This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 4/20/25, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Luke 24. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)
Jesus Christ is alive.
Jesus is not in the past tense, he’s not even in the future tense: he’s living in the present tense. He’s here. He is risen.
Jesus is not in the ground. He’s not hidden away in some celestial vault. He walks among us. He breathes in us. He acts through us. He has made us his body. Jesus is alive.
They thought they could kill him. The religious leaders thought they’d done away with Jesus. They thought that he was just another dangerous, disruptive troublemaker. The Romans thought that they’d disposed of Jesus, never to be seen or heard from again. They could be confident in this, because they dealt with him just like they’d dealt with countless so-called messiahs before: They nailed him to a tree and left him hanging there, bleeding out, until he stopped breathing. He would never live in Israel again. He was never coming back.
They laid him in a tomb of stone. They put a rock over the entrance to make sure that he was dead, dead, dead. No corpse was going to roll away that stone. They were sure that Jesus was gone, and he was going to stay gone.
The disciples thought so, too. The men disciples were sure that Jesus was dead, and they were hiding in terror that they might be next. The women disciples – Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women who had been traveling with Jesus and supporting him in his ministry – had watched Jesus die. On Friday afternoon, they had prepared spices and ointments to anoint Jesus’ body, which they were sure would soon begin to stink. But because it was the Sabbath from Friday at sunset until Saturday at sunset, they had to wait until Sunday morning to go to the tomb to give Jesus a decent burial.
But when they arrived at the tomb, the body was gone. What’s more, there were mysterious men there, in dazzling clothes, who announced that Jesus was gone – risen from the dead! – just as Jesus had predicted. They hadn’t been able to understand it when Jesus said it, and they were still having a tough time believing it now. But Jesus wasn’t dead; he was alive.
The men disciples couldn’t believe it when they heard the news. All of them thought the women were hysterical, clearly out of their minds. But Peter had a doubt, so he went to check at the tomb. And sure enough, it was as the women said: The body was gone!
On that same Sunday morning, Jesus appeared to two disciples on their way to the neighboring town of Emmaus. He walked alongside them, and they didn’t recognize him. But he taught them along the way, helping them to understand how the scriptures predicted everything that would happen to Jesus, including that after his suffering and death he would enter into glory.
Still, the disciples didn’t realize who was speaking to them. It was only that evening, when they invited Jesus to stay with them overnight, that Jesus broke bread for them and they recognized their resurrected teacher. But as soon as they understood who he was, he vanished.
The disciples rushed back to Jerusalem to tell the others. The Eleven had all gotten word from Peter at that point, and unlike in the case of the women’s testimony, the men believed Peter. They were saying, “The Lord is risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then the two disciples told about how Jesus had appeared to them, too. They described how their hearts had burned within them when Jesus opened the scriptures to them, and how they had recognized him in the breaking of bread.
Then, as they were still speaking, Jesus among the disciples who were gathered there. He was suddenly there, in the flesh, alive and well. Jesus asked for a piece of fish and ate it, so that they could be sure he was a real, flesh-and-blood human being, not a ghost.
Like on the road to Emmaus, Jesus once again opened the disciples’ minds to understand the scriptures, and how all prophecy points to him. He told the disciples, “you are witnesses,” and promised that soon they would be “clothed with power from on high.” The gift of the Holy Spirit was coming. And it says at the beginning of the book of Acts, which is just a continuation of the gospel of Luke, that Jesus continued to appear among them in Jerusalem and teach them for an extended period. Jesus was present in their midst.
Jesus is alive.
I understand that this sounds completely irrational. It sounded impossible for the first disciples, and it seems just as impossible for us today. Who can make sense of it? Who has ever seen a person be killed and then later – three days later – come back to life? It’s unheard of! It’s inexplicable. It can’t be imagined by any scientific understanding we have.
But it happened. The first disciples of Jesus were witnesses to it, and the early church recorded these events in scripture. That doesn’t prove anything of course. They could have all been lying. But that’s what they said. It’s what the whole church said from the beginning and continues to claim today: Jesus Christ is alive and well and at work among us.
Each of us has to decide for ourselves what we believe, but there’s no denying that the literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus is essential to the message of the early Christian community. It is at the heart of the faith.
These are some big claims. I get that. I was raised in a Christian household, the son of two Quaker pastors. But the truth is, I haven’t always believed this story. Even when I first became a Christian as an adult, I could only accept the resurrection as a metaphor. I needed to meet Jesus myself, through the power of the Holy Spirit, before I could really start to embrace the idea that all this stuff really actually happened.
But I’m telling you, it did. And I’m telling you, it matters.
The resurrection of Jesus is the single most important event in human history, because it began a chain reaction of life emerging out of death. Wholeness growing out of brokenness. Joy swallowing up despair.
The resurrection is a catalyst, exploding goodness and justice and glory into the midst of the violence and evil of human empire – transforming everything. The death of Jesus on the cross began a chain reaction that refashioned the world on the molecular level. When Jesus emerged from the tomb, the very nature of our cosmos shifted. The kingdom of God surged out of heaven and became real on earth.
It says in scripture that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to sit at God’s right hand in glory. There’s also a church tradition, alluded to in several parts of scripture, including 1 Peter 4:6, that during the period between Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection he descended into the realm of the dead, into the underworld, where he preached the good news.
There’s so much I could say about this, but what seems most important right now is that Jesus’ death and resurrection impacts the entirety of the cosmos, from top to bottom. Jesus’ life fills all things, from the heights of heaven to the depths of the abyss. His triumphant life fills every dimension. Jesus is everything. He is all-in-all. Jesus is life itself, and he is the way to life. And it goes without saying, but I’ll say it again: Jesus is most certainly alive.
I know this is crazy. I know this doesn’t make any sense from any normal perspective, as the culture we live in considers normal. Even in a nominally Christian society like the United States, most people – even many people who call themselves Christians – can’t bring themselves to take this story seriously, as an account of things that actually happened, and whose reality has utterly changed our world.
Maybe that’s you. Maybe you’re sitting here and thinking, “That’s all really nice, Micah. If you can believe that, I’m glad for you. But this is a bit much.”
That’s OK. It really is. If you want to think of the resurrection as a metaphor for now, that’s alright. After all, Jesus’ eleven closest friends – men who would become known as the Twelve Apostles – did not believe that Jesus was alive, even after the very first apostles – the women at the tomb – came and told them the good news. They could not believe without seeing. It’s understandable.
But the friends of Jesus kept seeking. They maintained a sense of curiosity. Peter ran to the tomb and found it empty, and he was amazed at this. The disciples kept seeking, and eventually they did find Jesus. “Seek, and you will find.”
The two disciples on the road to Emmaus practiced hospitality, inviting the stranger walking with them to stay overnight and share a meal. In this moment, Jesus was present with them, and they saw his face. “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.”
The disciples didn’t believe in the resurrection at first either, but they kept seeking. They kept following. They found the road by walking it first, understanding it later.
We live in an exceptionally skeptical age. I don’t expect people to just believe that a man was dead for three days and then was raised from the dead in a transformed physical body. I don’t expect people to believe in impossible things, and I don’t believe that God does either.
This Easter morning, I want to reframe the question of the resurrection. Rather than demanding that you believe in something impossible, what if God is inviting you into a mystery that the early church experienced?
Rather than hearing that we need to check our brains at the door of the meeting house, what if we heard an invitation to open our minds and hearts to something that is just too wild to be true – but just might be anyway?
What if we, like Peter, wrestled with the ambiguity that, though it’s hard to believe, people that we love and trust are witnesses to these things – and they’re telling us that Jesus is alive?
What if we heard an invitation to seek, and a promise that in seeking we will find?
What if in the story of Easter, we chose to stay awake, watching for Jesus’ presence in all things: The breaking of bread. The silence of the rock. The opening of our minds to scripture. The burning in our hearts. In love when we don’t deserve it. In an open path where we couldn’t see any way out.
Jesus is alive. He is risen from the dead. He has conquered the power of sin, death, and the devil. He has invited us into a mystery, into a world where all things are made new. Jesus has invited us into an adventure. He’s on the road, walking alongside us, striking up a conversation.
Come with me. Let’s step out onto the road.