Reverend Jonathan Waits
The Reason Why (John 20:1-18)
April 20, 2025
When you live in a houseful of boys (including the turtle), you build stuff. It’s just what you do. I’ve long since lost count of the number of Lego sets that have been built in my house, but that is far from the only construction medium our boys have used. We went through a season when they were really into Keva blocks. The name sounds fancy, but they’re basically over-sized Jenga blocks that you can use to build all sorts of things. Because of their shape and size, though, while you can build some pretty elaborate creations, most of them wind up sitting on a really tiny foundation point. In fact, for most of the coolest things we built, there was usually a single block or maybe two that was holding up the whole thing. If you were to take out that one point, the whole structure would noisily collapse in a great heap. Well, while Christianity is a bit sturdier of a structure than anything we ever built with Keva blocks, it nonetheless rests on a single foundation point. This morning, I want to talk with you about what that is and why it matters.
This morning we are in the final stop on our series, All Signs Point to Jesus. Over the last eight weeks, we have been working our way through seven different signs the apostle John identifies in his Gospel that serve to help us understand exactly who Jesus is. All of these signs were actually miracles Jesus performed during His ministry. Jesus, of course, performed many more miracles than just these seven things, but John, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, recognized these seven as particularly instructive toward this end.
The actual substance of these miracles have varied pretty widely. We’ve seen Jesus demonstrate power over nature down to the molecular level. We’ve seen Him perform dramatic healings. He reproduced matter in almost unimaginably enormous quantities starting from practically nothing. He even raised a man from the dead. After four days in a tomb. As…well…miraculous as all of these miracles were, none of them were about the miracles themselves. They were all pointers—signs—pointing beyond themselves to a deeper, richer, fuller reality of who Jesus is. They were all about helping us see Jesus for who He really is.
All of these signs have been pointing in the same direction: Jesus is the Messiah. He is the promised redeemer who came to free people from their sin by giving them a new spirit, and by writing the law of God (which is love) on their hearts. He was the one who came to fulfill all the promises God had made to His people; promises that were for them, yes, but more than that were to be given to the world through them for the sake of all the rest of the world. As God had told Jesus’ ancestor, Abraham when calling the great patriarch out on a journey of following Him, “all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” God’s plan was always to use Israel to bless the whole world; to use one nation to reveal Himself and the relationship He desired to have with us to every nation, people, tribe, and tongue.
But for all we have seen that has powerfully pointed in that direction, one thing yet remained: incontrovertible proof. There was one more thing needed before Jesus was really to be trusted as more than a particularly clever charlatan. He had made some really specific claims about Himself. Until those were fulfilled, He wasn’t to be trusted. Unfortunately for the disciples, something got in the way of Jesus’ really proving once and for all that He was the guy they all believed Him to be. That thing was this: He died.
On Friday before the Passover Sabbath, Jesus died. He was betrayed by one of His closest followers. Arrested by the temple guards who had been dispatched by the Chief Priests. Tried in an unjust, illegal trial that was a gross violation of the very law those men were sworn to protect and defend, and for whose protection they were in the process of engineering Jesus’ death. He was flogged at the direction of Pilate. And He was finally condemned to be crucified, one of the grisliest forms of execution humans have ever invented. And the Romans were really, really good at it. In other words, by Friday afternoon, Jesus was dead as a doornail. Any attempt to suggest something other than that happened is the result of not knowing what you’re talking about. And what do you do with someone who has died? You bury them. So, in a rushed process owing to the fact that the Sabbath began at sundown on Friday, at which point all such efforts had to stop, Jesus was hastily buried in a borrowed tomb. Without doing any of the normal embalming that was customary in first century Jewish burial ceremonies, Jesus’ lifeless body was wrapped in linen strips, laid on a shelf in the tomb, and a stone was rolled over the entrance to seal it both against graverobbers and also any odors the decomposing body would create.
Then came Saturday. We don’t know what happened on Saturday. It was the Sabbath, so probably not very much. The disciples were no doubt exceedingly concerned about what might happen to them if the Jewish or Roman authorities got their hands on them. But getting out of the city was a risky venture, so they likely found somewhere to lay low in the city and kept their heads down, planning together what their next move would be. There’s something else. All of these guys had run out on Jesus at His moment of greatest need. That kind of a betrayal in first century Jewish culture, especially by disciples of their rabbi, was unthinkable and unforgivable. To a man they would have figured that their association with Jesus was over, and not just because He was dead and sealed in a tomb. The thought that they were somehow plotting together how they could continue the movement without Jesus doesn’t make the first bit of sense.
The only people who were planning anything substantial at this point were the women who had followed Jesus. They knew the burial process had not been completed, their profile wasn’t as high as that of the male disciples, and so they planned to go to the tomb early on Sunday morning, after the Sabbath, to finish the job. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy, find your way with me to John 20. This is where our story picks up.
“On the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark.” We know from the other Gospel authors that there were some other women with her including Jesus’ own mother, but John keeps his focus on just Mary. They went to the tomb without knowing how they were going to move the giant stone that was sealing its entrance. They didn’t really seem to have a plan, but were improvising as they went. Fortunately, they didn’t have to improvise much. “She saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.”
We know from Matthew that an angel did it while at the same time scaring the pants off of a group of Roman special forces soldiers that had been stationed there by Pilate at the request of the Chief Priests to guard against the disciples’ messing with the body. After encountering the same couple of angels who told them what had happened, but before they even began making sense out of any of it, Mary and the women with her ran straight back to find Peter and John and the other disciples. “So she went running to Simon Peter and to the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They’ve taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they’ve put him!’”
Now, before we go on, why would Mary say this to Peter and John? Because Jesus’ body wasn’t in the tomb, she didn’t have any idea where it had been taken, and the idea that He had risen from the grave didn’t even process as a thought in her mind. The same went for Peter and John. “At that, Peter and the other disciple went out, heading for the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and got to the tomb first [which, considering that John was writing 30 years after Peter had died, this had to be a final joke he played on his friend]. Stooping down, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. Then, following him, Simon Peter also came. He entered the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there. The wrapping that had been on his head was not lying with the linen cloths but was folded up in a separate place by itself. The other disciple, who had reached the tomb first [there is it again], then also went in, saw, and believed.” He believed that Jesusn’ body wasn’t there, not that Jesus had risen from the dead. “For they did not yet understand the Scripture that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to the place where they were staying.”
Presumably, the other women returned with Peter and John to try to collectively wrap their minds around what was going on. Mary Magdalene, though, remained behind, grappling with her grief over the whole thing. Looking back in the tomb, she encountered the angels yet again. “But Mary stood outside the tomb, crying. As she was crying, she stooped to look into the tomb. She saw two angels in white sitting where Jesus’s body had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you crying?’”
Pretty much every single encounter with an angel reported in the Scriptures begins with fear on the part of the subject of the encounter. But not this one. Why? Well, how about this: Mary was still so discombobulated by this whole experience that she still wasn’t really processing what was going on around her. This explains why when the angels asked her why she was crying, she gave them the same complaint she had given Peter and John. “‘Because they’ve taken away my Lord,’ she told them, ‘and I don’t know where they’ve put him.’” Once again, notice the passive voice. She didn’t believe Jesus had done something. That would be silly. He was dead. She believed something had happened to Jesus’ body. At least she did for just another second. Then she didn’t. Then everything changed.
“Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know it was Jesus.” How could she not recognize this man she had spent three years following? Because as far as she knew He was dead, and you don’t expect to see someone dead standing in front of you alive. So, when you do, you don’t recognize them. “‘Woman,’ Jesus said to her, ‘why are you crying? Who is it that you’re seeking?’” At this point you figure she would be pretty tired of explaining to everyone why she was so upset. She was unfailingly polite. But she still didn’t recognize Jesus.
“Supposing he was the gardener, she replied, ‘Sir, if you’ve carried him away, tell me where you’ve put him, and I will take him away.’” By the way, this whole exchange just illustrates why the resurrection story wasn’t something Jesus’ followers made up. They didn’t have any kind of a category for this kind of thing happening. They couldn’t have made it up because they couldn’t have imagined it. Even when Jesus was literally standing in front of them, they still couldn’t conceive of it. And let’s further dispense with the silly notion that they borrowed this idea from any pagan myths. What a silly notion! They wouldn’t have borrowed from pagan myths because they were faithful Jews who would have been utterly repulsed by such myths if they even knew about them in the first place. Also, by the time the church was cosmopolitan enough to have encountered and possibly been impacted by those, most of the New Testament had already been written, its formational doctrines—most notably the resurrection of Jesus from the dead—already long since settled.
At this point, though, Mary was utterly broken. She was confused. She was scared. She didn’t understand what was happening, or who would be playing this cruel joke on Jesus’ followers. Rome was cruel, yes, but they didn’t stoop to this level of spitefulness because they didn’t care enough about the Jews to invest this amount of effort into it. But then she heard something that made her heart skip a beat. It was a sound she hadn’t ever expected to hear again. She had heard it before, and it had changed her life then. Hearing it now did it again, but in a whole new way.
Look at v. 16: “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’” When you hear Jesus call your name, nothing is the same after that. You can ignore or reject His call, but you’ll live from then on knowing that you rejected it. You’ll try to justify it in all sorts of ways, and some of those ways will seem perfectly understandable given what you have experienced, but that’s ultimately on you. The other option is to do what Mary did and turn to Him to receive Him. And like Mary experienced, if you do that, your life will never be the same again. “Turning around, she said to him in Aramaic, ‘Rabboni!’—which means ‘Teacher.’”
Jesus couldn’t linger with her for long because He had much to do, but He sent her on to begin spreading the news that would utterly transform the world, and which continues to transform lives today, as the first eyewitness of the resurrected Jesus. And perhaps you’ve heard this, but it bears repeating that given the culture of the day, for all four Gospels to insist on the fact that women were the first ones to learn and report the news of the resurrection strengthens the truthfulness of the claim. The testimony of women was not to be trusted. Luke himself notes the disciples thought their report was nothing more than hysterical nonsense. The only reason for them to report that the events here unfolded like this was because they actually unfolded like this.
This, then, is the point on which the whole of Chrisitanity hangs. There was not a thing called Christianity that existed in the world before this Sunday morning. There was no movement of Jesus before this point. No one thought He was the Messiah. Certainly no one imagined Him to be Lord the way we speak of Him today. There had been a glimmer of that belief in the hearts of His followers a few days earlier, but the crucifixion killed it. What flared into existence when His empty tomb was discovered and He started appearing to His followers alive and well was something new. Unless they had experienced the risen Christ, they would not have started telling anyone they had experienced the risen Christ. This was the turning point for all of human history. Nothing has even been the same since.
The resurrection is why we believe. It is why Jesus’ followers started telling everyone that He rose from the dead. It’s why they started going throughout the world, planting churches that were all rooted on the idea that this Jewish rabbi had defeated death, and that if you place your trust in Him, you get to share in His victory. It is why a movement of people rose up who behaved in ways that were radically different from the culture around them. The culture didn’t understand the change. Sometimes it hated on these weirdos who loved their neighbors and served the poor and fed the hungry and visited the prisoners and cared for widows and orphans and clothed the naked and were generally kind and gracious and generous and hospitable in ways that went far beyond any kind of cultural expectations.
Eventually, they started migrating to this movement because it was just so attractive. People who didn’t know the first thing about Jesus, first wanted to be near these folks who proclaimed Him as risen just to gain the benefits of being close to people like this. Then they found themselves wanting to take part in the doing good themselves. Then they decided that following Jesus must make a lot of sense if it so transformed the lives of these “Christians,” including some people they knew before they had started following Jesus who were not at all like they were now. And at last they became convinced that the only way to explain this change was that a power was at work in them beyond anything they had ever known or experienced before…a power they wanted to experience in their own lives. And gradually, bit-by-bit, the culture changed. Then the world changed. Human history itself was set on an entirely new course.
All of this transformation, though, started from a single place: an empty tomb on a Sunday morning that no one expected to be empty. It all started because Jesus rose from the grave. The resurrection is why we believe. If you are following Jesus, it is because of the resurrection. Yes, there is likely some other more proximate cause—often a relational one—but your belief ultimately goes back to the resurrection. The resurrection is why we believe.
If you aren’t a follower of Jesus, the resurrection is the single best reason why you should believe. Many skeptics have tried to refute the idea, but none have been successful. It has the inconvenient (to them) property of being an historical fact. It’s hard to refute historical facts. Many former skeptics have set out to prove it never happened, but when they have done an honest examination of the relevant facts came away convinced it is true beyond any reasonable doubt. The whole of Christianity may hang on this one peg, but it has proven remarkably stubborn at every attempt to dislodge it. Instead, it just keeps drawing more and more and more people to embrace the truth: Jesus is Lord. The resurrection is why we believe.
Okay, but what does this belief actually do for us? I mean, so Jesus came back from the dead. Who cares? You should. For starters and again, the resurrection is why we believe. Paul put this rather emphatically in his first letter to the Corinthian believers: “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 not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain, and so is your faith. Moreover, we are found to be false witnesses about God, because we have testified wrongly about God that he raised up Christ—whom he did not raise up, if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Those, then, who have fallen asleep in Christ have also perished. If we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone.”
As we have already said and Paul makes abundantly clear here, the whole of the Christian faith hangs on the peg of the resurrection. Fortunately, as Paul spells out in the verses preceding these, the resurrection is an historical event validated by the testimony of not just one or two, but hundreds by direct experience. More than that, untold millions have experienced the resurrected Christ since in more ways than we could even begin to account over the ensuing two millennia of church history. The resurrection is why we believe. You can believe in Jesus because He rose from the dead.
There’s more. Because Jesus rose from the dead, death has no more power over you. Death, that great enemy that has taunted and tormented humankind since time immemorial, has lost all of its power. Think of just how many decisions you have made because of what is ultimately a fear of death. Your life has been dominated by death in more ways than you could count if you tried. But in Christ, because He rose from the dead, all of that power is broken. Paul closes his reflection on the import of the resurrection by quoting from the prophet Hosea a promise of God to His people: “I will ransom them from the power of Sheol. I will redeem them from death. Death, where are your barbs? Sheol, where is your sting?” On Paul’s pen, the promise has been turned into a taunt in the face of a defeated foe. “When this corruptible body is clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal body is clothed with immortality, then the saying that is written will take place: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, death, is your victory? Where, death, is your sting?’”
When you are in Christ, death has no power over you anymore. You need not fear it. You need not make decisions in light of it. You can live driven by life, not death. You can courageously follow Jesus, the one who rose, loving others just as He did. When the world around you pushes back against that, you don’t have to worry about that at all. You can just keep loving because life is what lies ahead of you. You can live with kindness and compassion and generosity and graciousness. You can be a difference-maker wherever God has placed you and no matter what shape your immediate circumstances have taken. When the threat of death has lost its power, and life is your guaranteed reward, what can people do to you? All of this because Jesus rose. The resurrection is why we believe. More than that, the resurrection is why we live. It is why we do what we do. It is what sustains us through the hard. It is what deepens our joy in the midst of the good. The resurrection of Jesus is the key to everything. The resurrection is why we believe.
There’s only one thing left: Have you embraced it? If you have been living apart from Christ, living as if Jesus never rose from the grave, you are missing out on the life that is truly life. That doesn’t mean your life has no meaning. You were made in the image of God, and thus your life is flush with meaning. But because of sin, that image is marred. You are missing out on real hope. You are missing out on purpose that goes beyond merely what you can make up for yourself or borrow from someone else. What’s more, in your most honest moments, you know this. If that’s you, I want you to hear loudly and clearly right here and now, that there’s more to life than what you’ve yet experienced.
There is freedom; freedom from sin and its bitter fruits; freedom from despair; freedom for pursuing the good and the true and the beautiful. There is hope; hope for a better tomorrow no matter how grim today may seem. There is joy; joy that brings a delighted contentment in every situation you face. There’s peace; peace that comes from knowing there is one who holds tomorrow in His hand, and that He has good things planned for it. There is love; love for you that is perfectly unconditional, and love through you that has the power to change the lives of the people around you. All of this is available because Jesus didn’t stay dead; because Jesus rose from the grave. The resurrection is why we believe.
If you haven’t embraced this life-changing truth, I would like to invite you to do just that. Now, it won’t make your life easy. It won’t make all your problems go away. Anyone who tells you otherwise is leading you on with lies. What it will do, though, is give you the hopeful confidence that you won’t ever walk through any part of your life alone again. All it takes is a simple decision on your part. You simply acknowledge the historical reality that Jesus really did rise from the dead, and you acknowledge that because of that, He is Lord. If you do that, Paul said, you will be saved. On this Easter Sunday morning as we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, I can think of no more appropriate response than this. It is yours to make. The resurrection is why we believe.