An Idle Tale?

Exactly 50 years ago, a rumor began to fly around the world: “Paul is dead.”  The year was 1969, and many people were convinced that Paul McCartney of the Beatles had died and been replaced by a look-alike.  Music fans played a song from The White Album backwards and heard the message, “Turn me on, dead man.”  They listened to the song “Strawberry Fields Forever” and thought they heard John Lennon say, “I buried Paul.”

On the cover of the Abbey Road album, the four Beatles are crossing the street in what looks like a funeral procession. John Lennon is dressed in white like a heavenly figure. Ringo Starr, in black, is supposed to be the undertaker. George Harrison, in denim, is the gravedigger. And Paul McCartney, barefoot and out of step with the others, is the corpse.

Turns out, of course, that Paul wasn’t dead.  And he’s still alive over 50 years later.

On Friday of Holy Week, all the acquaintances of Jesus, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a safe distance from the cross and watched Jesus die (Luke 23:44-49). A righteous man named Joseph of Arimathea took the body of Jesus off the cross, wrapped it in a linen cloth and laid it in a rock-hewn tomb. The women saw the tomb, and then they prepared spices and ointments to put on the body (23:50-56).

Jesus was dead.  No doubt about it. Jesus had not fainted on the cross. He had not swooned. He was not in a state of suspended animation. He was so dead that the soldiers who were about to break his legs to hasten a death by suffocation, decided not to waste their time and energy on a dead man.

And remember, the people of Jesus’ day lived with death. These were rough times. They knew what “dead” looked like. They weren’t fooled.  His death was not just a rumor. This was not fake news. Jesus was quite emphatically dead, wrapped in a linen cloth and laid in a tomb.

Then they rolled a massive stone over the entrance to the tomb, effectively sealing it. Even if there were a strong, alive man inside, that stone was going nowhere. On Easter morning, at early dawn, the women walked to the tomb with the spices they had prepared. They were expecting death, not life.  But when they arrived to anoint the body, they found the stone rolled away from the tomb. When they ran inside, they were unable to find the body, which left them perplexed (vv. 1-4).

I saw a cartoon of the women after they had visited the tomb on Easter morning. One woman is kneeling and weeping, the other one is looking at her basket and commenting with a scowl on her face, “Well, I certainly hope you kept the receipt for all these burial spices.”

It probably did not occur to them that Jesus was alive. The women were like the people around the world who assumed that Paul was dead when he appeared on the inside album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with a shoulder patch bearing the letters some fans thought spelled O.P.D., which were said to mean “Officially Pronounced Dead.”

Was Jesus O.P.D.? Everyone assumed he was. It seemed like a logical assumption.

But at the empty tomb, two men in dazzling clothes suddenly appeared. The women were terrified and bowed their heads, while the men said, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen” (vv. 4-5).

So the women returned from the tomb and told this to the 11 disciples, as well as to the rest of the followers of Jesus. And it is significant, at this point, that Luke takes the time to identify the women by name, saying that “it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles” (vv. 8-10). This is eyewitness testimony, says Luke, made by women who are well-known and trustworthy in the community of Jesus’ followers. Their words were much more believable than a rumor about the death of Paul McCartney, an event that had no eyewitnesses and no evidence to support it.

So often we look for death instead of life, as was abundantly clear when the “Paul is dead” rumor swept around the world. People are naturally drawn to stories of bloodshed and disaster and death, as is captured in the well-known maxim of news programming, “If it bleeds, it leads.” But one of the signs of resurrection is a focus on life instead of death, which the women show when they take the message of the empty tomb to the disciples.

The resurrection marks the moment in history when life overcame death. That’s the primary reason most of us are here today. Death has been overcome.

Professional golfer Paul Azinger of Bradenton was diagnosed with cancer at age 33. He wrote about that experience: “A genuine feeling of fear came over me – I could die from cancer. But then another reality hit me even harder: I’m going to die eventually anyway, whether from cancer or something else. I am definitely going to die. It’s just a question of when. Everything I had accomplished in golf became meaningless to me. All I wanted to do was live.”

And that’s when he remembered something that his friend Larry Moody told him: “Zinger,” he said, “we are not in the land of the living going to the land of the dying. We are in the land of the dying trying to get to the land of the living.” That’s what Easter is all about.

Listen to the angel’s words again, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!”

The resurrection marks the moment when we have to make a decision. Will we leave here like the women, bursting with joy and telling everyone we know about the eternal life offered through knowing the risen Christ? Or will we leave here like the apostles, who thought the women’s story was an idle tale?

The resurrection is the decisive moment in human history. Jesus, who claimed to be the living embodiment of the one true God, died. After three days, he came back to life. There is no other belief system on earth that teaches this about their founder or prophet or god. The resurrection serves as the foundation of the Christian faith and the Christian church. Without the resurrection, all we have is a nice philosophy for living.

If the resurrection is a lie, then the Christian faith is a lie. If the resurrection is a lie, then death is the end of the story for every one of us. If the resurrection is a lie, then you had no reason to get up and come here this morning. If the resurrection is a lie, then millions of Christian churches across the world should close their doors for good.

But it isn’t a lie. It’s real. And it is the most important truth known to humanity.

Over a century ago, Pastor T. DeWitt Talmage of New York City illustrated our coming resurrection by referring to what was then a new-fangled invention called the phonograph. He spoke of how a person’s voice could be recorded and preserved on a cylinder and then played back again and again even after the person had died. Then he asked this question, “If man can do that, cannot God, without half-trying, return the voice of your departed?” But if God can bring back the voice, then why not the lips and the face and the body and the bones? He concludes with this wonderful sentence: “If man can do the phonograph, God can do the resurrection.”

Yes, God can. And God did raise Christ from the grave. And God will raise those whom we love who are in Christ. Oh yes, the resurrection is real. Alleluia!  Christ is risen!