20

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