An Encounter with the Lord

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You know, we’ve all been through a lot of changes and a lot of upheaval in the last several weeks. This has actually been one of the craziest times that I can remember. And sometimes we’ll go through changes in life that upset everything.

Sometimes even good changes can upset everything. And when I say upset, I just mean they affect everything else. That can happen with bad things.

It can happen with good things. You know, this pandemic, I would say, is a bad thing, obviously. And it’s changed nearly everything about the way we, a lot of us live our lives.

It’s changed nearly everything about the way our country operates, at least at this time. And yet some good may come out of it. There may be some silver linings to those clouds.

But even good changes in our lives can affect everything. And when I think about this, the thing that first comes to mind for me, probably one of the biggest changes that has taken place in my entire life was when my oldest child, my son Benjamin, was born. everything in my life changed in that moment.

Now, I don’t point him out as the biggest change relative to the other kids because I love him more or I love them less. It’s because he’s the oldest. And so by the time the others came along, I was already daddy. But when Benjamin was born, that was the first time there was somebody there who was going to look to me as daddy.

And, you know, if you look at that in the right perspective, when you willingly take on that responsibility, it changes everything. I mean, it changes. It changed my priorities.

It certainly changed financial priorities. It changed time priorities. It even changed my outlook on life.

Some of y’all are going to think I’m silly for this. But I have typically enjoyed war movies, especially historical ones. My favorite movie is Patton, if we could just do something about General Patton’s language.

But my favorite movie is Patton. And so I would watch these war movies. After Benjamin was born, there was a period of time where I couldn’t handle those war movies.

They just tore me up inside because I’d look at these people that are fighting and dying, and I’d think, that’s somebody’s child. And I’d project onto that how I felt about my own child. I know, that probably sounds crazy to everybody listening.

But, you know, just my outlook on a lot of things changed. You know, now I’m back to, I can watch that again. But, you know, my perspective on a lot of things changed.

And in a lot of ways, my priorities and my perspective never went back. I mean, they were changed forever now because I have children. And, you know, there have been some greater changes.

I would say certainly trusting Jesus as my Savior was a greater and a longer lasting change than that. But that moment of here’s this tiny little life that depends on me was one of those moments in my life where everything changed. and we all have those moments where everything changes you probably have something in your mind right now that you can think of yeah that changed my life maybe a good thing maybe a bad thing but it changed your life forever now Mary Magdalene was a woman who experienced that kind of change but she experienced it on a more dramatic scale than than what most of us would experience because the incident that changed her life that we’re going to read about here in John chapter 20 was a one-time event, and she happened to be there as a witness for the turning point of all of God’s redemptive history.

And it did transform her life. It transformed the lives of all those around her. This one single event, the resurrection of Jesus, totally transformed her life and Peter’s life and John’s life and everybody that witnessed it.

It transformed their lives, their priorities, their perspectives in a way that they never went back to normal. And they went on to something better and more meaningful than normal. So hopefully you have joined me in John chapter 20. If you’ve got your Bible there, take it out with me. If you’ve got a device there where you can look it up, I’d recommend YouVersion or Bible Gateway.

Something. Get God’s Word in front of you this morning. We’re going to read John chapter 20, verse 11 through verse 18.

This is after they’ve already discovered that the tomb is empty. On that first Easter Sunday morning, they’ve already discovered that the tomb is empty. Mary Magdalene has already reported this back to the disciples.

Peter and John have already ran out to see with their own eyes. They’ve all seen that the tomb is empty, but they haven’t found Jesus yet. That’s where we pick up in John chapter 20, verse 11.

But Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she was crying, she stooped to look into the tomb. She saw two angels in white sitting where Jesus’ body had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet.

They said to her, Woman, why are you crying? Because they’ve taken away my Lord, she told them, and I don’t know where they’ve put him. Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know it was Jesus.

Why are you crying? who is it that you’re seeking? Now that was Jesus asking her.

I skipped a line. That would make more sense if I read the whole thing, wouldn’t it? But she did not know it was Jesus.

Verse 15. Woman, Jesus said to her, why are you crying? Who is it that you’re seeking?

Supposing he was the gardener, she replied, sir, if you’ve carried him away, tell me where you’ve put him and I will take him away. Jesus said to her, Mary. Turning around, she said to him in Aramaic, Rabbani, which means teacher.

Don’t cling to me, Jesus told her, since I have not yet ascended to the Father, but go to my brothers and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, I have seen the Lord, and she told them what he had said to her. Now, we need to understand that when Mary Magdalene came out to the tomb, when she came out there the second time, because she’d gone out there first looking for the body of Jesus with some other women, she was going to prepare the body.

There was no time before their Sabbath, and so they were going to take the spices out and the different things that they were going to use to embalm and prepare the body. They were going to do that on Sunday morning. They got out there, they found the tomb empty.

She went back to tell Peter and John that the tomb’s empty, the stone’s gone, the stones rolled away, the body’s gone, and she accompanies them back out there. Well, when she does this, when she comes back to the tomb, she was heartbroken. She was heartbroken for a number of reasons.

She was heartbroken because Jesus had died. She was heartbroken because his body was gone and she couldn’t offer him this one last service of preparing his body. And so she’s sitting there and she was crying out of desperation.

I mean, it’s hard enough when you lose a loved one. But I talked one of the nights this week on the devotional about how for them, for the disciples, and I would count Mary Magdalene as one of his disciples, one of his followers. She as devoted as anybody else.

It’s hard enough losing a loved one, but for the disciples, he was a loved one and then some. He had become their reason for everything they did. He had become their reason for getting up in the morning, for going about and preaching the Word.

He was the reason for all of it. He was what they had devoted their lives to over the last three years. Suddenly he’s been ripped away.

So think about the pain and heartache of losing a loved one and saying, what do I do now? She was in that boat. She very much would have understood that.

And she was heartbroken. And then think about those people who lose a loved one and the body is not found. She goes out there and wants to offer him just the final act of love and compassion and service of a proper burial, not just a hasty time of being put in the tomb, but to actually take the time to prepare the body and go through the rituals that they were supposed to do.

She wanted to offer him that last dignity, and she didn’t have that opportunity. So she’s just heartbroken. She’s in absolute despair, and she’s crying out of this desperation, and she’s crying so heavily.

The desperation and the sobbing and the weeping, it explains so much about why she acts and reacts the way she does. Verses 11 and 13 tell us that she was crying, and I think that’s the reason why she didn’t notice anything unusual about the angels. She looks in in verse 12 and sees these angels.

She doesn’t seem to think there’s anything odd about two people sitting in the tomb and doesn’t seem to notice that they’re angels. She doesn’t seem to realize anything is askew here. She’s that upset.

But then also in verse 14, we see she didn’t recognize Jesus. Now we think, how is that possible that she wouldn’t recognize Jesus? Well, there are a few possibilities.

Number one, we know that he was beaten beyond recognition during the crucifixion. He might different. But I attribute most of it to just the fact that she was crying in such desperation.

You know those times that you’re so upset and the tears fill your eyes. I mean, you can’t really see. I mean, how observant are you going to be?

You can’t really see every detail of what’s going on in front of you. And so she was crying so hard, she was so upset that she didn’t notice anything unusual about the angels or recognize Jesus. And we can tell from her conversations with the angel, with the angels and with Jesus, that the idea of resurrection wasn’t even on her radar.

And that’s one of the challenges I see to this idea that so many people have, that the disciples just made up the story of the resurrection. They hid the body and made up the story. If you look at the accounts of where they are, and I don’t think the accounts of where they were and what they were doing were made up later, because they don’t make them look very good.

They were doubters, and they were hiding in fear. They all abandoned Jesus. There’s nothing about these stories that tell me, oh, the disciples made them up later.

They would have made themselves look better if they’d made it up. But you read about the disciples, the twelve, and the women, and the things that they were doing, and what they thought, and how they reacted. They were not thinking about Jesus coming back from the dead.

That was the furthest thing from their radar. I mean, the idea of the tomb being empty was so unimaginable to Peter and John, they thought Surely Mary had made a mistake, so they ran out there to check it out for themselves. Mary, at this point, just assumed somebody has moved the body somewhere else, like one of the gardeners.

I don’t know if she thought maybe it was in the way, so they had to move it away so they could garden in the tomb. I don’t really know what she was thinking in that moment, other than the resurrection that Jesus had hinted at, and sometimes had spelled out for them that resurrection was not anywhere in the forefront of their minds. They were looking for a dead body.

She thought his body had been taken away. And so she was in despair because she didn’t have this hope that we have now, where we equate that Sunday morning with he’s alive, she equated that Sunday morning with he’s dead and now the body is gone. And she loved Jesus.

And because of this, she was absolutely torn apart, as were Peter and John and the others. They were all devastated by this. So Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, convinced that Jesus was dead, and she was devastated because of this, but Mary Magdalene left the tomb convinced that Jesus was alive.

She came there convinced he was dead and that it was all over, but she left there convinced that he was alive again. It took something pretty compelling to change her perspective on that, and that change changed her whole life. You see, what made the difference was when Jesus called her by name.

She’s looking at Jesus, and maybe he looks a little different after the beatings that he’d endured. Maybe he looked different from what she would have expected the body of Jesus to look like. Maybe it’s because her eyes are filled with tears, but she didn’t recognize Jesus by sight.

And even when he talked to her, she didn’t recognize him. You know what? When he called her by name, there was something in the way that he spoke to her.

There’s something in the way that he called to her by name that she recognized that that could be nobody else but Jesus. And her eyes were opened and she saw him for who he really was. In verse 16, all it took was the word Mary.

He called out to her by name. Now, why is this? Those of you who do go to Trinity, those of you who are with us each week, may remember from a few months ago, I did a series on sheep.

did a series of messages on how the Bible describes us as sheep and what that teaches us about our relationship to God as our shepherd. And one of the things that I talked about was in John chapter 10, where Jesus said that his sheep follow him because they know his voice. Jesus said those sheep that belong to him as shepherd, when he calls out to them, see, the sheep in a community would all be gathered together in a communal sheep pen.

Unless you were rich enough to afford to build your own sheep pen, which would have been pretty expensive to build it out of wood or stone, anything like that. There was often in these villages a communal sheep pen. Everybody’s sheep would be mixed in together.

And the only way you sorted them out is that they’d be put in there at the end of the day. And the next morning you’d take them out to graze. Well, the shepherd would come and stand when the gate was open.

The shepherd would come and stand at that opening and he would call out to his sheep. And the sheep that had been with him, the sheep that recognized his voice, would follow him out. And if you weren’t the shepherd of that sheep, they didn’t recognize your voice and they didn’t come when you called.

And so what Jesus was saying there in John chapter 10, when he said his sheep knew his voice and would follow him, those who belong to him will recognize him and they’ll be sorted out of the fold by their willingness to come and follow when he calls. Jesus used that word picture to help us understand. And here we see it playing out because she didn’t recognize by sight, but when her shepherd called her by name, she recognized his voice.

Literally, she recognized his voice, and she realized it was him. And so she looked at him, and from that moment she was convinced that it was him, and she was convinced that he was alive again. Because she didn’t look at him and say, can it be?

She didn’t say, is that you? she didn’t look at him and say, I need a little more convincing. He said, Mary, and she looked at him and said, Rabboni.

She said, teacher. She said, it’s you. This exclamation here of rabbi, of teacher, master.

She’s saying, it is you. She’s acknowledging that this person who stands before her that just a moment ago she thought was the gardener, when he called out to her by name, she realized it was her Lord. It was nobody other than Jesus.

She recognized Him for who He was. And she acknowledged Him, and she turned to embrace Him in verse 17. She turned to embrace Him, and we know this because He told her in verse 17, don’t cling to me.

Now, some translations say, don’t touch me. Sounds like something I would say to my followers. Don’t touch me.

Don’t hug on me, especially with the pandemic now. Not that I was much of a hugger beforehand. But he didn’t say, don’t touch me.

I think the best translation in the way we use the words today is, don’t cling to me. Because Mary ran to him and she acknowledged him. She ran to him and embraced him as her Lord.

I think as much as she loved him and as much as the other disciples loved him, if they had their way, they were going to hold on to him and never let go. Jesus said, don’t cling to me because I have not yet ascended to my Father. He said, I’m not staying around forever.

He had already told them, or he already had a plan that he was going to leave and he was going to send them another comforter. He was going to send them the Holy Spirit who would be with them always, who could dwell inside of them. So he told her, don’t get comfortable.

Don’t treat this as normal. Yes, I’m back, but don’t cling to me because this is not my long-term plan. He said, I’ve not yet ascended to the Father, but go tell my brothers that I am going to ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and to your God. He told her, go spread the word.

And she did. He sent her to spread the word and she went out to tell the world. To tell his disciples and tell everybody she could that the Lord was back and explain what he had said to her.

And Jesus’ resurrection, his appearance to her, that he was now alive again. proved that he’s Lord. It proved that he’s Lord.

It proved that he wasn’t a ghost or a spirit. If he was a ghost or a spirit, she wouldn’t have been able to cling to him. Now, I know some people have speculated that he may have been a ghost or a spirit because he was apparently able to come through walls.

I mean, the disciples were at one point in a locked room and Jesus shows up in the room. I think when you’re God, you can do whatever you want. But if he was a ghost or a spirit, she wouldn’t have been able to cling to him.

And also Thomas wouldn’t have been able to touch the nail prints in his hands. He wouldn’t have shown up on the shore with his disciples to eat fish with them. Now, the fact that she’s able to cling to him shows that he’s not a ghost or a spirit.

Some people have speculated that something called the swoon theory, that I think is intellectuals believed it back in the 1800s, and some people have grabbed onto it again in modern times, but I think it’s absolutely the most ridiculous explanation for what happened. The idea of the swoon theory is Jesus didn’t fully die on the cross. They thought he was dead.

They put him in the tomb. Think about this. He was brutally beaten.

He’d lost so much blood, his body was going into shock. They even thrust a spear through his side and ruptured the pericardium, sending out pericardial fluid, ruptured his heart, sending out blood with it, with the spear. They did all these things.

He still wasn’t dead. Not sure how that works. Still wasn’t dead, even though they ruptured his heart with a spear.

And after all that blood loss, after what should have been a fatal wound to his heart, the blood loss, the shock, everything that he was in, he was laid without medical attention or treatment of any kind for three days in a damp, dark hole, a cave. And three days later, he sort of revived and showed up and cut a strong enough figure for people to convince them that he had come back to life. I tell you what, put somebody through that.

Put somebody through half of what Jesus went through. Don’t kill them. Don’t actually go do this, all right?

I don’t want the FBI beating on my door because some lunatic on Facebook saw this and went out and did it. I’m saying hypothetically. Put somebody through that.

Put them in a cave for three days with no food, no medicine, and no medical attention of any kind. See what kind of shape they’re in three days later. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

It absolutely boggles the mind to think that people would believe that, and yet people do. But I’m telling you, when she saw him, he was in good enough health and good enough shape to prove to her that he hadn’t just merely appeared to die and come back. No, no, he had conquered death.

He wasn’t some man who was beaten nearly to death and managed to revive in the tomb. He was God in human flesh who conquered death for us. His resurrection proved he wasn’t a ghost or a spirit.

It proved he wasn’t the weak form of somebody who had revived after appearing to die. She told the disciples, I have seen the Lord. There’s no hedging her bets.

There’s no equivocating in her statement. She was absolutely convinced that who she had seen was the Lord who had come back from the dead in bodily form. That the Lord had risen from the dead in all of His power and glory.

She went to the disciples absolutely convinced. By the resurrection, Jesus proved that He’s Lord. By coming back from the dead, by conquering death, and standing before them again as this risen Lord.

He had proved that He’s Lord over all things. He’s Lord over life and death. He’s Lord over righteousness and judgment.

He had conquered death. He had purchased our forgiveness. He had forgiven our sins.

He had defeated Satan and he’d showed himself to be Lord of all. When he came up out of that tomb three days later and he appeared to Mary and he appeared to the others, he proved that he’s Lord of all. And this absolutely changed their lives.

It changed Mary’s life. It changed Peter’s life. It changed John’s life.

These people gave up everything to go and spread the word that Jesus had risen from the dead. And folks, if you’re watching this and having any skeptical thoughts at all, one of the greatest evidences to me of the resurrection is the change that was produced in the lives of these people. Now, we know that people will die for a lie.

If you believe that other religions are untrue, people are still willing to die for them because they believe they’re true. I was listening to a podcast this week on the story of Jonestown. Some of the people at Jonestown in Guyana in 1978 thought that Jim Jones was God, and so some of them willingly drank poison because he told them to.

They were willing to die for a lie because they thought it was the truth. But people don’t die for what they know is a lie. And if the disciples had made up the story of the resurrection, somebody would have talked.

Of the 11 remaining disciples, 10 of them died grisly deaths, and John died in exile. The reason all of them were persecuted to death was that they were out preaching the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Telling people to be nice and do the right thing, that didn’t get them in trouble with the government. What the Roman government and what the Jewish officials didn’t like was that they were preaching that Jesus Christ had died and risen from the dead.

And if they had made up that story, if any part of this wasn’t true, somebody would have talked. Somebody would have exposed the conspiracy to save his own skin. But nobody did.

All of these people who were eyewitnesses, these purported eyewitnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, they all went to their graves. They all suffered immensely and went to their graves maintaining, insisting that they had seen him alive again. They gave up their entire lives to spread the message that Jesus was alive.

That moment when Mary recognized her Lord for who he was and went back and told the other disciples that she had seen the Lord, that moment was the tipping point, the turning point in her whole life where suddenly everything was different. And it was that way for all of them because Mary recognized that her Lord rose again and she acknowledged Him for who He was. And the resurrection calls us to respond as well.

Now, you can look at the resurrection with a skeptical eye and say, I don’t believe it. You can look at it and say, it’s pretty compelling and I believe it. But you can’t ignore it.

There are serious truth claims made by the resurrection that Jesus either is God in human flesh who died on the cross and rose again, or He’s not. And we have to decide which. Each of us have to decide whether we believe He is what He said He was or whether He isn’t.

And if we decide, if we believe that He is what He said He is, then that realization should change everything. And it starts with acknowledging Him for who He is. That He is the Lord.

That He is God in human flesh who died and rose again. That He died to forgive our sins and He rose again to prove it all. And this morning I would invite you, like Mary, to acknowledge the risen Lord.

Acknowledge that He is your Lord. See, the Bible tells us that we’ve all sinned against God and we’re all separated from Him because of our sin. We’re all separated.

We don’t have the relationship with Him like we ought to have. And we’re separated from Him in this life and we’re going to be separated from Him in the life to come in a place called hell. And none of us can do enough good to change that.

None of us can do enough good to earn our way into heaven or to earn a relationship with God. Jesus Christ came to die to take responsibility for our sins on Himself and to die on the cross bearing our full punishment so that we could be saved, so that we could be forgiven, so that we could have that relationship with the Father and eternal life with Him.