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Home , Depiction of Jesus

Sermon: Luke 24:36-49 (See also Acts 3:11-21; 1 John 3:1-7) Today's reading is a call to bear witness to . It's Luke's : not as overt as Jesus' Great Commission at the end of Matthew, but still undeniably a call to proclaim the to all nations. "Thus it is written, that the should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem." The duty to proclaim to all nations through the apostles' testimony falls on every Christian. But you know, sometimes that duty is hard to carry out. There are whole generations of people in this country now who can't take spiritual claims seriously because they don't have hard physical evidence. How do you bear witness to the truth of Jesus to someone who doesn't even believe in the ? Not to mention that a lot of people just don't want you to preach at them. If you wanna believe in your religion or whatever, fine. Just keep it to yourself. Religion and politics are the two big subjects to avoid in polite conversation, right? Besides, most of the people you know are probably stable and happy and doing just fine without ever hearing you awkwardly talk about Jesus. They probably already know what you have to say, anyway, so you might as well just save everyone a headache and keep your Gospel to yourself. Unfortunately, that's not an option. It's the job of every Christian to proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins in Jesus' name to the world. And that doesn't mean just living a good life and hoping people notice—it means being intentional about getting the Good News into as many ears as humanly possible, period. But it doesn't have to be as difficult as we make it out to be. In today's reading alone, Jesus gives us some very good reasons, apart from his own commissioning, that we shouldn't shy away from sharing his story with those whom God has placed in our lives. Jesus tells his disciples that the Law of and the Prophets and the are fulfilled in him. That's the entire : The Law of Moses is the Torah, or the first 5 books of ; the Prophets include the historical books as well as those named after prophets like and Jeremiah; and the Psalms is meant to include all the wisdom literature, including Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and others. So what he's saying is, the whole Old Testament is about Jesus! It's kind of hard to believe, because Jesus obviously hadn't been born before it was written. But The Old Testament is filled with prophecies that have come true in Jesus—some estimates say as many as 354 distinct prophecies are fulfilled in him! Even if you factor out "supernatural" prophecies that would be difficult to verify, such as the virgin birth or the resurrection, Jesus still fulfills scores of prophecies that would have been easy for his contemporaries and critics to verify.

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Jesus' lineage, for one, needed to be precise; most people were ruled out for the role of the promised Messiah before they were even born. The Messiah was prophesied to come from the line of Shem, Noah's son; that alone disqualifies, what, two thirds of the human population? Then also Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, and King and his son Solomon. Every time the Messiah was promised to come from a certain family line, the number of possible candidates was slashed. The Gospel writers knew how important this was, too; that's why both Matthew and Luke contain genealogies of Jesus that fit with the prophecies. Those genealogies would have been independently verifiable by any interested parties back then; the Jews kept careful logs of family histories going all the way back to Abraham. But you've also got prophecies like Zechariah 11, which just contains a ton of stuff about Jesus. In that story, Zechariah becomes a shepherd at God's command. As a shepherd, Zechariah is foreshadowing Jesus as shepherd. He becomes a shepherd, but his sheep despise and reject him. He was paid 30 pieces of silver for his work—the same price for which Jesus was betrayed by Judas—and his wording even suggests that they had bought him with that money, the way the chief priests "bought" Jesus from Judas. He then threw the 30 pieces of silver into the temple, just as Judas did. Really, the book of Zechariah contains a ton of prophecies about Jesus. So does Isaiah. Then there are other prophecies in the Psalms, some of which weren't even understood to be prophecies until after they were fulfilled in Christ! Psalm 22, for instance, is a strikingly accurate depiction of Jesus on the cross. Psalm 55 describes Jesus being betrayed by a friend, and Psalm 69 foretells that his enemies would give him sour wine when he was thirsty. Another form of Old Testament prophecy about Christ is called typology. This is a case where there isn't a single prophecy with a single fulfillment, but rather an institution or other event in the Old Testament that just seems strange or out of place until viewed in light of Christ. One example of that is the priest Melchizedek, who comes from the town that would become Jerusalem to meet Abraham after he was victorious in a battle. He only appears in that brief episode, but he brings to Abraham a feast of bread and wine. Sound familiar? Then you have the Passover celebration, which is just chock full of references to Jesus. In the Passover, a lamb is slain and its blood painted on household doorposts to ward off the angel of death, just as the blood of Christ saves us from death. Not a bone of the lamb would be broken, just as Jesus' bones would never be broken. There's the story of the bronze serpent in the wilderness: God sent deadly snakes among his people as punishment for their grumbling. Eventually God told Moses to erect a bronze snake on a pole, and anyone who was bit could look at that bronze snake and live. Similarly, Jesus was lifted up on a pole—the cross—and anyone who now looks to him for salvation from death will find it. The message of the Old Testament has always been that God would overcome sin and undo death. God's Word has always served as a beacon of hope for humanity, and that hope has always been centered in the person and work of Jesus Christ, whether that work was hidden away, like in those typology examples, or whether it was explicit, like the suffering servant songs in Isaiah. 2

And the central element of the person and work of Jesus Christ is his bodily resurrection from death. Jesus gave many great lessons in morality; Jesus performed many signs and wonders that revealed the kingdom of God to our world; but none of that can hold a candle to the hope that we have in his resurrection. Our text really drives home that Jesus is risen in his body, not just in spirit. Because at first the disciples are afraid that he is just a spirit. Jesus has to show them his hands and his feet. He even invites his disciples to touch and feel his own flesh and bones. Finally, the big kicker, Jesus asks for something to eat, and he makes a point to eat it in front of them. So what's the big deal? Why does Luke put so much emphasis on Jesus' bodily resurrection in his account? It's because Jesus' resurrection is inextricably tied to your own. Your hope of overcoming death is anchored in Jesus' overcoming of his own death. You look to Jesus and you see a picture of your own resurrection. So what's your resurrection going to look like? Are you just going to be this kind of wispy, immaterial spirit floating around in the clouds? Are you going to subsumed into "the cosmic energy" and lose your identity and individuality? No! You're going to have a body, just like the one you have, only better in every way. You're going to have a body that never gets sick or injured, never grows old, never dies. That's the body that Jesus has, that he shows his disciples here. Your body is a sacred thing. God's Word calls your body a temple of the . It's the place where God himself dwells. God gave you your body, and just because sin has corrupted it doesn't mean God is done dealing with bodies. God will give you a new body, a restored body, in your resurrection, just as he did with Jesus. And that's a good thing! I don't know if I'd want to spend eternity as some kind of ghost or energy or something. I want to be able to feel God's creation, to see it and hear it and smell it and taste it. God made Adam and Eve that way before the fall into sin, and he promises in Christ to remake us that way long after death has destroyed the bodies we have now. So now Jesus stands victorious over death with two very powerful assets: credibility and hope. Jesus is credible in that he fulfilled so many very specific Old Testament prophecies about himself. We have possession of Old Testament manuscripts like the Dead Sea Scrolls that predate Jesus' time on earth, so we know the prophecies weren't somehow made up after the fact. Likewise, we have accounts from scribes of Jesus' time who were hostile to , like the Jewish historian Josephus, and these accounts acknowledge the truth of the disciples' testimony. These two facts alone should force any honest skeptic to pause and consider Jesus more closely.

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So Jesus is credible, but what he offers is so much more incredible: he offers hope. Death is the fate of everyone. And from our perspective death looks like the end. You never observe a person doing anything after death; you can't even detect the soul departing the body. It's just…the end. An empty shell of a body is left to decompose. It leaves you wondering: what's gonna happen to me? What happened to my loved ones who died? And the hope that Christ gives us is this: death isn't the end! You know what's gonna happen to you? You will be raised up to new life, just as Jesus was raised! That should have a profound effect on you! Jesus is alive! He has proven that he is who he claims to be: the Almighty Son of God, Lord of life and of death. Immortality is the innate desire of every person, and in Christ it can actually be achieved. Better still, that immortality will be in a world without pain or sickness or sorrow or evil of any sort. Just think about what that means, not only to you, but what it would mean to a person who has spent his entire life in fear of his inevitable death. What hope would fill such a person's heart, if he only knew about the salvation from death that Jesus has won for him! If he only knew…well, Jesus has a plan for making sure he knows: you! "You are witnesses of these things," Jesus said to his disciples. And their witness has been passed down in writing through the words of the Gospel accounts. Jesus didn't just die for you—he died for everyone! Anyone you know who doesn't have that resurrection hope needs to hear it, even if they already claim to be "Christian." A coworker who drinks and parties and wallows in hedonism needs to know that there's more to life than just living for vain pleasure. A friend who rarely attends needs to know that there are eternal gifts to be unlocked there. A neighbor who denounces Christ as a fairy tale needs to be shown just how credible Jesus' claims are. A person grieving the loss of a loved one needs to know that there is hope in the resurrection. The devil attacks us ceaselessly—, non-Christians, all of us. He loves to make us suffer; he loves to draw our focus away from the profound . We are in the world to fight him on that front, to draw people back to the saving grace of Jesus. Be the witness that Christ has called you to be. You may not have seen Jesus' earthly ministry firsthand, but you have the account of those who have. In sharing that account, speaking the truth in love, you yourself become a beacon of Christ's light in this sin-darkened world. In Jesus' name, amen.

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