Why Jesus Raises the Dead

Transcript

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[0:00] And now we go to our sermon text is Luke chapter 7, verses 11 through 17. So a few words of introduction before we begin our sermon. Again, we're in a sermon series. This is a five-week series on the miracles of Jesus. The first week was the miracles of nature, followed by the miracles of healing. Last week, Victoria preached on the miracles of Jesus' power over spiritual darkness. Today, we're looking at the miracle of resurrection. And next week, the miracle of the Holy Spirit and the miracle of faith. And so today is the miracle of resurrection. And we'll talk a little bit about all the different resurrections in the Bible. And they are distinct from Jesus' resurrection, which is also a miracle. But it's of a different order. Clearly, it's of a different order.

[0:53] Now, I want you to know, and this is just kind of just a little bit of background, that I ! There are three resurrections performed by Jesus that we have a record of in the New Testament. All right? One is Lazarus, that we know very well. That's from John's Gospel. Another is the daughter of a man named Jairus. And this one is, the word we're going to read about today, is the son of a widow who is from this town of Nain. And we'll talk about that town and where it is. In the rest of the New Testament, Peter and Paul each raise one person from the dead in the book of Acts.

[1:30] Peter raises a woman named Tabitha or Dorcas. Those are both her names. And Paul raises a young man from the dead named Eutychus. And Eutychus was one who was sitting in the window and Paul was talking for too long. And Eutychus fell asleep and fell out the window from the second floor and died because Paul was boring. And he was talking about church governance. And it was just like, ugh. And then Paul felt so bad about being so long-winded and boring that he went and he raised Eutychus from the dead. And so, luckily we're all on one floor here, but if any of you fall out of your pew and knock your head, I don't know what we'll do. Just give you an ice pack because we're not at that level as the Apostle Paul. But who knows? We could pray for a miracle.

[2:18] There are three people in the Old Testament who are raised from the dead. Did you know that? They're all raised in 1 and 2 Kings. One by Elijah, one by Elisha, and one by God himself. And that's when somebody was thrown into, a dead person's body was thrown into the tomb of Elisha and they were raised from just by being thrown in there by God. Which, do you know the Bible is kind of full of interesting stories, alright? Now there, and then we have the resurrection of Jesus and then we have an undefined number of people. And this is very interesting. In Matthew chapter 27, at the moment when Jesus dies on the cross, between then and when he's raised again, an untold number of people who were said to be good believers, good people at heart, came out of their tombs and walked around the town. And this is one of those strange passages in the Bible at the end of Matthew 27 where we see that the resurrection of Jesus is very interesting. And we have a number of people who were raised from the dead at the moment of Jesus' resurrection and they wandered about the town and their loved ones found them. And you know, we don't have a number for those. So it's very interesting. And you would probably say those people were raised by God or raised by Jesus.

[3:40] But they don't have names and we don't have a number for them. But it's very miraculous. But we should say that resurrections then really aren't that common in the Bible. Compared to the number of healings in the Bible. Resurrection is very common. Resurrections are of a much smaller number. But that makes sense because they're of a much higher order. They're a much more unique type of thing. Now we're not going to be spending our time so much on the record of these resurrections but on why Jesus chooses to perform them. That's the interesting thing for us this morning. Why does Jesus raise people from the dead? So we have a few clues from our reading today. I'm going to ask you to listen for a couple of clues as to why Jesus raises people from the dead.

[4:25] Resurrection is the story of the raising of the son of the widow of Nain in Luke chapter 7. I think we're starting at Luke 7 verse 11. Soon afterwards Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went along with him. As he approached the town gate, a dead person was being carried out, the only son of his mother. And she was a widow. And a large crowd from the town was with her. When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her, and he said, Don't cry. Then he went up and touched the coffin, and those carrying it stood still. He said, Young man, I say to you, get up. The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother. He said, I'm going to tell you a story.

[5:43] I'm going to end up with you. I'm going to end up with you. Luke chapter 7, Jesus is still in the region of Galilee, around the Sea of Galilee, right? He's not yet gone to Jerusalem. He's not yet gone up to the cross. His goal now is really to teach and to preach, and he does many miracles in this region. But the movement is growing, the following of Jesus. Many people are following him. But the time's not quite yet right for him to go up to Jerusalem. But it's close. He's sort of right on the cusp. So he's traveling from town to town, and on this day he happens to be going to this town called Nain, which is at the southern end of Galilee, right? It's sort of below the Sea of Galilee.

[6:35] And at the moment, what are the odds? At the moment he enters the town, there's a funeral procession. I don't think anything ever happens to Jesus quite by accident, right? And so there was sort of a divine appointment at this time. As he enters the town, he's coming to the... He's going to the town. A funeral procession is going out of the town because you would bury somebody outside the town. And so Jesus has sort of a knack at showing up at the right time for things, right?

[7:03] Now, often in Luke, we see that Jesus is interruptible, which is a great attribute of who Jesus is. He connects with people in the moment of their need. And he takes time away from whatever he had planned, and he does something that needs to be done for that person in that moment. And so he has... He has this radar that's kind of active for people and what they're going through. So this happens in Jericho when he meets Zacchaeus. He's actually on his way to leave Jericho. He's going to go walk up a hill to Jerusalem. But he sees Zacchaeus, and he stops, and he interrupts his plans. And instead of continuing on his way, he spends the night in Jericho. And he spends... He has a meal with Zacchaeus because he senses that Zacchaeus needs his help to leave the life of greed that he's been living. So Jesus is interruptible. And he senses when people are in need, and he does what's needed in that moment, right? So Jesus does the same thing too. He sees a moment in need. He stops. And as this procession comes up to him, he goes up and he touches what our Bible text says is the coffin of this young man, and he comes to life. Now, just a good place to point out that our translation today has a mistake. And I'll ask...

[8:21] I'll ask you, Andreas, to maybe bring up the first text slide. Because it says Jesus touched the coffin. Where does it say that now? Let's do the second slide. There we go. Verse 14. He went up and touched the coffin. Now, that word is wrong, okay? And this is just good news to tell you. Not good news. It's bad news. But it's just news news. Is that sometimes our Bible translations are wrong. You know, the word underneath this could be translated... It is coffin. But it doesn't even make sense here. Because if somebody's in a coffin, how do they jump up, right? There's a lid on top of them, right? And actually, this isn't how Jewish people carried somebody out to be buried. They wouldn't... They don't use a coffin until after the person has been buried and been in the ground for a long time. And their body has just been reduced to bones. And then they collect the bones and they put those in a coffin called an ossuary. And so he was not in a coffin. And another way to translate this word is beer. Not the beer you're thinking of, some of you. B-I-E-R. Or a stretcher. Sort of like this two planks of wood or one big plank of wood. Or they didn't have plywood, but maybe two planks that are held together. And so the man would have been laying out in the open, but wrapped up perhaps in some burial clothes,

[9:43] like Jesus was when he was carried off to his grave. So coffin is not the right word here. Beer or stretcher. Or something like that is the correct word. Okay. Now what does he do? He stops what he's doing. He touches this. He touches it.

[10:01] And immediately this young man sits up and he starts to talk. And Jesus gives him to his mother. Now, given all the other miracles, I don't think that we're at the point where we would say that raising the dead is impossible for Jesus. I mean, we've talked about all. We've talked about all the amazing power that really is at Jesus's disposal, especially if he can create matter from nothing, right? Or control the weather or heal people. And, you know, you could kind of think as resurrection of people who have just recently died as just being healing at kind of a higher level, right? He also has power over the demonic, which is of a great power. Pastor Victoria gave a really powerful sermon last week about that. And. And her contention, I think, is good is that the power over the demonic has got to be one of the greatest powers that Jesus has. That's an incredible power because the demonic has a huge amount of power itself so that he has control over it. It's huge. So I don't think we're saying to ourselves at this point in our series, how could Jesus have the power to do this? I think we have. We know that Jesus has the power to do this. So what I want us to focus on is to say why?

[11:21] Why does Jesus do this? Okay. Why does Jesus raise the dead just these three times? Now, John's gospel often states that when there's a miracle, it's so that people will come to faith. And so that's definitely one of the reasons why Jesus does miracles, including resurrection, for sure.

[11:45] But miracles flow. And this I want you, if you're taking notes, you're going to write this down. Miracles flow out of who Jesus is and what Jesus is sent into the world to do. So I'm going to say that again because I know that was a lot. Miracles flow out of who Jesus is and what Jesus is sent into the world to do. So then we'll be getting at the why of the miracle. The why of the miracle is so that Jesus can be who he is and so that he can do what he was sent to do. Now, our clue here is in verse 13. We'll ask that one to come back up. Thank you.

[12:22] If you look at verse 13, it says this. When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her. And he said, don't cry. Right? The word here for his heart going out to her is, I can't believe if I can pronounce this. Nobody can. But this is how it's probably pronounced. It's esplankniste.

[12:45] Esplankniste. Don't write it down. The root of it is the splankna. These are the intonations. These are the internal organs. This is where you feel things in Greek. The place where you really feel something. And, you know, like if you're feeling guilty or regret, don't you feel it right here? You really feel it here. So the Greeks, they thought the seat of emotions was in your intestines. But I think they're right. You feel it here. You know what I think it is? Some sort of acid response inside your body. Like, ugh. Jesus felt it in his splankna, right? His guts. His heart. His guts went. Really, you could say his guts went out to her. But we give it the idiom that we have in English, the translation, and it works. His heart went out to her. And this word describes this deep feeling, in this case, of compassion, of concern, of care. It's a rare word. Luke uses it a few times. It's a rare word in the New Testament. The most notable place elsewhere in Luke, where this exact word is used, is the feeling that the Good Samaritan has when he comes across the traveler who has been left for dead. The same deep sense of care and concern. And that feeling leads him to care for this man at his own expense. And we notice in that parable

[14:09] that other people who pass by don't have that feeling for this man. Isn't that interesting? Some people have this feeling. Some people don't. Isn't that interesting? Jesus has this feeling in this moment. Similar. And so he has this feeling for this woman who's lost her son, right?

[14:28] So we're beginning to get at the why. Jesus has deep feelings. This is the incarnation. He feels all the things we feel. He's interruptible. He's in tune with people's feelings and brokenness and hurts. And so he's connected to people in their loss, right? And you could say, this is the same thing about the resurrection of Lazarus, right? When Jesus heard that Lazarus was dead, we receive the shortest verse in the Bible, which many of you know, Jesus wept, right? Jesus is movable. He's moved emotionally by loss. And so Jesus wept when he describes his feelings about Lazarus. Now there's a justice aspect to this miracle as well. I think that Jesus is feeling in his guts.

[15:18] And Victoria mentioned it very well in the children's sermon. The mother that we're told at great lengths here in the sermon, or in the text, that the mother is a widow, means she has no husband. We're also told that this son that she's burying is her only son. Now there we have a few clues that this is a person who's now extremely vulnerable, right? She doesn't have the means to take care of herself. You might say, well, she might have some property. That's true. It's also possible that some of her husband's brothers could come and claim all her property since she has no heirs. Now when they do that, if they do that, they're also supposed to marry her. But it turns out that they could come up with all sorts of reasons why they wouldn't really want to do that. They could take her, maybe take her property, but not marry her. And so she really would be left out. So Jesus is seeing this. You begin to see this. This now is through a lens of justice. Here's a person who's now extremely vulnerable. And so Jesus, by raising her son, is restoring some of her power in her culture, some of her own agency in her culture, so that she's provided for. Her son can work. Her son can take care of her, right? She has a male heir.

[16:39] That means she can keep the property that she's on, you know, all these things. So, um, the, the resurrection in this case gives her a safer life. And it seems that Jesus is concerned about. Now that leads us to another question, which I think is really interesting in this text here is who is the miracle for? Right? Who is this miracle for? You might say, well, it's clearly it's for the son because he's dead. So now he's been brought back to life. But if you think about that a little longer, you might say, well, he's dead. So does he notice anything that's happening? Does he care? That he's being raised to death after he's raised to death? He might care a great deal, but in the moment, you know, are we doing him any favors? Yes, it's for him, but I think it really is for the mother too. She's being resurrected in her own way to her life is being resurrected. Her safety is being resurrected, right? And so we have a similar thing going on with the daughter of Jairus, not that he's at risk, but that there's this deep emotional thing going on with her and with Lazarus. And so, Jesus is raising the dead, not just for the sake of the dead person, but for the emotional wellbeing or for the social wellbeing of the person who receives that,

[17:57] that dead person back from death. So there's, it's interesting what's going on in the resurrection. There's sort of a larger picture than just a dead person becoming alive. Again, families are brought back together and people are made safer. Again, deep emotions are healed in the moment. So we're beginning to see the why, right? It has to do with Jesus, his compassion and his sense of justice. He, his heart goes out to those who are in need, but there's another clue in our reading and it's, it's in re it's in the response to the miracle. So we'll go to the next slide. Thank you, Andres.

[18:37] There it is. Yes. Um, and you look for it in verse 16, we get the crowds reaction. What does the crowd, say when, um, Jesus does all this, they say, God has come to help his people. And I want you to remember that Luke is a great storyteller. So when Luke sets out, he creates a very ordered account of the life of Jesus, but he also leaves some signposts at the beginning that point to things that happened later and at the end. And it's, it's really masterful storytelling. So Anton Chekov, the Soviet, the Soviet, I say the Russian playwright, he said, if there's a, if there's a gun and the first act, it has to go off in the last act, right? You kind of have to pay off these things that happen. Can you imagine a play where there's a gun in the first act and it never goes off? And the whole time the audience is like, what, when's the gun going to go off? You know, if you introduce this thing, you have to pay it off, so to speak. Well, Luke does that. He introduces ideas in the beginning and he pays them off later on. Uh, so even before Chekov, Luke was on it and other people were too, of course, he, Chekov didn't come up with anything terribly original there, but he said it well, right?

[19:51] So, um, what's at the beginning of Luke, what's at the beginning of Luke? Well, there's a genealogy which has a lot of clues about Jesus. That's good. There's Mary's Magnificat, which has all sorts of clues about what's coming and about the life of Jesus. It charts a course for Jesus's life. It tells the story of the gospel in a way. It's, it's great. We, we've had a few sermons, just about, just about the Magnificat and what we will again.

[20:19] did you know there's a second Magnificat in Luke, not by Mary, uh, but it's still in chapter one and we don't talk about it much. This is the one that's spoken by Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, and he had been made unable to talk because he doubted that he and Elizabeth could have a child in their old age. So he was, he was not able to talk. Uh, but when he finally was able to speak, the Holy Spirit, sort of inspired him and he speaks this beautiful thing, almost, almost as good as Mary's Magnificat, uh, sort of, he talks about what's going to happen. And it's another signpost from Luke about what's going to happen in the world. And that the time of Jesus and of John is a culmination of the plans that God has for the world. That's what Zechariah is saying when he speaks. And I'll only read one verse of it from Luke. Chapter one, 68 Zechariah says this blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. So he's saying that God is going to come into the world to look on his people favorably and redeem them. And this phrase looked on favorably is, is just one word is a complex word in Greek. It's epi skeptomy. And it's this exact same word that are used by the people in Luke chapter seven,

[21:45] 60. When they see the miracle that Jesus performs, he says, God has come to help his people. What that really says is God has seen his people. God has seen and come close to his people to see them. And he's going to save them, come to help them, right? So it's an echo of what Zechariah was saying about what God is planning in the world at the birth of John and Jesus, that God looks favorably on his broken world. God sees the broken world that Jesus is moved deeply by the pain of death. And by the sting of injustice, Jesus sees, God sees. And so he sends someone to help and send someone to save and send someone to redeem. That word redeem really means to purchase them out of bondage or slavery to free us from the bondage to sin and death and decay.

[22:38] So we, that signpost is also kind of saying now Luke is paying off in chapter seven. What he promised is, in chapter one, and the people seeing this resurrection of this young man are fulfilling what Zechariah prophesied himself. The people are beginning to say, yes, God has come into the world to save us. I mean, how else would we respond to a resurrection in our midst? We would say, this is pretty good. This is pretty amazing. We would, we wouldn't, we wouldn't soft pedal it. I don't think, I mean, the skeptic would say, well, maybe he wasn't really dead. He was just really in a deep sleep. And, but we're past skepticism at this point.

[23:19] Finally, and we're at the end here. We need to think about these miracles of resurrection and ask ourselves, what do they accomplish? Right? What do they accomplish? They, they accomplish, as we said, they show who Jesus is and what he's trying to do in the world. He's bringing about the redemption that God wants to do in the world. He's showing us that Jesus sees the world. It's who Jesus is. Um, but on, I want to say this for the flip side of the resurrection of somebody who died, maybe too young, like all these people do, two children and one man who's not yet full, not, not yet old like Lazarus. Um, and if you want to be really pessimistic about these resurrections, you could say, you know what? They only really postpone a death. They're not, they don't get to go live forever in heaven. Like Elijah, getting swooped up, by a chariot and never tasting death. That's not what happens to these people. So this young man, he did die. I mean, I'm newsflash. He's dead. Like it, it, it didn't save him from an eventual death. Lazarus eventually died. Jairus, his daughter eventually died. Right? So you say, well, what good is it? All it does is postpone the inevitable, right? And if some people are like, I'd rather have the inevitable now,

[24:37] so I don't have to worry about it. Well, of course they, all these people were happy to have their family members back. Right? Um, the miracle and the meaning is not so much the power over physical death, which is a great power. The meaning is to be found in who Jesus is and what God is doing through him. If Zacharias song is a signpost for this miracle in Luke, then this miracle, see how this works now in Luke seven, this miracle is a signpost for many more things. So that is a foretaste. Okay. I can raise the dead. So then there's more miracles to come. There are more resurrections to come. God sees his people and he plans to redeem them. And Jesus cares about the broken and death really is. It's not defeated. That's the thing. Death isn't defeated in not finally, at least in Luke chapter seven, because this is a person who's raised from the dead, but they're going to die again. But it is finally death is finally defeated. Um, in the place that Luke seven points to, which is Luke 24, that's the resurrection of Jesus himself. And that's probably how we need to pull Jesus, his own resurrection into this conversation is that his resurrection is of a greater order by far, because he's God and man together being resurrected.

[26:01] And we saw that in the Nicene Creed, right? Um, but also it's the promise, not that we'll be resurrected. Uh, like if we get really sick and die and we'll be raised again, in this life, that's not the promise. The promise is that when we die, when Jesus comes again, we will be raised and death then will be put to death and death will have no sting and no power over us. And so we are all going to face death unless the Lord comes again soon. And some days I'm like, yes, please. Now, other times I'm like, let me live a little longer, but unless the Lord comes, we're going to, we all going to die at some point. And you know, a lot of us, almost all of us have lost loved ones. That you can think of, you can remember people that you've loved who have gone on and we've wished, we have wished for those miracles to extend their life on earth. I know that I have wished for those things, but the larger miracle, this is the larger miracle is here. And it's that God sees his people and he redeems them. He redeems them by sending his son whose heart goes out to the hurting. And that very son takes death into his own body. And defeats death itself forever. And that's the miracle of resurrection for today. Let's pray. Father, thank you again for your word.

[27:20] Thank you for the hope that resurrection of the dead gives us both of this young man, but also especially of Jesus himself, that we will be raised ourselves someday and see you face to face.