Text:  John 20:1-9                                                                           U Feast of the Resurrection (Easter Day)

The Body of Evidence

            In the name of him who for us conquered death and the grave, dear friends in Christ:  Though today is surely the most upbeat and joyous festival of the Church, the Easter Gospel reading certainly doesn’t begin that way.  It starts instead with the discovery of a crime scene – at least, that’s the way it appeared to the people who were there.  With several other women who had loved and followed Jesus, Mary Magdalene came early to the tomb where her Lord’s mangled body had been hastily buried right before sunset two days earlier.  At that time, working together, Nicodemus the Pharisee and Joseph of Arimathea, who were secret followers of Jesus, had taken his body from the cross and given it a very quick embalming before sealing it in the tomb that Joseph had prepared for himself.  They had been pressed for time because it was late in the day and the Sabbath began at sunset; and being good and faithful Jews, they weren’t about to offend God by doing anything that could be called work on that holy day.

            Now, some of the women had watched them from a distance. And seeing what a rushed and sloppy job they’d made of it, they resolved to return here after the Sabbath to finish properly what the men had begun.  (Seems that women have to do that a lot for men – that, or women are never quite happy with what men do.  I’m not sure. Take your pick.  Anyway) It seemed that returning here to anoint his body was the right thing to do to show their final respects for the man they had called “Lord”.  So, as soon as the Sabbath was over, Saturday at sunset, they’d gone out to purchase the things they would need.  They spent much of the evening preparing the items, probably infusing oils with herbs and spices, so that they’d be ready for use the next day.  Then, before dawn, they gathered to head out together to the tomb. As they walked, they remembered the two men straining to roll the heavy stone door over the entry to the cave-like sepulcher.  They saw it drop into the slot that had been cut for it in the solid rock at the base of tomb’s mouth.  And they wondered aloud if they would have the strength to dislodge the stone.  (And probably at this point, one of them observed rather critically that there are never any men around when you need them.)

            They arrived at the tomb just as the sun was rising.  They were at first surprised, and then rather dismayed to find that the tomb was already open.  What’s going on here?  Hurrying closer, they could look into the shadowy vault to see that the body was gone. What?  When did this happen?  Who would do such a thing?  Why? Where did the body go?  These and many other questions raced through their minds, while over them all swept waves of intense emotional pain. It was like salt on the raw sores of their souls.  His arrest, beatings, and crucifixion had been pure agony to watch. Worst of all was the feeling of utter helplessness – to see such horrors happening to someone they loved and being so completely unable to do anything about it.  And now, as they were just beginning to accept it and try to make sense of what had happened, this last offense he had to suffer was too much for them to bear.

                Numb with shock and alarm, they ran back into the city to tell the others.  It was Mary Magdalene who found Peter and John in the safe house where they were laying low for fear of Jesus’ enemies. Between her gasping sobs, they were able to make out, “Lord taken, tomb open, body missing, don’t know where”. They ran to see for themselves, the younger John sprinting ahead while Peter slogged along behind followed by Mary who was tired from already having run this course from the other direction. John found it just as Mary described. When Peter arrived, he pushed past him and went into the tomb for a closer look.  John followed.  And what they found was that whoever had taken the body had also taken the time to unwrap it.  Yards of linen strips lay in a pile along with the fifty or so pounds of aromatic embalming spices they had held pressed against the body of Jesus.  And over on the side, carefully folded, was the cloth that had been used to wrap their Lord’s bloody head.  That’s what they discovered; and as our text says, when they saw it, they believed.

            But what did they believe?  We’re specifically told that they did yet understand that according to the Scriptures Jesus had to rise from the dead.  Jesus had told them this several times; but they never did catch on and grasp what he was telling them.  And I suspect that even if they had understood it, at this point, they still would not have believed it.  So, what did they believe?  That a crime had been committed.  A tomb had been violated and body stolen.  The believed that they were at a crime scene – but the clues they were looking at didn’t make a lot of sense.

            Who would want to take the body?  Jesus’ enemies, perhaps, to defile it – that would be the most logical guess; or maybe Joseph of Arimathea wanted his tomb back and moved the body to another place.  But who of them would have violated the Sabbath to do it?  No Jew would do that.  Well, the Romans, then … but what would they want the body for?  And why, when they took it, would they bother to unwrap it?  Though a bit heavier, it surely would have been easier to carry and much less messy if it remained all tightly bound up.  And having unwrapped it, what kind of body-snatcher takes the time to fold the laundry before he departs?  Peter and John were stumped.  The body of evidence before them just didn’t add up.

            And from our perspective, we can see that it was because they were investigating the wrong crime.  They believed that they were at the scene of a ghoulish grave robbery, so the clues didn’t make sense.  What they should have been doing was investigating a murder – that was the much bigger crime that they seem to have forgotten about. Sure, Jesus’ body was missing; but it was small potatoes compared to the fact that the Lord of glory had been murdered two days before.

            These days on television there are a lot of popular programs that reveal the secrets of forensic science:  the remarkable ways that evidence gathered at crime scenes can expose criminals and lead to their convictions.  I’m sure most of you are familiar with them.  Some of these programs (the ones I sometimes watch) are like serial documentaries that review the facts of actual cases.  I’m talking about shows like, FBI Files, Cold Case Files, and American Justice to name a few.  The popularity of these fact-based programs has spawned another whole series of fictional dramas about crime scene investigation.  The draw is pretty much the same:  it’s fascinating how the experts go in and gather evidence:  studying autopsies, clothing and carpet fibers, patterns of blood splatter, ballistics, latent fingerprints, DNA … all kinds of neat high tech stuff, and how they then use it to construct a whole body of evidence that unravels the mystery and solves the crime.

            Anyway, you learn a few things watching shows like that. One thing is that it’s important not to jump to premature conclusions.  If you think you know what happened and who was responsible, it tends to color the way you look at the evidence.  It may even cause you to neglect certain clues or to fail to gather key pieces of data because you assume that you won’t need them.  This leads the investigators to waste time pursuing false leads and red herrings.  And in a sense, that’s what the disciples were doing by assuming they were at the site of a grave robbery.  Again, what they should have been thinking about was murder. They should have been asking who killed the Lord Jesus and why.  If they’d thought about it, they’d realize that they had all the evidence they needed. And if they found the answer to that mystery, everything else would have fallen into place.

            Well, who did kill Jesus?  That turns out to be a more complicated question that it appears at first.  As a matter of fact, it was subject of the whole sermon I preached a year ago on Good Friday.  Let me give you the short version:

We know that it was the Romans who actually nailed Jesus to the cross and executed him.  So, the Romans killed him; but then you have to ask, if an innocent man is unjustly condemned to die, can you blame the hangman who carries out the sentence?  The answer is of course not:  he’s only doing his job.  It’s not his fault if he gets bad orders.  Well then, who set Jesus up to be condemned?  Who falsely accused him and handed him over?  Who pressured the court to have him condemned?  Well, now we’d have to say it was the Jewish religious leaders and all their flunkies.  They were the conspirators who used and manipulated the system to kill Jesus.  Or did they?  Jesus himself told his disciples that he was going to Jerusalem to die.  He told them that no one had the power to take his life from him, but that he was going to lay it down on his own accord.  So, in a sense, it could be said that Jesus killed himself.  He could have stayed away from Jerusalem; or even having gone, at any point in the proceedings, he could have stopped it. That he didn’t proves that he volunteered for death.  In certain ways he even instigated it.

Why would he do that?  It’s important that we know because solving a crime always involves finding the motive. It’s assumed that people do things – especially serious things – for reasons.  And when solving a murder, you have to consider who stands to benefit by the victim’s death.  They’re always your prime suspects.   So why would Jesus hand himself over to death and who stood to gain by it? Answer those questions, and you will have found the true perpetrator of the crime.

This is the part when the super sleuth tells everyone that the real killer is here in the room. Yes, you guessed it:  it’s you.  Jesus went to the cross to offer himself as the sacrifice of atonement for your sins. He laid down his life for you. And because your sins were imputed to Jesus, and he suffered and died for them, that makes you responsible for his death.  You killed the Lord of glory.  You are personally guilty of his death; and so is every other person who has ever lived whose sins were carried on the cross by Jesus.  And that includes Peter and John sitting in the empty tomb on Easter morning.  It’s too bad that they didn’t yet know it, because if they had, they wouldn’t have been so upset that the Lord’s body was missing.

Why’s that? Well, again, from watching all those crime solving shows, you learn that one thing that’s absolutely necessary to prove that someone is guilty of murder is to produce the victim’s body.  It’s almost impossible to convict anyone of murder without one.  As far as most criminal murder cases are concerned, if there’s no body, there’s no crime – no matter how large a body of other evidence you may have stacked up against your suspect.  Why? Well, it could be that the so-called victim isn’t a victim at all.  The fact is that sometimes people get tired of their lives and walk away from them and start over again someplace else, or maybe they’re afraid and they go into hiding, or they have some kind of mental illness and turn themselves in to a hospital with a fake name, or they have an accident in which their body is lost, or they commit suicide, or who knows what might happen?  The bottom line is that until they find a body, it’s extremely difficult to prove a case of murder against any suspect.

And that, my friends, is the whole point of the empty tomb.  You know that you are guilty of the Lord’s death.  You know that your sins killed him. But without his dead body silently speaking against you before the court of divine justice, you cannot be convicted. But take it a step further now. What if you were standing trial for murder with whole mountains of evidence testifying to your guilt; but then, just as it looked as if you were going to be sent away forever, suddenly the victim of your alleged crime walked into the courtroom?  That living body of evidence would set aside everything else that appeared to speak against you.  It would be proof to the court that your alleged crimes never happened.

This is the significance of the resurrection of Jesus.  He’s not just missing; he’s alive.  What it means is that even though you killed the Lord Jesus by your sins, as far as God is concerned, your sins never happened.  When God looks at the record of all your misdeeds, that record is as empty as the tomb in which Jesus lay.

But the whole situation is even better than that:  as you stand in God’s court accused, not only is the tomb empty, and the victim you killed alive, but the alleged victim, the Lord Jesus, is your lead counsel and defender. He speaks to his Father on your behalf. He talks about the wonderful things he does in your life and gives all the credit to you.  You couldn’t ask for a better character witness than that. But the point is that you’ve got the best attorney of all time – probably the only honest attorney in history – and what’s more, he does his work for you pro bono.  You see, the resurrection is not the only miracle we celebrate today.

And finally this:  not only does the risen Lord Jesus speak to the court in your behalf; he speaks to you personally.  Through his Word of absolution he comforts and assures you that your sins have all been forgiven and forgotten for his sake, and that there is nothing you ever need fear in this life or the next.  And to prove it to you yet more thoroughly, he presents you with his own living body of evidence in the Sacrament of the Altar. There he strengthens your trust in him by literally feeding your faith with his own body given in death and raised to life for you.

This is why we celebrate today, and why we join saints above and throughout the world in proclaiming: Christ is risen!  [He is risen indeed.  Alleluia!]  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!