Sermon Tone Analysis

At the very beginning of our service this morning, we showed a video that may have hurt more than you would want to admit.

In it, we saw scenes of emptiness - empty tanks, empty cartons, empty accounts, empty nests, and empty hearts.

The video said, “Emptiness means disappointment, misery, heartache, anxiety...”

Does that hit home with you this morning?

I know Easter is the day we are supposed to be happy and excited.

You are here, right, in your Easter outfit, looking sharp for all the world to see, so you have it all together?

Perhaps the last year has brought disappointments and heartaches and emptiness that you didn’t have last year.

No one in this room may be aware of the emptiness of your heart today, but I want you to know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I have great news today for an empty heart.

As we will see this morning, there is something else empty this morning, and it is what gives us hope, joy, and a reason to celebrate.

If you are here with an empty heart this morning, my prayer is that you will again find joy by what we see in the empty tomb.

Turn with me in your Bible to .

Let’s set the stage.

It is now the pre-dawn hours on Sunday and the women who followed Jesus are heading back to the tomb to finish the burial preparations they hadn’t been able to finish before the sun set on Friday.

The other gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, mention several women at the tomb, but John is only focusing on one: Mary Magdalene.

She was a woman Jesus had delivered by casting out seven demons, and she had followed his ministry closely.

They are coming to try to honor their deceased teacher and friend one last time.

They are hurting and confused, and their hearts are empty.

What they find, however, filled them with greater joy than we can imagine.

Read with me vv 1-2.

To the women’s dismay, Jesus’ body was gone and in their minds, the tomb was empty.

However, as John tells us what happened over the course of a few hours that morning, we will will find several items in the empty tomb for those of us with an empty heart.

The first item we notice in the tomb is...

1) Hope.

If you

Read with me verses 3-9.

Read with me verses 3-9.

Although everything about this story gives us hope, we see a unique symbol of hope in these verses.

Mary had run back to the other disciples and told them that Jesus’ body was gone.

Immediately, Peter and John run to the tomb.

John is content to stand at the doorway, but Peter rushes past him into the tomb.

The first thing they noticed, after seeing that his body was really gone, was that Jesus’ graveclothes were still in the tomb.

What in the world does that tell us?

That Jesus’ resurrection was going to be different than anything we had ever seen.

Other people in the Bible come back from the dead.

However, none of them are resurrected like Jesus.

Every single person that came back to life would one day die again, but not Jesus.

In fact, John seems to be painting a vivid contrast with this note.

He has told us about another person who had been raised from the dead, a man named Lazarus.

When Jesus raised Lazarus, he had been dead for days, and his body had been wrapped like Jesus’ would have been.

Here’s how Lazarus is described as coming out of the grave:

john 11:

If it wasn’t so serious, it would have been kind of a funny picture, right?

Lazarus looks like a mummy as he walks out of the tomb and has to have the wrappings taken off his face and his body.

But what do we see in the empty tomb?

Look back at ...

When Jesus rose from the dead, he didn’t come out of the tomb with the wrappings on.

The linen cloth was lying in the tomb, and the cloth wrap that covered his face is folded neatly to the side.

I tried to think through all that would mean, but here is one of my favorite thoughts on it: he folded it up because he wouldn’t need it anymore.

You see, Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t like Lazarus coming back to life.

At some point, Lazarus died again.

His body would once again be wrapped in cloths and laid back in a tomb.

However, Jesus wasn’t just raised back to the same kind of life as before; he had conquered death, never to die again.

His body would never again be subject to the pain and weakness we saw in the garden.

His physical body had all the stain of sin removed, so when he was raised, he was raised in the perfected body that would never again be laid in a tomb.

For us to see why this is important, we have to understand why we die in the first place.

The Bible teaches us that man was created to live with God forever in perfect peace.

However, we were not content to stay in that relationship, so we decided to disobey God to try to become like him.

Ever since that moment, death entered the world.

We die physically because of sin has corrupted everything in the universe, but even more so, we die spiritually.

You see, the primary idea of death is separation.

Have you ever seen a mob movie where they disown someone, and they say, “He is dead to me”?

That means the person is separating them from the other, never to have contact again.

When we die physically, we are separated from our physical bodies.

However, when we die physically, we are separated from God and cannot make ourselves alive again.

That’s why these leftover grave clothes are so important: when Jesus died, he died physically and also became sin on my behalf, experiencing spiritual death.

When he came back to life, he proved that he had not only conquered physical death but spiritual death as well, and now, if I would receive his gift of life and forgiveness, I too can live spiritually now and one day be physically resurrected.

That is the single greatest source of hope in the world.

The fact that the cloth around his head was folded up neatly implies something about this victory over death.

He didn’t just barely escape death or fight his way back to life and just barely edge it out.

The cloth was folded neatly, which implies he had the time to put things in order when he came back.

In a way, it is the first sign we see that Jesus really had defeated death and was setting things right again.

Paul describes it beautifully in .

Having told us that Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection are our source of hope, he describes what will be true of the resurrection that is awaiting you and me.

His description shows what happened to Jesus as well:

1 cor 15:54-

Jesus won a full victory that was so decisive that he even had time to fold his laundry.

The cloths, lying in the tomb, give us hope this morning.

As Paul said, there is coming a time when our bodies will put on immortality, and the sting of death with be taken away forever.

For those who came to the tomb and found it empty, they didn’t yet understand what they saw.

For us, though, we see the folded grave clothes that point to the fact that Jesus defeated death once and for all and now offers us life.

Our empty hearts can have hope that no matter what happens, Jesus has overcome death and has the power to walk us through anything.

We have hope that those who have been saved by Christ who have passed away are spiritually alive with him now and we will see them again.

We have hope that we are spiritually alive with Christ and will one day enjoy a resurrected body like his, and nothing can stop that from happening!

The empty tomb didn’t have Jesus’ body, but it did have his grave clothes that he would never need again.

That wasn’t all that they found in the empty tomb that day, though.

Notice also that they discovered...

2) God’s plan.

Pick up in verse 11-13.

Peter and John leave Mary at the tomb where she discovers something else in the empty tomb: two angels.

The other gospel writers give us more details about the angels and what they said, but for John, it is simply enough to remind us that they were there.

It seems that they appeared after the disciples left but while Mary and the others were still at the tomb trying to figure out what was going one.

Their presence in the tomb is important, even if we don’t see much about them in this passage.

Why?

Because it showed that everything that happened, from Jesus’ arrest through this very moment, was a part of God’s plan.

If you look hard at the cross, you might be tempted to imagine that God had somehow lost control of his world.

After all, Jesus was supposed to be God in the flesh, and here he is being carried off by an angry mob to be executed, even though he was the only innocent man on earth.

Where was the king who was supposed to set up God’s rule and reign on earth?

What about all those miracles and things?

Did God just doze off for a few hours and lose control?

The presence of the angels here shows us that God knew exactly what he was doing and never lost control.