Well, that’s Easter – done and dusted. Chocolate eaten. Back to work. But – are we missing something? Do we dismiss Easter too easily? So the tomb was empty? So what?

It’s great to be with again for a fresh new week when most of us are enjoying a day of rest on Easter Monday. But two thousand years ago it wasn’t a long weekend they were celebrating in Jerusalem, it was a brutal crucifixion, burial and then, then something nobody expected. Imagine you have a friend or a relative who’s just died, tragically killed and you watched them die, you go to the funeral, you see them buried, and you get what you think is closure.

Now closure is one thing, but the mourning process goes on. And then a few days later you go down to the grave to leave some flowers, to reflect on the life that was so tragically taken, and the grave’s been dug up, the coffin’s up on the ground, the lid’s off and the coffin’s empty. What would you feel, what would you do?

A friend of mine recently was interviewing Barry McGuire for a radio program in New Zealand. Now Barry McGuire was a well know rock protest singer from the 1960’s. It’s when it was all about drugs and make love not war, and you know that whole flower power thing was happening in the 1960’s, which I have to say I only just barely remember! I wish! Over a period of ten years Barry was saying in the interview he lost more than 20 close friends to drug overdoses and sexually transmitted diseases in the music industry.

Isn’t it sometimes the case that TV stars and movie stars and rock stars and politicians try to commit suicide, isn’t it so often the case that these personalities of promise turn out not to be what they promised? From Marylyn Munroe right through to Michael Hutchins of INXS, there’s a litany of fallen stars. And it’s sad because we place our hope, to some extent, in these people, we do we look at them and think I’d love to be like them. Love to have that sort of success or fame or money. And we do we project ourselves on them and we place our hope in them, and as we so often see, drugs and attempted suicide so often claims those people. Fallen stars are really very sad.

In a sense, Jesus was in that place, at least from the perception of the people who were looking at Him. Jesus was a star; Jesus Christ was a superstar as the musical goes. He attracted crowds over three and half years that were unprecedented, crowds of four and five thousand people, in rural settings where maybe that was the whole population or a very large percentage of the population.

So here is this Jesus Christ who’s doing amazing things, amazing miracles, healing leapers and the blind and the lame. who’s caring for the little people, the widows and the prostitutes. A man with passion and profound teaching with a wisdom about God that none of the religious leaders of the day had. He was so relevant, and yet so wise and so deep, He touched people deep inside. He had a wisdom that confounded His religious critics who were constantly trying to trap him. That’s why He drew the large crowds, that’s why in His day, Jesus Christ was a superstar. He promised so much.

It was an oppressed land, here was Israel who but for a short period in their history had almost always been either in slavery or an occupied land. Right now they were under brutal Roman occupation; they were oppressed, most of them were poor subsistence farmers, they needed someone to believe in, someone to hope in, someone to promise them something. And Jesus was that someone.

And then, then the events of that first Easter long weekend, the Passover festival for the Jews, all the crowds were in Jerusalem the lynching mob that was baying for Jesus’ blood. All of a sudden this man of hope became a man of despair, and as He wandered blooded and beaten down the Via Delarosa carrying His cross, He was nailed to that cross and buried in a tomb. Hope becomes despair. Jesus Christ the superstar becomes Jesus Christ the looser!

Then He’s buried, it’s the Sabbath when nobody does anything because that’s the day of rest. And the next morning some women, (Mary Magdalene among them), devoted followers, go down to the tomb with some spices to embalm His body. There were no funeral parlors in those days or undertakers, it just had to be done and they were going down with the expectation of wrapping Him in spices and preparing His body finally to being laid to rest.

Amidst pain and fear and tears and lost hope which was probably the worst of it all, they go to the tomb and it’s empty! What’s their first reaction? Well they run back to the other disciples, to Peter and the others and they say, “They’ve taken His body from out of the tomb”. Don’t know quite who ‘they’ were but that was their reaction. And Peter runs down there and sure enough the stone’s been rolled away. The linen wrappings are lying folded neatly on the floor and it tells us that the disciples saw and believed.

Jesus had been telling them he’d be crucified and He’d rise again. Jesus had been telling them He would rise from the dead. And in this mix of pain and fear and tears and confusion a glimmer of hope! But there it was, just a glimmer. And over the next few weeks it took them a while to come to grips with what had happened, to understand it.

The biggest thing, if I put myself in their shoes would be loosing hope. A time in my live ten years ago, where I lost almost everything I’d ever hoped for and you know the worst thing for me was the things that I was dreaming of for the future, my hopes for the future they all lay on the floor shattered. These disciples had been looking at Jesus and seeing His miracles and His wisdom and believing He was the one, believing He was the Messiah and all of a sudden that hope was lost when He was nailed to the cross. But the empty tomb, the empty tomb, no Jesus, spelled hope for them.

I wonder whether we just brush over Easter too casually, you know we’ve heard the Easter story dozens of times through the years and we miss out on what’s going on in the hearts of His followers, all hope was lost on Good Friday. And yet when they came to the empty tomb there was new hope of a new life. Years later Paul the Apostle said that the hope isn’t just in this life, the hope that we get from the resurrection of Jesus Christ it’s a certain hope for an eternal life. Because Jesus was raised from the dead so we will be raised from the dead.

I wonder whether in our day and our time and our society whether the things that we hope in are to here and now. We hope that tomorrow will be a fine day, we hope that we’ll get a better job, we hope that we’ll be able to buy that new whatever it is we want to buy. It seems to me that those are the things that these days we place our hope in.

And then we rush through Easter and we brush it aside and we forget about it, but that day when the women went down there, that empty tomb, that is hope. It is the hope of an eternal life, it’s a certain hope, it’s a knowledge that one day there’ll be glory and joy and peace, no pain, no disease, no fear, no poverty, no hunger for ever and ever, and it began on that morning with an empty tomb.

Imagine someone close to you dies, you go to the funeral, you come back a few days later to put flowers on the grave and it’s been dug up, the coffin’s open, empty. One of the cemetery gardeners walks past. What would you ask Him?

It’s just great to be with you again today. I hope you had a great Easter weekend, but it’s funny how quickly we brush by the Easter celebration each year. A day or two later and we’ve forgotten all about it. But it wasn’t like that on the first Easter, a brutal crucifixion, pain, mourning; they lost someone who promised so much. They’d lost all hope, and then, then on the day after the Sabbath a few of His followers down at the tomb, empty, gone, confusion, hope, despair, maybe… no surely not. Was there hope, had He risen? He always said He would but … no.

Some found it easier to come to grips with it than others. Mary, Mary Magdalene, the women who first looked into that empty tomb, she couldn’t, she thought someone had taken His body; then she asked the local gardener.

Over these last three and half weeks we’ve been going through a series of programs looking at the question, “who exactly is this Jesus?” The things He said, the things He did. Now here we are, Jesus has risen from the dead, the tomb is empty and Mary Magdalene, a really devoted follower and servant of Jesus who’s been with Him these last three and half years, she is the first one at the empty tomb.

If we’re going to look at who Jesus is, then as well as the Jesus who walked for those three and half years and talked and did and healed, I think we need to look at the risen Jesus. The Jesus that came back from the grave, what’s He like, what did He do, how did He treat people, how did He interact with Mary Magdalene in her grief? And when she looks in this tomb, her immediate reaction, the one that stuck in her heart is “they’ve taken His body away.”

Which they? Who’s they? Well we’re not sure who she was referring to. Maybe she was talking about the Roman authorities, maybe the religious leaders who ultimately were the ones who prosecuted him to the point of death. Maybe she’s talking about other followers, we don’t know.

But the reaction she has isn’t an unreasonable one; in fact it’s the most plausible explanation. You go down there, she’s watched Him brutally beaten and nailed to a cross and crucified. She watched Him taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb. He’s dead, dead, is dead! And so she goes to the tomb and it’s empty, what’s happened? Someone has taken the body away, and let’s pick up the historical account as John writes it in the forth book in the New Testament, this is what he writes.

Mary stood outside the tomb weeping, as she wept she knelt to look into the tomb and she saw two angels sitting there dressed in white, one at the head and the other at the foot of where Jesus’ body had been laid. They said to her ‘Mary, why are you weeping?’ ‘They took my Master,’ she said ‘I don’t know where they put him.’ After she said this she turned away and saw Jesus standing there but she didn’t recognise him.

Jesus spoke to her, he said ‘Mary why are you weeping, who are you looking for?’ She, thinking that he was the gardener said ‘Mister if you took Him tell me where you put Him so I can care for Him.’ And Jesus said, ‘Mary!’ Turning her face to Him she said in Hebrew ‘Oh Rabbi,’ meaning teacher. Jesus said, ‘Don’t cling to me because I haven’t ascended to my Father yet, go to my brothers and tell them I ascend to my Father and your Father, my God and your God.’ And Mary Magdalene went, telling the news to the disciples, ‘I saw Him, I saw Jesus.’ And she told them everything He’d said to her.

Now Mary was locked in the reality of her grief. It’s so often the way, isn’t it? In our here and now, in our reality, in our pain or just plain life, we are locked into our reality. And then we come to Easter and we have a few days off and we have some chocolate, maybe go to Church and we brush past Easter barely noticing that something profound has happened. Mary looked at Jesus; (I love this, I chuckle every time I read this in John’s gospel), and she thought that the Son of God was the gardener! That is just so wonderful to me. You can imagine years later when she was telling her grandkids, “Can you believe it, I saw the risen Jesus, the first person to see Him and I thought He was the gardener!”

But maybe we do that too here in the 21st Century. Maybe we look at the whole Easter story that seems to have happened so long ago, two thousand years ago and we just brush past it. We misinterpret it, we miss the whole thing that’s going on, no more or less than Mary did when she looked at Jesus and thought He was the gardener. It’s tragic! Then He spoke her name, He said “Mary!”

There’s something special about someone who knows our name and someone in whom we can trust and hope. And the moment He spoke her name she recognised Him, she recognised the voice, she recognised the way that Jesus used to say “Mary.” Instantly, the grief was turned into joy, instantly hope was restored, instantly she knew that she need never have lost hope because Jesus was risen from the dead.

I love this part of the story because so often you hear people say, “Well you know, maybe the disciples were delusional, you know maybe they were just imagining things because they were under pressure.” Mary did not expect to find a live Jesus at the tomb, she came down to embalm His body, she was looking for a dead one! And she found Him alive and she didn’t even recognise Him until He said “Mary” and then she fell to her knees, she knew. The disciples, Peter and the others, they believed before Mary, they knew what Jesus had been saying, they thought, “well He must have come back”, they’d gone back to their lodgings. Yet Jesus knew her grief, He knew that she was locked into her physical reality and He lingered there, He tarried there at the tomb, waiting for her.

She was the first one to see Him alive, and Jesus chose the one who hadn’t yet believed, He spoke her name. Come on, have we brushed past Easter have we missed what’s happened? Are we so locked into our present circumstances we don’t get it? We kind of know the story the way a child knows the story because we saw it at Sunday school or whatever, but in our lives and in our hearts we don’t know the story. We don’t live our lives so often as though Jesus actually has risen.

Today I believe He’s speaking your name. Today I believe Jesus wants to speak hope into your life. Today He’s coming to look for the lost. Today He’s coming to look for the one with no hope left anymore. Just like Mary Magdalene at that tomb. Listen deep inside your heart; listen to Him, because I believe He wants to speak your name in a way that you know that he rose for you, that He died for you that He rose for you, that He loves you so much. The Master is speaking your name, new hope, new start, new life.

Now we can ignore that quiet whisper in our hearts and we can come up with some kind of gardener or Easter bunny misinterpretation of what was going on, or we can believe, we can answer, we can respond, we can say,

Lord, I hear you, I want you, I love you, come into my life, give me hope, give my joy, just the way you did for Mary at the tomb that day.

It’s up to us.

We all have minor miracles in our lives – easy enough to explain. But big miracles – like Jesus rising from the dead – well, they’re black and white. Truth or Fiction. Reality or illusion?

Every now and then we have little miracles happen in our lives, something just falls into place or we meet someone apparently by chance and that sets off a whole string of other coincidences that can alter the course of our lives. Little miracles are easy enough to explain away I guess, but big miracles, well, they either happened or they didn’t. Either it’s a miracle, or an illusion, or a lie, there are no grey areas.

Imagine you’re one of the twelve disciples, your mates tell you a few days after Jesus’ crucifixion, that they’ve seen him alive but you saw him crucified. They’re saying he’s alive (yeah right), so prove it to me. You and I, we’d probably need some tangible evidence wouldn’t we? I certainly would. Well so did a guy called, “Thomas”.

I love illusions, I remember when I was working as an I.T. Consultant, I worked in a large bank in the I.T. Department and one of the men that worked there, his name was Peter, he was an illusionist. We called it magic years ago but I’m not talking about magic, I’m talking about illusions. Tricks, things that trick the eye and the mind into seeing and believing things that actually didn’t happen. Every time that he left his office or his cubicle, he’d always be stuffing things in his pockets, or putting things up his sleeves and he always had a little trick ready to go at an instant’s notice.

I remember he had a little wooden finger guillotine. We all know what a guillotine is, imagine he had this tiny little guillotine and it was like a wooden sheath and the guillotine slid in. Now the wooden sheath had three holes, one for you to stick your finger through, and then on either side, top and bottom of your finger, it had little holes for toothpicks, right so the deal was, you put your finger in the big hole, you put a toothpick above your finger and a toothpick through the sheath below your finger and he would slide the metal guillotine in the top of the sheath. And he’d go “one … two … ” and then bang!

This guillotine would come down, I have to tell you the blade was pretty sharp, this guillotine would come down and it would snap the toothpick above your finger, it would snap the toothpick below your finger, but so far I still have all of my little fingers even though I went through this guillotine thing quite a number of times.

To this day I have no idea how the guy did it. I’ve looked that this wooden sheath, it’s just a couple of bits of wood nailed together. I’ve looked at the guillotine; it is as solid as a rock. How did he do it? No idea! I remember going to a David Copperfield performance. Now David Copperfield again is a well known illusionist. This was a live performance and he did some amazing things but the one really that sticks in my mind is when he got into this huge Perspex box, you know about three times the height of a man and really wide, it was a solid, well it looked like, a solid Perspex box. They put a lid on, and all of a sudden he starts to levitate and fly inside the box. Again I have no idea how he did that? I bought front row seat tickets so that I could get close to this, I tell you, the guy was flying in the box.

So I love illusions but I know that David Copperfield didn’t fly. I know that that guillotine didn’t pass through my finger, those things weren’t magic, they were illusions. Now you get to something just as confounding and confusing, Jesus! We know historically he was nailed to a cross, we know he was dead. Doctors read the historical accounts and they say ‘well we know he was dead because his blood plasma had separated and when they pierced his side and water and blood ran out, that is a medical indication that Jesus definitely was dead’ he was buried, and yet all his followers were racing around afterwards saying, “he’s alive, he’s alive, he’s risen.”

Come on! Really? What’s the evidence? If it’s, true it’s going to have an enormous impact on my life? But I need to know it’s true, I need to know that it actually happened because it’s such an amazing thing, it’s not an illusion. If it’s real it’s a genuine miracle, if it’s not it’s a lie. It defies the most basic natural law, which goes something like this, when you’re dead, you’re dead! Right, that’s a basic natural law! And yet the resurrection of Jesus Christ completely defies the most certain law of all, which is, “one day my body’s going to give up the ghost and one day so is yours.”

Well there was another sceptic, one of his disciples, a man called Thomas who was really sceptical about this as well, the story goes like this, let me read it to you.

Thomas, who was sometimes called the twin, one of the twelve disciples, wasn’t with the others when Jesus came and yet the other disciples told him ‘we saw him, we saw Jesus’. Thomas said ‘look, unless I see the nail holes in his hands and put my finger in the nail holes and stick my hand in his side where they stabbed him, I will not believe it. Eight days later, (I love this, Thomas had to wait for eight days) his disciples were in the room again.

This time Thomas was with them, and Jesus came through the locked doors and stood amongst them and said ‘Peace be with you’. Then Jesus focussed his attention on Thomas and said to him ‘look Thomas, take your finger, examine my hands, take your hand, stick it in my side, don’t be unbelieving … believe!’ And Thomas said ‘my master, my God’ and he worshipped Jesus. Jesus said ‘so you believe because you have seen with your own eyes but even better blessings are in store for those who believe without seeing’.

Jesus provided far more God revealing signs than are written down in this book. These ones are written down so that you will believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and in the act of believing have real and eternal life in the way he personally revealed it.

No serious historian doubts the existence of Jesus; the fact that he walked on this earth, the fact that he was crucified, the sticking point is the resurrection. Maybe they stole his body, maybe there was hysteria by the disciples, yet here we have the arch sceptic Thomas, who needed proof and he had to struggle along for eight days with all his buddies saying, “he’s alive, he’s alive, we saw him” and Thomas, not knowing, and being sceptical and doubtful. And then Jesus comes into the room and says, “Peace, Shalom, Thomas have a look, look and see.” In fact one of the other accounts also says that Jesus was hungry, he asked for some fish to eat and after eight days, Thomas saw, Thomas touched. Thomas the sceptic believed.

That’s what’s in the historical record. What do you believe? There’s a few options, maybe the answer’s “nope, I just don’t believe it happened.” I’ve heard some so-called prominent Christian leaders believe that. Faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ is central to Christianity. I can’t call myself a Christian if I don’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead. So one answer is “nope, just don’t believe”, there’s a second answer, the second answer might be a bit like Thomas, “well … well maybe but I dunno, I just don’t know.” Well let me say to you there are no grey areas here. This is one of those very few things that is black and white – either he did, or he didn’t.

It’s kind of like that line “you can’t be half pregnant”, you know you either are, or you aren’t. Either Jesus rose from the dead, or he didn’t. And Paul later writes, “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” And maybe your answer is “I do” and you have hope, and faith. And because we know that the one who is raised, Jesus, from the dead, will also raise us with Him in His presence, we know that when our body goes through the death rattle, we know that when our body gives up the spirit, we have life, we have eternal life.

Why do we know that? Because Jesus Christ was raised from the dead.

Relationships – are wonderful – some days. But what about when friends dessert each other. What then? How do we treat them? How does Jesus treat them?

Just great to be with you again today! Over the last four weeks, around this Easter period, we’ve been looking at Jesus, who is He? What’s He like? Is He for real? Just short stories from the historical accounts of his life, written by Mark and John. Startling little vignettes of a Jesus that you really don’t expect. Today, today let’s look at how he treats his closest friends after they deserted him in his hour of greatest need. When he was arrested, and tried, and crucified, they all deserted him. They fled for fear of their lives and left him to face the brutal music alone. Now after his resurrection how does he treat them, what does he say? I know what I would say.

I love the plain everyday accounts of Jesus’ life that you find in the first four books of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They’re so ordinary, so everyday. You see him crucified (that’s not everyday) but you see him crucified and you see him come back to life, and when he’s been crucified as I said before, all of his disciples, all of his friends desert him, he goes through this horrible thing, he’s killed. But then, then the day after is Sabbath, Jesus is risen, Jesus comes back from the dead, the tomb is empty, Jesus is alive.

And there’s a passage towards the end of John’s gospel, the last chapter in fact, where we see the disciples (many of them fisherman) have gone back to the sea of Tiberius, now that’s about 120kms north of Jerusalem as the crow flies. So Jerusalem where the whole crucifixion and burial, and resurrection happen, is a long way away, they’re back in Galilee where Jesus had grown up, where he met the disciples three and a half years earlier, miles, a world away from the tumultuous times of Jerusalem only a few weeks before. Let’s have a look at John’s account of what happened.

After all those things happened in Jerusalem, Jesus appeared again to the disciples, this time at the sea of Tiberius, or the Sea of Galilee, as it was really known. This is how he did it; Peter, Thomas, Nathaniel, the brothers Zebedee and two other disciples were together and Peter said, “c’mon, I’m going out fishing”. The rest of them said ‘yeah, we’ll come with you’. So they went out and they got into the boat but that night they caught nothing.

When the sun came up Jesus was standing on the beach but they didn’t recognise him. Jesus yelled out to them he said, “Hi, g’day guys catch anything for breakfast?” And they answered “no”, and he said, “well look, throw your net out of the right side of the boat and see what happens.” They did what he said and all of a sudden there were so many fish in it, they weren’t strong enough to pull it in.

Then the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “it’s Him, it’s Jesus” and when Peter realised that it was Jesus he threw on some clothes (because he was stripped for the work) and he dived into the sea. And the other disciples came in by boat because they weren’t far from land, about 100meters or so. When they got out of the boat they saw a fire was ready, with fish and bread cooking on it.

And Jesus said to them, “bring some of the fish you’ve caught” and Peter joined them and pulled the net to shore, 153 big fish, and even with all of those fish the net didn’t rip, and Jesus said to them “c’mon, breakfast is ready”. Not one of his disciples dared to ask him “who are you?” because they knew, they knew, it was Jesus. And Jesus then took the bread and gave it to them, he did the same with the fish, this was now the third time that Jesus had shown himself alive to the disciples since he’d been raised from the dead.

Now remember these disciples were Jesus’ best friends, they were closest allies. They’d lived with him, worked with him, learned from him, travelled with him for three and a half years and in his darkest hour they deserted him. Not a one of them was left standing, Peter denied that he even knew Jesus three times; and here just a few weeks later the guys have gone back to Galilee, they’ve gone fishing, he rocks up on the beach, another amazing miracle – Jesus is back! And he’s cooking a BBQ for breakfast, some bread and some fish.

Now I spent ten years in the Australian Army and I remember when I was in my officer training years, the first four years. We spent a lot of time out in the bush and on exercise. And you had all the smells of the bush, you know the forest and the mud and the water, all those natural beautiful smells, and when we lit our little fires we had some little tablets called “hexamine” tablets which we lit, which gave us the fire to heat our food. When we lit our little fires and we cooked some food, the smell of the food was so pungent out there amongst nature; it really stood out, so sharply in contrast to the smells of the forests that we were in.

And my hunch is it was the same here, by the sea of Tiberius, the fresh morning air with all the smells, punctuated sharply by the smell of something cooking, some fish, some bread. The smell of bread cooking is the most wonderful smell, that’s what was going on here.

Jerusalem, the big smoke, the brutal trial and beating and crucifixion of Jesus, the crowds, the mobs, they’re a world away and here they were by the sea of Galilee, at home on familiar territory, doing the things they always did, being in the place that’d always been before they met Jesus – fishing! And Jesus on the beach.

And he does that fishing net miracle again; he’d done that once before right that the beginning when he first met them, that’s how John realised that it was Jesus, because he recognised the miracle, he said ‘that’s Jesus there, we’ve seen him do this before’ and Peter dives into the water, and they’re sitting there on the beach having breakfast, would this have been a surreal experience do you think? I think it would’ve been just the most strange morning that they’d ever experienced. Jesus is back from the dead, the Jerusalem crucifixion thing, did it really happen? And this wonderful smell of bread and fish cooking on the morning air.

Now you think through the sequence, Jesus came and picked the disciples three and a half years ago, he called them, he spends three and a half years with them training them, teaching them, befriending them, showing them miracles, giving them the power to do miracles, he then goes to the cross and they desert him. There’s a wonderful account in Luke’s gospel where, when Peter had denied Jesus for the third time, their eyes met. Ah man what would they have been thinking?

And then there’s the tomb and the tomb is empty, there’s the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection and here he is on the beach, after all of that, cooking them breakfast. What does that say about Jesus? What does that say about God? After all of that, after the desertion? After the pain and the loneliness that Jesus must have felt on the cross. What does that say? Not one word of condemnation, not a one.

Here Jesus comes along; humble to serve them, to build them up. What do you think his actions said to those disciples munching on fish and bread on that beach, that morning? What does it say to us here and now? They had failed Jesus, they had betrayed Jesus, they had deserted Jesus, not one word from Jesus. He just comes and cooks them some fish, and has breakfast with them. So easy for us to say, “I’ve failed God, I’ve failed Jesus, I’m not good enough, I could never match up”, don’t you get it?

That’s the whole point, that is the whole point of Jesus dying for our sins on the cross and the thing that makes Jesus stand out from any other religious figure in the history of humanity is his grace, is his forgiveness, is the fact that he bore those disciples failures, in his flesh on the cross. And he has borne my failures and your failures, which he calls sin, on the cross. That’s what Jesus was saying on that beach that morning, “I love you, I forgive you and I will be with you no matter what you do.” That was one awesome BBQ breakfast!

There’s nothing worse than a broken promise. Jesus made lots of promises. What was the last one He made? How important was it? Did He keep it? What does it mean here and now?

Well, here we are at the end of another week, and this is the last program in a four week series that’s been twenty programs asking and exploring the question exactly, “Who is Jesus? What I thought would be great, is to finish up by having a look at one of His last promises. For me there’s nothing worse than when someone makes a promise and fails to keep it, it’s really lousy. Jesus made quite a number of promises in His three and half years of public ministry, but this one, this one was a parting promise. He said it was also His Father’s promise and it was a promise that ended up changing the course of human history. What was it? Did He keep it? What happened?

In human terms, I believe the greatest promise that one person can make to another is the promise of marriage, the promise between a man and a woman. Now there is two sorts of promises on this earth, a bi-lateral promise and a uni-lateral promise. A bi-lateral promise goes something like this; I’ll do this if you do that. Now if you don’t do this, this is the punishment, so it’s a conditional promise, it’s where both parties have to do something to make the contract work.

The other sort of promise is a uni-lateral promise, now a uni-lateral promise says, doesn’t matter what you do or you don’t do, this is what I’ll do. It’s the uni-lateral promise that’s an unconditional promise. So question – which one is the marriage vow? Is it uni-lateral? Is it unconditional or is it bi-lateral, conditional?

Well most of us would probably answer, given that two parties are entering into this contract called marriage it’s probably a bi-lateral promise. Let me read you the wedding vows that I spoke to my wife Jacqui on the day that we were married. It’s very short let me read it to you.

Jacqui, today I take you to be my wife, and so I set myself apart from the rest of the world for you and you alone. Everything I am and everything I have I give to you, in the heights of our joy and in the depths of our sorrow I promise to be by your side, to hold you, to encourage you, to honour you, to cherish you, to protect you. It is my solemn promise to you that I will always seek to love you just as Jesus Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. Jacqui, all of these things are yours until we are parted in death.

Question: what sort of promise is that? Is it bi-lateral and conditional or is it uni-lateral and unconditional? Well pretty clearly, that is an unconditional promise because there are no conditions in there that make any of my promise of behaviour conditional on what Jacqui does do or doesn’t do.

It’s the mistake that we in the 21st Century make in marriage. We think it’s bi-lateral, we think that the promise is conditional but it was never meant to be that way. The promise of marriage is an unconditional promise. I think that when we make an unconditional promise of relationship, when we say “no matter what you do this is what I will do”, I think that’s the greatest promise that one person can make to another. Anyone who’s been married for any amount of time will know that some day’s marriage is tough, and on those days love needs to be a decision to honour the promise that we have made to the other party.

You know the whole decision of loving a husband, of loving a wife, is saying when one of us is down then the other one comes up underneath and lifts them up. The reason that it’s the greatest promise is that it says, “when you fail, I won’t attack you, I won’t reject you, no, no, I’ll stick by you, I’ll hold you, I’ll cushion you, I’ll protect you, I will lift you up and I will help you through. When you are hurting me I won’t hurt you back.” An awesome promise. And it’s why so many marriages fall apart today is that we don’t understand the importance of making and keeping an unconditional promise to the person that we married.

In a sense it parallels the final promise that Jesus made to His disciples. If you have a Bible you can go and look it up later, it happens in the fifth book of the New Testament, it’s called the Book of Acts and it’s in the first chapter. Let me read it to you because it’s just an awesome thing that He does.

After His death Jesus presented Himself alive in many different settings over a period of forty days. In face to face meetings, He talked to the disciples about things concerning the Kingdom of God as they met and ate meals together, He told them that they were on no account to leave Jerusalem but that they must wait for what the Father had promised. ‘The promise you heard from me,’ said Jesus, ‘John the Baptist baptised in water but you will be baptised in the Holy Spirit and soon.’ When they were together for the last time they asked Him, ‘Lord are you going to restore the Kingdom of Israel now? Is now the time?’ And he said to them ‘Look, you don’t get to know the time, timing is the Father’s business, what you’ll get is the Holy Spirit.

And when the Holy Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all over Judea and Samaria and even unto the ends of the earth.’ These were His last words. As they watched He was taken up and disappeared into a cloud. They stood there staring into an empty sky. Suddenly two men appeared in white robes, they said, ‘You Galileans, why are you standing there looking at an empty sky, this very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven, will come as certainly an mysteriously as He left.

When a man marries a woman, when a woman marries a man, the two become one flesh, they share the same bed, they share intimacy, physically and emotionally and spiritually. In a sense the promise here that Jesus made, “Don’t go away from Jerusalem, don’t go anywhere, wait for what the Father promised. The promise you heard from me, the promise of the Holy Spirit; you will receive the Holy Spirit.” That promise of being baptised in the Spirit implies that same level of intimacy that you have between a husband and wife, in a spiritual sense. Baptised, literally means to be drenched, to be dunked and dripping.

You know when you take a dry sponge and you pour water on it and to start with the water doesn’t sink in, but all of a sudden the sponge gets moist and then it’s dripping wet. That’s the picture of baptism, it’s being completely drenched in the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit as we know is one of the three persons of the trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons, one God. Jesus promises an intimate, spiritual, wonderful relationship by drenching us in the presence of God through the person of the Holy Spirit.

That is open to every believer to receive, to have an intimate relationship. And you can read in Acts 2, 3 and 4, the subsequent chapters exactly how that happened at that time. But what does it mean? Well to the twelve disciples who were fisherman and bumpkins all of a sudden Jesus gave them, through the presence of the Holy Spirit in them the wisdom and the power and the strength and the Godliness to be founders of the Church that is alive and well today. To you and me, well I’m not sure what it means to you, but to me I was and IT Consultant, I was a businessman I hated Christians.

Then one day I met Jesus and He filled me, He baptised me with His Holy Spirit and I experienced something that the disciples experienced, the power and the strength and the wisdom and the Godliness and the intimacy and the closeness with Him that enables an IT Consultant like me to be doing what I’m doing now and sharing the wonders of God with you.

One of His promises just before He ascended was “I will never leave you.” That’s what this is about. Everything Jesus is, teacher, healer, friend, Lord, Saviour, wisdom, power, humility. Everything He is, He will drench us in that, in power and intimacy for ever and ever. That is the last promise of Jesus Christ.