The Resurrected Christ - Luke 24

I am going to tell you nothing new this morning!

I have just come to the end of my personal morning Bible studies in Luke. I don’t teach Bible Survey or Theology any more – so I have to grab my five minutes here and there in morning devotions to let all my golden thoughts come out. The last chapter of Luke covers the stories around the resurrection of Jesus and his appearances to his disciples in a way I find so encouraging. We can catch the mood of the disciples, devastated by the loss of their Master killed so unjustly on Calvary, along with all their expectations for a glorious messianic future shattered. Then we can enter into the joy of the disciples when they realise that Jesus really had been raised again from the dead. 

In Luke we can also learn how the risen resurrected Jesus appeared: in his new, but real resurrected body. He had visible healed wounds on his hands and feet; he could break bread and he could eat fish. He was recognisable yet sometimes unrecognisable. The risen Jesus could appear and disappear. He could enter rooms through locked doors, he wasn’t a ghost. Yet his body was as truly real as yours or mine is this morning.

Even after three years of following Jesus and experiencing all the miracles and excitements and teaching that they saw, one of his followers Cleopas still considered him to be merely “the prophet Jesus of Nazareth” [v19]. On that first Easter Day, even after hearing the stories from the women who had seen the risen Jesus, they still didn’t ‘get it’.

On the Emmaus Road Jesus gave to Cleopas and his travelling companion the greatest Bible Survey lesson anyone has ever received, as Jesus explained to them the centrality of the Christ in all the Old Testament. That’s not fair we might ask, “Why can’t we have a similar one-on-one tutorial with Jesus?”

And what about us today who haven’t been eye-witnesses of the resurrected Christ? Who haven’t been able to put our hand in his side or inspect the healed wounds in his hands and feet to strengthen our faith? What’s the difference between us and them? Why do they have the opportunity to touch the body of the risen Christ whereas we have to trust someone else’s word that the resurrection occurred 2,000 years after the event? 

Some years ago Lyn and I went to a seminar on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians in Auckland given by the American theologian, Gordon Fee, from Regents College in Vancouver (of Fee & Stuart fame). The seminar was absolutely superb and I still have my notes. Gordon Fee is of course a Pentecostal theologian and gave what for me was the missing link in my understanding of Galatians. Faith in Christ gives us what the Old Testament law never could – namely the Holy Spirit who empowers us to obey God, whereas the law can never give us power to obey it.

Likewise I realise now that I don’t need to meet the risen Jesus personally in the flesh because of the gift of the Holy Spirit – the Promise of the Father [v49] who had not yet been given to Cleopas and the eleven apostles. The Holy Spirit is actually living in me now and it is a tremendous privilege. The key difference between us in this room this morning and the disciples is that they had not yet received the Holy Spirit. The risen Christ now reveals the truth of his resurrection to men and women today by the Holy Spirit.

There is a lot in this very compact portion of this last chapter of Luke: Not just the reality of the resurrection proved over and over again, or the way Christ is shown to be the centre of the Old Testament – but something else, he opened their minds [v45] to the Old Testament scriptures. I am sure he talked through, Gen 3:15; Gen12:1-3, Pss 22 & 40; and the so-called Servant Songs in Isaiah and so on … I don’t know what else. We are not unthinking robots, we can’t make the excuse that we have received the Holy Spirit so we don’t need to think about who Jesus is or what he has done. We do need to study the scriptures, and that requires our minds. We do need to think. At the end of the this chapel you will leave for your classes, where you will be thinking and studying, and that is entirely consistent with this passage of scripture.

Then there are the ‘shoulds’ that Jesus explained from Old Testament: the Old Testament shows that the Christ should suffer and on the 3rd day rise from the dead. And that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed to all nations as a consequence. Your future ministry of bringing the gospel to the nations is founded on these ‘shoulds’ of this most fundamental truth of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The gospel is that simple and non-threatening [vv45-47], yet people are still murdered for it. 

Finally, we are the only college in New Zealand specifically training people for this proclamation to the nations at the moment. This is our chapter this morning.

So what do we do with this? We do what the disciples did as Jesus ascended to heaven for the last time … we worship and bless God [v52]!