Jesus Has Risen! Go, Tell!

Preached at Shepley Methodist Church
16th April 2013: Easter Offering Service for Methodist Women in Britain (MWiB)
Mark 16:1-7

I want start now by asking a question: what is mission?

We have all come here today to dedicate the Easter Offering for the work of the World Mission Fund, an organisation that’s part of the Methodist Church supporting mission projects and missionaries across the globe. All the money that you have helped to raise and all the money that we’ll be dedicating together later on in the service is money that will be used to contribute to God’s mission in 65 Partner Churches around the world.

The first Easter Offering dates back to 1883, when a group of women in Manchester collected £32 from ‘Christmas pennies’ at family gatherings at lunch on Christmas Day for the express purpose of supporting Christian missionary work overseas. In 1884, Easter envelopes asking for a penny a head were sent out all over London and raised just over £100 for the work of overseas mission. By 1903, Easter Offerings were a national thing, something done in all chapels across the country.

The tradition, which continues today and which today we are part of, has at its roots a deep-seated commitment to mission. It is, then, worth reminding ourselves what mission itself actually is.

In its simplest form, you could say that mission is about spreading the Good News of Jesus. I think it’s a little bit more than that. I want to suggest that mission is about responding to what God has done and is doing through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. In fact, I want to put it to you that the resurrection of Jesus is not only the message of all mission, but also the motivation and the medium of all mission as well.

That first Easter morning, as the women were making their way to the tomb to anoint Jesus’s body and pay their final respects, the question on their lips was, “Who will roll away the stone for us?” The problem was simple: Jesus had been laid in a tomb cut into the rock and at the entrance to that tomb was a great big round stone, probably some 4 or 5 feet across and a foot thick. Quite simply, the stone they expected to find in front of them was a massive great bit of rock that wasn’t going to budge in a hurry.

The stone that had been rolled in front of the tomb stood there as a great barrier between life and death. On one side was the land of the living; on the other was the nothingness of death and decay. When the women arrived at the tomb that first Easter morning, they found the stone rolled away. The great divide between life and death had been overcome. No more was death the end of the story. No more was death the final word. In Jesus, God had rolled away the stone and declared that life wins. In Jesus, God declared loud and clear that life in all its fullness prevails against all the sin and corruption destroying our world.

The women, when they went to the tomb, thought that Jesus was the one trapped by death. In truth, it was them. They were the ones who couldn’t see beyond death. They were the ones who went out first thing in the morning to buy spices with which to anoint Jesus’s dead body. They were the ones who had made an investment in death having the final say.

In many ways, we are all much like those women. We too find ourselves trapped by the forces of death, trapped in a broken world with broken dreams. The abundant life we were made for is drained out of us by disease, despair, abusive and damaged relationships; we are trapped by the pain of love lost, by the crumbling of hope, by addiction, anxiety and worry. We are stuck behind the stone and cut off from the life of God.

But the Good News is that Jesus has rolled away the stone for us. Death and all its trappings are on their way out; life as we know it has been changed forever. Life conquers death. God’s love overcomes all our best human efforts to cut ourselves off from Him. The resurrection of Jesus tells us that the life we were made for is the life that has come into the world through Him. Because Jesus is raised from the dead, God’s life has its foot in the door of our broken world, and won’t give up until it’s come in and made itself at home.

The young man in white (the angel) the women met at the tomb was the first to spread the Good News, and what was that Good News? “You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; He is not here.”

The resurrection of Jesus is the message of Christian mission.

But, apart from being the message of Christian mission, the resurrection of Jesus is also the motivation for Christian mission. “Jesus has risen,” the young man in white said, “Go, tell!”

The resurrection of Jesus shows beyond contradiction that Jesus really is the Messiah; He really is the world’s one and only true King, come to restore God’s rule. What’s more, because Jesus is alive, because death couldn’t contain Him, it means that the restoration of God’s rule is guaranteed. If death couldn’t hold Him back, what will? The news that Jesus has risen means that God’s new creation has already begun—God’s new world, where God and humans will live side-by-side, where every tear will be wiped away, where death shall be no more and where mourning, crying and pain shall have no place.

The resurrection of Jesus is the motivation, the impetus, the driving force, the energy and the incentive for Christian mission. In raising Jesus from the dead, God has given us a powerful vision of what God is going to do for the whole of creation; He is going to release it from every chain that holds it down and imprisons, and He’s going to free it for the life He made it for. God, in Jesus, is remaking the world and He wants us to get on board with the building work. It isn’t so much that God wants us to build His world for Him, but that because Jesus is alive, He is already doing it and invites us to join Him back where it all started, with a call to come and follow Him.

The logic of Christian mission is breathtakingly easy to understand: God is renewing the Earth and we who have begun to know the risen Lord Jesus have been given the privilege of inviting others to be part of it.

So then, the resurrection of Jesus is the message of mission and the motivation for mission; but it is also the medium of mission.

Let me try and explain what I mean. We are called, like the women on that first Easter morning, to witness to the fact of Jesus being raised from the dead. “Jesus has risen. Go, tell!” the angel said to them. We—you and I—are the vehicle for the message of Christ’s risen life, and it is only insomuch as Jesus’s risen life is visible in us that it is believable to others.

William Barclay, writing on this passage from Mark’s Gospel, says this:
“By far the best proof of the resurrection is the existence of the Christian Church. Nothing else could have changed sad and despairing men and women into people radiant with joy and aflame with courage. The resurrection is the central fact of the whole Christian faith.”

In other words, it the Church, it is Christians, who testify to the risenness of Christ. When we set out “beyond the harbour wall” in faith and courage, not knowing what we’ll find, but simply wanting to show and share the Good News of God’s love in Jesus with others, we testify to the fact that we believe Christ is alive and that because He is alive, love wins.

David Livingstone, the great Scottish missionary of the 1800s, once said, “If we have not enough in our religion … to share it with all the world, it is doomed here at home.”

By raising money to send to the work of mission projects around the world, we are saying that Jesus has risen and that people need to know. Mission, however, goes far beyond a one-off, once a year donation to missionary projects. Mission is the responsibility of the whole Church for the whole of the year for the whole of its existence. It is the job of every Christian—to witness by the way we live and speak that Jesus Christ is alive and that love that lays itself down to death is the only true life we’ll ever know.

Jesus has risen. Go, tell!

In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.