The First Step Into A New Kind of Life

Matthew 27:51-54, 28:1-10

Have any of us ever been through an earthquake. I can remember a couple of small ones in southwest Ohio when I was a child, but nothing major.

In January 1994, an earthquake that lasted around twenty seconds hit the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles. It caused almost twenty billion dollars in damages. Fifty seven people died during the quake and another 13 later to injuries they sustained during the earthquake. Much of the city’s power was lost because of the quake; radio and television stations were knocked off the air. That night, the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles began to receive odd phone calls from panicked citizens reporting a “strange sky.” They figured that maybe the silver cloud above them somehow caused the earthquake.

After some confusion, the director of the observatory realized what was going on. With the city lights out because of the earthquake, for the first time maybe ever, the people living in Los Angeles looked up and saw a dark sky. The scary, smoky, silver cloud they reported was the Milky Way.[i]

Earthquakes like that can be life-defining moments. “Where were you when …” kinds of moments. Homes and businesses, roads and bridges need to be repaired or rebuilt. Communities built in earthquake-prone areas, like Los Angeles, have developed different construction methods for everything from single family homes to sky scrapers to enable them to withstand the earth moving beneath them. They’re built and rebuilt with earthquakes in mind, just like our homes here in northern Michigan are built with heavy snow on roofs in mind. But if the earthquake is severe enough, even specialized hardware and construction techniques don’t help. Big earthquakes change the landscape.

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is just as landscape changing in our lives as any earthquake. But before we look at the life-terrain altering impact of Jesus, we need to see the impact the death of Jesus had on the earth itself, because when Jesus died, the earth shook, and then some other weird things happened. Turn with me to Matthew 27:51-54.

When the word “Behold” shows up in the Bible, we need to read it like. “BEHOLD!” It’s an exclamation. Like, “And LOOK!” It points to something that happens suddenly, immediately after whatever our attention has been on to this point – in this case, the moment of Jesus’ death – and it’s big. Sudden, immediate, and big.

The first thing we need to “BEHOLD” is the temple curtain being torn in two. Now, this was not your average, every day window covering curtain. This was the veil between the holy place inside the temple – where sacrifices were offered – from the MOST holy place, or holy of holies, inside the holy place, where the ark of the covenant, the representation of the presence and throne of God on the earth, rested. This wasn’t a curtain that kept people from being able to see inside after dark. It was a curtain that kept the holiest people in Israel from being accidentally killed by the holiness of the presence of God.

The only people who could enter the holy place inside the temple were ritually pure priests who were there to perform their daily duties, offering sacrifices. No one else could enter. But even they could not enter the holy of holies. Only the high priest could enter that place, and then only one day a year, and even then only after offering sacrifices for the his and his family’s sins, and he had to keep his eyes cast downward lest he look upon the glory of God and die. The curtain that protected sinful people from the holiness of God is the curtain that was torn in two when Jesus died.

It was a massive curtain. 60’ tall, 30’ wide, and 4” thick. No human hand could tear it. You’d struggle to get a Sawzall or a chain saw through fabric that thick. It would bog it down. The moment Jesus died, with the sins of all placed on him, the once and for all sacrifice for sin, that curtain was torn in two. From the top down. If a human being had torn it, they would have had to start at the bottom, because the top was 60’ up in the air. For comparison, the peak of this sanctuary, the highest point of our ceiling, is about … any guesses? It’s about 38’. Obviously, in the temple, they’d built a scaffold and people had climbed up there during construction to hang the curtain, but it wasn’t something people did every day. Like our fans up there. Yes, someone put them up there. But if we need to get up there to work on them, we have to rent a big lift to get people up there. You can’t just go up there to work on them.

It’s as if God himself tore the curtain from top to bottom. Why? Because the temple, the ark of the covenant, the altar and the sacrifices offered daily on that altar, as well as at special times throughout the year, were no longer needed. They had served their purpose, but they were no longer necessary. They were now outdated.

Christ’s death on the cross was the inauguration of a new age in God’s relationship with humanity. Sacrifices were no longer needed to cover sin before a holy God, because THE once for all sacrifice had been offered. Everything the temple, the altar, the sacrifices, the festivals, the Passover celebration and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement had foreshadowed and pointed toward had been made real in Christ. Everything they had accomplished by being performed over and over again had been accomplished once and for all in Christ.

So the 60’ tall, 30’ wide, 4” thick temple curtain – a curtain so heavy that tradition and simple math say it took around 300 priests to hang it – was torn in two, from top to bottom, like a piece of paper. Christ is now the means of entry into the presence of God. And it is available to all through faith in him. He is, as he said of himself, “The WAY, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

But that isn’t the only weird thing that happened when Christ died. The second thing that happened is that there was an earthquake, and it disturbed graves in the area, which we might expect, right. What we might NOT expect is for the people in some of those graves to get up and walk out. The word order is a little clunky, because Matthew includes this in his telling of “Weird things that happened when Jesus died,” but he is very clear that the dead people coming to life and walking through town thing happened AFTER the resurrection of Christ himself.

So the earthquake that happened the moment Jesus died disturbed the graves, as we would expect, and then people walked out of them that first Easter morning. And Matthew is clear that they went into Jerusalem and were seen by many. Not zombies. Living bodies that had died and were alive again. Only Matthew includes this strange little tidbit. But he wants his first readers to know that, even though he is writing a few decades later, they can probably find someone in Jerusalem who saw it with their own eyes. He’s telling us that there were in fact eye witnesses to this.

What’s the point of that bit of weirdness. It was a loud and clear declaration that Christ’s resurrection had defeated death. Yes, we still die. Each person in this room will some day come face to face with death. But in Christ, we need no longer fear it. Death has lost it’s sting. Why? Because while yes, we will die physically, we will live on in God’s presence. Death, for the follower of Christ, is still scary, because we don’t know exactly what the journey is like. But Scripture is clear that once we have experienced death, we will look back and say, “That’s it? I spent my whole life fearing THAT?”

The temple curtain was torn in two. Jesus and his once for all sacrifice is now the way into a loving relationship with a loving and holy God. Death has been defeated. And then, and believe it or not, this is just as significant, the Roman centurion and his men, who had carried out the crucifixion, were awestruck as Jesus died and proclaimed, “Truly this was the Son of God.”

Not “a son of a god,” as we might expect a polytheistic Roman to say. THE Son of THE God. Roman soldiers were the best soldiers in the world at the time. They had seen men die. Many men. Men had died at their hands. They’d performed crucifixions before. They’d seen men die on a cross. They’d witnessed it all before. Seen it all before. But this time, something was different. Something stood out to them. They were awestruck at the way this man, who claimed to be the Son of God, died, and the way the earth itself responded. The earth quaked when the one who laid its foundation died on a cross, creator crucified and killed by his creation. Why? Because he loves us.

The temple curtain torn from top to bottom. An earthquake that disturbed graves and dead people alive and walking around. Roman soldiers left in awe. The death of Christ was truly a seismic event. Not just on this earth, but in our lives. Turn over to Matthew 28:1-10.

Pastor Tim Keller compares the Lordship of Jesus Christ to what he calls “a life-quake”:

When a great big truck goes over a tiny little bridge, sometimes there’s a bridge-quake, and when a big man goes onto thin ice there’s an ice-quake. Whenever Jesus Christ comes down into a person’s life, there’s a life-quake. Everything is reordered. If he was a guru, if he was a great man, if he was a great teacher, even if he was the genie of the lamp, there would be some limits on his rights over you. If he’s God, you cannot relate to him at all and retain anything in your life that’s a non-negotiable. Anything … any view, any conviction, any idea, any behavior, any relationship. He may change it, he may not change it, but at the beginning of the relationship you have to say, “In everything he must have the supremacy.”[ii]

If God just overlooked sin, said, “Don’t worry about it, you’re all doing the best you can,” he would not be a God of justice. And truth is, we all like justice. We want OTHER people, the people who hurt us, held accountable. Most of us only want mercy for ourselves. But that isn’t how it works.

And just as God can’t turn of his justice, he can’t turn off his holiness and righteousness. God doesn’t choose to be holy, God simply IS holy and righteous. Just like I can’t choose to not be 6’ tall. That’s simply how I am. I can’t suddenly decide to become 5’8”. And God’s holiness would simply consume us, destroy us. Not because God chooses that, but because his nature is holy and righteous. That’s just the way things ARE.

But God is also our loving creator, and he WANTS us to be in relationship with him. And that created a problem. A problem that we cannot, on our own, solve. How can we draw close to God, enjoy loving relationship with our creator, if God cannot just choose to be unrighteous, unholy, and unjust? The triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, chose to take the just punishment for sin upon himself. And so the eternal Son became flesh, born of the virgin Mary. Fully human, so that he could make atonement for sin for humanity. But also fully God, so that he could make atonement for sin before God.

When he died on that cross with the sin of humanity placed fully on him, the temple and the ritual sacrifices were no longer needed. Sin had been atoned for, once and for all. Justice for sin had been meted out on Jesus. Sin was defeated, because it was now forgiven. The debt created by sin was paid in full. We need only receive the gift by receiving Christ.

And when he rose again, death, our remaining enemy, was defeated. Look at Matthew 28:1-10. In Christ, we no longer need fear death, because death itself cannot separate us from God’s love. We cannot earn this gift. We can only accept it in Christ.

But Jesus didn’t die just so that we can be forgiven. He died so that we can be have a loving relationship with God. He died so that we can come near to God. And that amounts to an earthquake sized “life-quake” in our hearts and minds. He begins to transform us. Slowly, over time, much like plants grow, his transforming work takes hold in our lives and we begin to live differently. We think differently. We feel differently. We view the world differently.

I love the way God describes this process through the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel. “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ez. 36:26). In the New Living Translation, it says, “And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.”

The heart of stone he describes is a heart that is hardened toward God and is stubborn and callous. A heart hardened by sin. But its also hardened by life in this hard and callous world. By the things that happen to us. The things we see. The things we experience. The words we hear spoken to us. The heart of flesh is a heart that is softened, responsive to the touch of God, receptive to his voice. It’s a heart that is devoted to God and marked by compassion and is sensitive to the reality of God and his love for us.

God doesn’t just forgive us in Christ and then leave us unchanged. He goes to work in our lives. He doesn’t promise us a life of ease … a life of no pain or struggle. But he does promise us that life in his kingdom, under his rule and guidance, lived in his love, is beautiful, filled with purpose and meaning, regardless of the pain we endure and the struggles we face. He gives us a resurrection perspective on life and resurrection power for life. His life flows into and through us, and it transforms us and makes our lives beautiful.

Bible scholar and pastor N.T. Wright retells this story about an archbishop who was hearing a confession of sin from three hardened teenagers in the church. All three boys were trying to make a joke out of it so they met with the archbishop and confessed to a long list of ridiculous and grievous sins that they had not committed. It was all a joke. The archbishop, seeing through their bad practical joke, played along with the first two who ran out of the church laughing. But then he listened carefully to the third prankster, and before he got away told the young man, “Okay, you have confessed these sins. Now I want you to do something to show your repentance. I want you to walk up to the far end of the church and I want you to look at the picture of Jesus hanging on the cross, and I want you to look at his face and say, ‘You did all that for me and I don’t care that much.’ And I want you to do that three times.”

And so the boy went up to the front, looked at the picture of Jesus and said, “You did all that for me and I don’t care that much.” And then he said it again, but then he couldn’t say it the third time because he broke down in tears. And the archbishop telling the story said, the reason I know that story is that I was that young man. There is something about the cross. Something about Jesus dying there for us which leaps over all the theoretical discussions, all the possibilities of how we explain it this way or that way and it grasps us. And when we are grasped by it, somehow we have a sense that what is grasping us is the love of God.[iii] Let’s pray.

[i] Emily P. Freeman, Simply Tuesday (Revell, 2015), pp. 23-24

[ii] Tim Keller, The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive, Redeemer Presbyterian Church.

[iii] Adapted from N.T. Wright, “Grasped By the Love of God,” N.T. Wright Online