Focal passage: Luke 24:1-8, 36-40, 44-46
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have the ability to bring something back to life, breathe life into it?
People are constantly seeking to do just that when they painstakingly restore things such as cars, furniture, or various other items. Sometimes the key is just finding that special item that often seems to allude.
I have recently been reintroduced to a former hobby — collecting baseball cards — by a dear friend and fellow pastor. It involves these searches for those rare finds, and hopes for discoveries.
Unfortunately, with baseball cards there is not much hope of bringing them back to life. How you find them is how you find them. There are those moments when you come across a rare find and you wish that a “resurrection” was possible. I am trying to find a rare set of 1971 Topps cards because that is the year I was born, and they are hard to find. Imagine looking for a body in a tomb and arriving to find that it too was suddenly hard to find. This was what greeted the women on that first Easter.
They arrived at the tomb to find the stone rolled away and suddenly were surprised by the appearance of men in dazzling clothing, angelic messengers, which shared with them, “He is risen” (v. 6). The verse which is most poignant to me is the statement, “Why do you seek the living One among the dead?” (v. 5). Christ had shared in all of the gospels that He was to suffer and He was to die, but most importantly He was to be raised from the dead (Matt. 16;21; 17:9,22-23; 20:17-19; Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34; Luke 9:22; 18:31-33).
Following the tomb discovery and Christ’s appearance on the Emmaus road Christ appears to a group as disciples were sharing their Emmaus experience. In this moment Jesus was affirming that it was no hallucination and that He had truly been resurrected from the grave and was back among the living. The physical resurrection of Jesus was the fulfillment of that which began on the cross and now the risen Christ and Jesus of Nazareth are the same.
Jesus continued to speak with them in verses 44-46 about the fulfillment of Old Testament scriptures by referencing the “Law of Moses” which is the first five books of the Old Testament; the “Prophets” refers to the books of Joshua-2 Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea-Malachi; and the “Psalms” to the rest of the Old Testament. He shared with them that His suffering and resurrection were the fulfillment of that which was written. One prominent example of that is the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53).
And in the Easter miracle we have the greatest “find” of all. It is rarer than a ten gem mint 1951 Bowman rookie Micky Mantle card, and far more precious.