Big News — Easter Sunday 2022

We Christians should be the world’s most adventuresome people. In Jesus’ Resurrection, God is making all things NEW!

The popular image of Easter is no news at all. Don’t get me wrong. I like chocolate eggs and fluffy chicks and bunnies. The problem lies deeper. People think see Easter as a happy ending after the horror of Good Friday. But that’s not enough.

The real NEWS is that God is putting the whole world right. God is making all things NEW! That’s about this world—not just somewhere called ‘heaven.’ The resurrection of Jesus begins that great work.

Here is what we Christians believe about Easter. On Good Friday, Jesus died. He took everything that sin and evil could dish out. He absorbed it all. Death took its best shot and lost. We know that because the tomb was empty that first Easter. Christ is risen! (Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!)

Jesus’ earthly body was completely used up in that final battle with the Evil One. And God raised up his Son in a new body that cannot die. Jesus the Messiah is the beginning of God’s New Creation. In that New Creation, mourning and crying will be no more. Pain and suffering will be no more. Death itself will die. All of Creation will live the life God has always intended. Today we celebrate the beginning of that New Creation. Christ is risen! (Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!)

But there’s more! Easter is the beginning of it all. We live as Easter people. We work to make that new life a reality in our lives, in our church, and in our world. When God sees fit, this world will be done. Nothing good in it will be lost. God will raise up the New Creation. What we see in Jesus now will be true for all of Creation in the end.

In Jesus’ Resurrection, God is making all things NEW!

That includes…YOU! Out of the greatest failure in the universe—the crucifixion—God raises newness of life. We are baptized into that same cross so we too can walk in newness of life. “Do you not know,” Paul writes in Romans, chapter six, “that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” We forget that all of the time.

Since we forget that, we miss out on the best part of Easter, “Therefore,” Paul continues, “we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” Christ is risen! (Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!)

In Jesus’ Resurrection, God is making all things NEW!

We have died the one death that matters. If you can’t kill me, you can’t control me. Dying and rising with Jesus is the only true freedom. The one true declaration of independence is found in Romans 8:38-39: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

“Newness of life” is how we walk in this world! We should not restrict that thinking to funerals and some faraway future. Instead, we Christians should be the great experimenters, the great innovators, for the sake of the world.

In a real sense, the church is the world’s “test kitchen” for faith, hope and love. The church is the place where we experiment with the New Life and then share what we have discovered. To do otherwise is to risk working against God.

Remember, in Jesus’ Resurrection, God is making all things NEW!

Here’s the problem. We keep acting as if Easter hasn’t happened! We can forgive the world for such blockheadedness. But how can we shout Resurrection on Sunday and grumble on Monday, “Nothing has changed”? In Romans 6, verse eleven, Paul puts it another way. “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” That’s what Easter Sunday looks like on Easter Monday. Christ is risen! (Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!)

But we continue to live the same way even though everything has changed. We can skate along for a while as if nothing has happened. But when we face mortality and meaninglessness, mere human capacity fails us. When common sense produces bad solutions, it’s time for something new.

In Jesus’ Resurrection, God is making all things NEW!

We are always so worried about how we will get to the future. But on Easter, God’s future has come to us. Nobody saw this one coming. God’s future is here. His name is Jesus. Christ is risen!

So a good pointer to God’s work is when something NEW is happening. A good pointer away from God’s work is when things stay the same. Jesus does not promise us lives that are stable, safe and secure. But he does promise us lives that are interesting.

In Jesus’ Resurrection, God is making all things NEW!

The women were scared stiff when they found the tomb empty. The disciples thought their story was just idle talk. You are going to hear voices whispering, either in your head or from people not far away, telling you much the same thing: don’t be silly, it can’t be true, and if it was it would be so scary it would hurt.

Well, yes, it is scary, but it isn’t an idle tale. It’s the sober, daytime truth. Don’t look for the living among the dead. Jesus is on the move. Jesus calls you to join him in making God’s new creation happen, right here and right now. Christ is risen! (Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!)

In Jesus’ Resurrection, God is making all things NEW!

The Slave Who Would be King

Philippians 2:5-11

Several years ago, millions of people were wrapped up in the television series, Game of Thrones. The series is all about bending the knee. Who rules? Who is the ruled? The popularity of that show demonstrates how anxious people are about this. Who’s in charge, and why isn’t it me?

Jesus was executed as part of a first century “game of thrones.” Let’s think about why that happened and what it means for us. Let’s ask, “Why?”

Why was Jesus killed? He was killed because the tyrants of this world don’t tolerate competition.

We need to remember that, in the ancient world, death by crucifixion was the worst that could happen to anyone. Crucifixion meant hitting rock bottom. You couldn’t get any lower or be more shamed. For Jesus, the death on the cross showed how low God will go to lift us up.

Jesus is the slave who now is king. And he is king because he willingly became that slave. He has not left the one form behind in order to assume the other. The cross is becomes his throne, God’s throne. For death, it’s game over. Death is the last tool of the tyrant, so the cross is the end of the game for the powers of this world.

In Jesus’ death and resurrection, he gives himself for us and to us. We experience that weekly when we come to the Lord’s Table for Holy Communion. That’s why we can call Communion the “Feast of Victory”!

Why did Jesus die? He died so that death would be destroyed

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus is God’s answer to that prayer. Jesus’ death shows us God’s heart. The God we worship serves. And the God we worship serves by dying. As we heard Dietrich Bonhoeffer say a few weeks ago, only a suffering God can help.

In ancient Greek, the words in Philippians two are a poem. The poem is three stanzas of three lines each…except. That balance is interrupted by those words, “even death on a cross.” These words throw the powers of sin, death and evil out of whack. These words de-stabilize a world bent on self-destruction. These words jar us out of sleepy surrender to sin. And these words show us most clearly who God is and how God works.

So, for example, when we come to the Lord’s Supper, we meet the slave who is king. He is king precisely as he gives himself for us and to us. The folks going to Detroit have been studying what it means for God to be in solidarity with us. The reading from Philippians 2 is the answer to that question. God’s solidarity is Jesus–given for you, to you, and through you.

Now we can move on to the more important question.

Why does Jesus live? So that all can live through him.

This is the “mind of Christ” that Paul urges on us. The only way to be the real church is to let ourselves be emptied for the sake of love. It is only that “loving vacuum” that allows us to be the church for the world. As Pastor Dennis Bratcher has said, we are called to live the “poured out” life.

Why does this matter? Because God calls us to die and live with Jesus now and forever. “For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ,” writes the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians eight, verse nine, “that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”

What does this mean in practical terms for the church?

It means first that mere survival is of no concern to us. We are resurrection people. We know how this all turns out. God has defeated death. So we can focus on life. Anxiety about our survival as a congregation or as a church is a failure of our resurrection nerve and an expression of bad faith. As he waited his execution in a Nazi prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way.

“The church is the church only when it exists for others. . . . The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving. . . . It must not underestimate the importance of human example which has its origin in the humanity of Jesus.” (Letters and Papers from Prison, pages 203-4).

It means second that we seek the mind of Christ. Personal preference is a secondary matter. For example, when we think about worship schedules here at Emanuel, what matters is what is best for the mission of the congregation, not what is best for me. When we think about pastoral needs for the future, what matters is what the Holy Spirit wants, not what I want. When we think about the future direction of this congregation, we focus on the mission of the gospel and not on my comfort zone.

We live our lives now as servants of the real King of the cosmos. In Romans 14, verses seven and eight, for example, Paul applies this to how we live in Christian community. “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves,” he tells the quarrelsome Roman Christians. “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” That’s what it means when we remember that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess.

Bowing and confessing means that our desires are subject to his commands. When we live that way, we allow the world to see what it means to live under the real Ruler of the Universe. And that is part of our calling as Jesus followers. We are called to live like Jesus is our one true king.

Why did this happen to Jesus? Jesus died to show us how to live—how to live a life of ultimate trust, a life that is wholly and completely given to God. This is the answer to our prayer for the Kingdom on earth as in heaven. And this is the best life of all! It is the real “game of thrones.” This week we remember where the Real Ruler of the Universe sits. And we pray that we will let him make his throne in our hearts.

Text Study for Luke 24:1-12 (Part Two)

“Take the risen Christ out of the NT,” write Hageman and Beker in their Proclamation commentary, “and the rest of the story is meaningless tragedy” (page 5). Some homiletics instructors warn that it is a rookie preaching mistake to spend time on Easter Sunday “proving” or “demonstrating the truth of” the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead on that first Easter. Yet, the veracity of the resurrection event seems to be a central concern for the Lukan author – not only in chapter 24, but throughout the body of Luke-Acts.

The group of women who witnessed the empty tomb, heard the admonition from the angels, and remembered Jesus’ own words (Luke 24:8) returned from the tomb and reported what they had seen (and not seen) and heard to the eleven apostles and all the rest of the company of disciples (Luke 24:10). “And these words appeared, in their judgment,” the Lukan author notes, “to be nonsense, and they refused to believe them.” (Luke 24:11, my translation). The Lukan author uses the rest of the chapter to demonstrate that the resurrection of Jesus was anything but nonsense.

Photo by Jessica Lewis Creative on Pexels.com

I have found, over the years, that many of my folks came to Easter services hoping precisely for some reassurance that the bodily resurrection of Jesus has really happened. It continues to seem, as it has from the earliest days, that reports of Jesus risen from the dead may in fact be nothing but nonsense. We live in a material world, governed by relatively unchanging and reliable physical laws. A story about a process or event that seems to violate these laws and the worldview upon which they rely – such a story needs a bit more than trumpets and lilies to make it seem plausible (much less certain).

Deborah Prince notes that concerns about the veracity of Christian resurrection claims are as old as the purported event itself. We find evidence in Matthew’s gospel that guards were rumored to have been bribed to support the story. Paul acknowledges in First Corinthians that this resurrection business seems ridiculous to Gentiles and offensive to Jews. Questions about the resurrection animate conflicts in the Jewish community, according to the reports of Luke-Acts.

Prince reminds us that the controversy not only continues but increases in the centuries following the first Easter Sunday. She quotes the words of third-century pagan skeptic, Celsus, in his debate with Origen of Alexandria. Celsus describes the women as hysterical females who were probably hallucinating or engaging in wishful thinking. Or more likely, Celsus argues, the witnesses fabricated the resurrection story in order to impress and manipulate people.

She notes that many scholars have seen an apologetic agenda in the Lukan account – a desire to defend and even prove the truth of the Good News of Jesus Christ. “Although the precise definition of the genre of apologetic literature and its relationship to Luke-Acts is still highly debated,” Prince writes, “it cannot be denied that in some way and to some extent Luke is concerned with assessing the truth of his narrative to his audience” (page 26). We can see that in the first verses of the Lukan account, where the author asserts the intention to establish the “truth” for Theophilus.

Prince examines how the Lukan author may have demonstrated the reliability of the Gospel account in ways that met first-century standards for veracity. Witnesses were critical to the demonstration of a report’s truthfulness. The more ancient the witness, the greater was the credibility. In the Lukan account, the “fulfillment” of Jewish scriptures functioned as an inventory of ancient and therefore highly credible witnesses. More recent witnesses were also used, although if they stood to gain from the witnessing, their testimony was of less value. Women, children, and slaves were, by legal definition, unreliable sources of credible testimony.

The Lukan author, therefore, has an immediate credibility gap. “The Christian traditions of Jesus’ resurrection depend upon unreliable witnesses,” Prince reminds us, “women and friends, both of whom testify voluntarily. Their social status would not assist their credibility, nor would their character, which is never explicitly described in any positive way up to this point in the narrative” (page 28). The Lukan author needs additional rhetorical weight to shore up the testimony of these eyewitnesses.

First, there is the testimony at the tomb itself. The two men in shiny clothes remind the women of Jesus’ words – where, we readers know, Jesus described how his ministry fulfilled scripture. The women then “remembered these words” (see Luke 24:8). The apostles and the rest of the disciples regard the report of the empty tomb as nonsense. That’s why it’s important that Peter runs to the tomb to verify the women’s report (and one of the reasons why it is likely that Luke 24:12 was part of the original Lukan account).

Even though Peter confirms the report of the empty tomb, that’s all that is certain at this point in the narrative. “In only two verses, Luke is able to acknowledge the unreliable status of the women witnesses,” Prince argues, “and at the same time offer the first corroboration of the women’s testimony, while continuing to leave the disciples and the readers unsure of the truth” (page 29).

Therefore, the Lukan author provides additional witnesses and testimony. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus add their voices to those of the women. In addition, sometime after his sprint to the empty tomb, Peter (Simon) encounters the Risen Jesus. His testimony seems to be accepted without question. In the Emmaus Road story, the witness of Jewish scripture is added once again to the argument. Nonetheless, this is still not enough testimony to meet the Lukan standards for reliability.

The empty tomb and the missing body have been seen and verified by Peter. Jesus has appeared on at least two separate occasions. Both Peter and the Emmaus couple have identified him as the Lord Jesus. Yet, when Jesus appears directly to the apostles and the rest of the disciples, they still wonder if they are seeing a ghost. They are both joyful and not believing (verse 41). Jesus requests a snack and eats it in front of them.

“In these verses the ancient expectations that the spirits of the dead cannot be touched and cannot eat,” Prince writes, “are employed to prove that the Jesus before them is not merely an image of his living presence” (page 29). This physical evidence is amplified and supported by additional teaching from the Jewish scriptures. Prince notes that this time the scriptural witness includes the Psalms as well as Moses (Torah) and the Prophets.

“With certainty finally attained through the presentation of multiple witnesses, both contemporary and ancient,” Prince writes, “the disciples are now prepared to act as witnesses to the world, which they have in fact been doing throughout Luke’s narrative” (page 30). The Lukan author has met the standards of credibility for a first-century document and buttressed the testimony of the women, the weakest element of the evidence, in the first-century evaluation.

Prince draws several implications from her study. The emphasis on the resistance to easy belief on the part of the disciples perhaps matches the same resistance in the Lukan community and among contemporary Christians. Because the first witnesses were hard to convince, that means they were not pushovers, ready to fall for the first “idle tale” to come their way. We, who have our own doubts, are not the first ones to struggle with the credibility of the resurrection accounts in the gospels, nor will we be the last. An easy acceptance of the astonishing news of God’s victory over death is perhaps a sign of an unexamined faith rather than a sign of a secure faith.

“As educated readers, like Luke and his audience,” Prince writes, “we do not need to be content with easy and pat assertions that gloss over real concerns of reliability. Rather,” she continues, “we can be assured by Luke’s narrative that the truth of Jesus’ resurrection has been deemed credible by the ever widening and diverse testimony of those who experienced Jesus alive” (page 30). Yet, that isn’t where the Lukan author ends the account.

Instead, we move on to the Book of Acts and further experiences of the resurrected Jesus in the lives of the early believers and in the witness of the Church. “Just as the first disciples slowly grew in their conviction that Jesus was alive and recognized the reality of his presence with them through the opening of the scriptures and the breaking of bread together,” Prince concludes, “so Luke insists that those to whom he writes, both then and now, are likewise presented with multiple opportunities to witness for themselves the reality of Jesus’ living presence through our lives in Christian community” (page 30).

The Lukan account provides witnesses for the two necessary and sufficient conditions (in N. T. Wright’s argument) for proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus. Those two conditions are the empty tomb and experiences of the living Jesus. “The early Christians did not invent the empty tomb and the ‘meetings’ or ‘sightings of the risen Jesus in order to explain a faith they already had,” Wright argues. “They developed that faith because of the occurrence, and convergence, of these two phenomena” (page 707).

Therefore, the Easter Gospel is not merely an historical report. Rather, it is a promise based on both the witness and experience of Christians for over two millennia. That promise is that we, too, can and do meet the risen Christ in the gathered body of believers, in the Spirit-driven interpretation of scripture, in the breaking of the bread, and the mission of the Gospel in the larger world.

The Lukan author invites us to echo the words of the disciples in Luke-Acts, that “we, too, are witnesses of these things.”

References and Resources

Hearon, Holly. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/resurrection-of-our-lord-3/commentary-on-luke-241-12-6.

Prince, Deborah C. (2012) “Resurrecting Certainty in the Gospel of Luke,” Leaven: Vol. 20: Iss. 1, Article 8. Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/leaven/vol20/iss1/8.

Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Minneapolis, MN.: Fortress Press, 2003.

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Text Study for Luke 24:1-12 (Part One)

The Resurrection of Our Lord, 2022.

“But the first thing after the Sabbath, very early in the morning, they went to the tomb and brought aromatic oils which they had prepared. But they found that the stone had been rolled away from the tomb. Now, when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus” (Luke 24:1-3, my translation).

I was in college when the bumper stickers and public relations campaign first began. The backs of cars were decorated with the phrase “I Found It!” This was part of an effort by Campus Crusade for Christ to build on and take advantage of the Jesus movement of the Sixties and early Seventies. This was same moment in history that produced things like “Key 73” and the “Good News for Modern Man” translation of the New Testament and the Psalms.

It wasn’t long before responses in kind appeared. Some snarky and superior denominations produced stickers proclaiming, “I Never Lost It!” Then there were the happy and increasingly militant former-Christians-turned-atheists (me among them) who proudly declared in print “I Lost It.” Perhaps my favorite was the response of those who embraced the Cheech and Chong school of theological reflection: “I Smoked It.”

I have often told people that even when I was an atheist, I was still a Lutheran atheist. I knew that regardless of my personal prejudices regarding God’s existence, if there was such a Being, then we humans were not the ones who would be in the “finding” business. Finding us was God’s primary activity and why the Divinity got the Big Money.

For a while, I was pretty sure that such a Divinity didn’t exist. If I was lost (and I was), then I was on my own. I expended no energy trying to find Someone whom I was sure simply wasn’t there and certainly wasn’t there for me. Then – at precisely such a point in my life – I got found. Unfortunately, that phrase never caught on as a bumper sticker, so my future in faith-based public relations stalled before it started.

As Karolyn Lewis noted in a recent “Sermon Brainwave” podcast, no one in our text finds Jesus. Nor is there a “resurrection appearance” by Jesus at the tomb in the Lukan account. Instead, the text is about “finding” that Jesus is not there. The one who does the finding in Luke 24 (and in the whole Lukan account) is Jesus, not us.

This is a consistent theme in the Lukan account. A few times characters “find” Jesus. The shepherds find him in a manger wrapped in swaddling cloths, but only after being directed there by the angel. After three days of anxious searching, his parents find the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, engaged in Torah debate. Those who arrested Jesus came to him on the Mount of Olives, but only because Judas led them there.

Otherwise, it is Jesus (and his metaphorical representatives) who do the finding. The owner of a hundred sheep wanders over hill and through valley to find the one who was lost. The woman cleans her house from top to bottom to find the one coin. The generous father runs to a son who is still lost until he is embraced. And that same father leaves the house to encourage the other son to be found in the midst of his self-imposed exile.

Jesus passes through Jericho and looks up into a sycamore tree. He sees Zacchaeus and calls him down. Jesus invites himself to dinner, and salvation arrives at the home of the chief tax collector. It is Jesus’ mission, especially in the Lukan account, to seek and to save the lost. Jesus does the finding in the Lukan gospel.

On that first Easter morning, at the earliest possible and permissible moment, the women come to the tomb. They find the stone rolled away from the entrance. But they do not find the body of the Lord Jesus. There is no cry of “Eureka” on that first Easter morning. “Eureka!” after all, is simply the English adoption of the Greek word for “I have found it!” In the Lukan account, Easter is all about being found by Jesus.

There is an air of the unfinished in the lectionary reading for this Easter Sunday. It’s not the fearful perplexity of the Markan composition. That’s another story altogether. No, this experience of the incomplete results from the size of the Lukan Easter story. It takes up all of chapter twenty-four, not merely the first twelve verses. What we have as our Easter lection is the prelude to the complete Easter account in the Lukan gospel.

The central story in this account is the journey toward Emmaus. Jesus finds the two disciples, completely absorbed in their debate about what Jesus’ crucifixion meant in light of the Hebrew scriptures. Jesus finds Simon as well, although we only hear about that encounter secondhand. Jesus finds them gathered together and demonstrates the realities of his resurrected body. In the Lukan gospel, Jesus does the finding.

N. T. Wright describes the “most spectacular” parallels between the Emmaus story and that of Jesus’ anxious parents trying to find him in Jerusalem. Both events happen at a Passover. A couple begins to travel home from Jerusalem and learns something that forces them to turn back. In both cases they find that Jesus is not with them. The parents search for three days, Wright observes, “the parallel to which hardly needs pointing out” (page 651).

When they find Jesus and ask him about his disrespect for his parents, the reply should take us directly to Luke 24. “Didn’t you know that it was necessary for me to be among my father’s affairs?” (see Luke 2:49, and Luke 24:25-26). “The significance of Easter, for Luke,” Wright notes, “is not least that it completes things that ‘must’ take place concerning Jesus. In doing so,” he continues, “it reveals to people who had not previously grasped the point, the story that Israel’s scriptures had been telling all along” (page 651).

In our Easter reading, it seems that the first “witnesses” to the Resurrection are looking in the wrong places. “Why are you searching for the living among the dead?” ask the two men in the shiny outfits. “He’s not here; rather, he has been raised” (Luke 24:5-6, my translation). We’re not going to find Jesus in the places we are most likely to look – the places where death and decay are still at work. All we’ll find there is a tomb looking for a purpose, and burial cloths left all by themselves.

“The question, ‘why do you seek the living among the dead?’ draws attention to the incongruity between the women’s expectations and their experience,” writes Holly Hearon in her workingpreacher.org commentary. “They came to the tomb expecting to find the dead, because that is the function of tombs: to house the dead. What they discover,” Hearon continues, “is that the ‘tomb’ is now an empty tomb. It is a familiar sign transformed by resurrection.”

In the Emmaus story, it seems that the two disciples are looking for the wrong things in Scripture. “But we had hoped,” they sigh, “that he was the one who was about to redeem Israel” Luke 24:21a, my translation). They can’t seem to get to that insight on their own. It is necessary not only for Jesus to die and be raised but also for him to open the scriptures, and their hearts, so they can see and understand.

In the resurrection appearance to the full community, it seems that the community is looking for the wrong sort of body. When Jesus appears to them, they fear they are seeing a ghost – a wraith in human form, but not in a “real” human body. He urges them to touch him. He shows them his wounds. He eats a piece of broiled fish. And again, he opens their minds to understand what has been written about him.

Most important, this is the body of the Lord Jesus, precisely the body which the women did not find in the empty tomb. Jesus’ name and title are omitted from a few manuscripts in Luke 24:3, although they are early and authoritative. However, the majority of the text-critical Aland committee voted to keep the words in the text, and rightly so. It’s not just any “body” that is at stake. The body to be found (rather to be found by) is that of the Lord Jesus.

It’s not that the women find nothing when they come to the empty tomb. Levine and Witherington look at the “finding” motif in the Lukan account and point to two texts in particular. Jesus declares in Luke 11:9-10 that everyone who searches finds. In Luke 18:8, at the conclusion to the Parable of the Persistent Widow, he asks if the Son of Man indeed will find faith on earth when he comes.

“The women seek the body of Jesus, and they will find him as their resurrected Lord,” Levine and Witherington write. “The women then will have the faith and courage,” they continue, “needed to carry out their apostolic mission of proclaiming his resurrection” (pages 650-651). I would suggest that the women are found by their resurrected Lord. But clearly, in the tomb what they find is the faith and courage to proclaim what they have seen, regardless the response.

When Jesus finds us, we find the faith and courage to go forward.

References and Resources

Hearon, Holly. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/resurrection-of-our-lord-3/commentary-on-luke-241-12-6.

Levine, Amy-Jill, and Witherington III, Ben. The Gospel of Luke (New Cambridge Bible Commentary). Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Minneapolis, MN.: Fortress Press, 2003.

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