It’s too soon after the murder to mention the names of the people involved; so, the following names are changed. In a small town, Janice, a young grade school teacher, had tried to break off a dating relationship with a young man. The young man had serious mental illness. He shot and killed Janice; then committed suicide. Her parents, Jack and Maxine, were friends with the young man’s parents. In the midst of their grief Jack and Maxine got in their car and drove to call on his parents. No matter the tragedies, they set out soon, much quicker than I’d be able to do, to try keeping the relationship intact between them and the young man’s parents. Consider the effort of those grieving parents as trying to put part of a broken world back together. And, reflecting upon Jesus’ crucifixion, consider God’s raising Jesus from the dead as God’s setting out to put the broken world back together.
We can’t gloss over that Jesus’ death was a great tragedy. We can’t just show up Easter morning and bask in Jesus’ resurrection without acknowledging how terrible was his crucifixion and the circumstances in this world that bring about such evil. Not acknowledging the tragedy of Jesus’ death would be like not admitting that the shooting of Janice was a tragedy.
We don’t attend worship expecting to face the world’s most unpleasant realities, but we don’t deny them here, either. We all know tragedies: some caused by people we hate or love or used to love, some caused by germs or body tissues whose cells multiply irregularly, or by chemically impaired decisions of drivers, and some due to nature’s violent whims. Life is full of disasters that aren’t deserved and sufferings that can’t be explained. We could slide over Jesus’ suffering death by stating the grand theological conclusion that Jesus’ death was meant to happen. But when we begin our reasoning in that manner instead of ending there after acknowledging a world of mysterious pain, we smooth over the catastrophe of Jesus’ death.
Jesus’ death was a tragedy. His death should not have happened. Humans by any standard should not allow such a miscarriage of justice. However, and this is the Bible’s grand proclamation, God is so loving and so powerful that God would use even the worst that humans could do in order to bring this world back together, and God did it quickly. Ever count days between Jesus’ death and the tomb being found empty? So many times Jesus said he’d be raised on the third day or after three days. Jesus said, “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). Count the days. Jesus died Friday at 3 p.m. and he was raised at least before dawn on Sunday. That’s right. Not even two days.
I’ll give you two explanations for this shortness of time. First is the scholarly explanation that Hebrews counted part of a day as a day. But the explanation I’m drawn to is that, considering all the evidence of the Bible, God couldn’t wait to put the world back together. Think for a few minutes about Jesus’ resurrection as God’s hurrying to put the world back together. Things had gone so terribly wrong. God hadn’t wanted Jesus to die. God wanted people to repent and believe in Jesus. If not, when Jesus preached, his telling people to repent and believe was some kind of pretense, a going through the motions because it wouldn’t make any difference if or how many people repented and believed.
However one might reason about God’s actions in Jesus’ death, after God’s chosen Messiah, God’s unique Son was rejected and killed, God now set out as fast as possible to bring the world right again. We find out about it like this: Mary of Magdala walks outside the walls of old Jerusalem in the dark. It’s dark in more ways than one. She starts to the tomb as the sky turns pink. Picture in your mind Mary approaching Jesus’ tomb while it’s quite dark, stumbling down the path through the unlit, ancient world. Mary hasn’t slept for two nights, numbed by grief and still in shock. She should carefully watch every step but she can hardly manage a shuffle.
She saw Jesus die and John’s gospel offers nothing that would have us conclude that Mary hopes Jesus is alive again. Why is she coming to the tomb now? Ask her and she probably can’t even answer. She isn’t coming because she’s not thinking well, or thinking at all. We’ve all had times like that, when the mind doesn’t work. Feet barely work. That’s what disasters do to people.
When she realizes the rock that covered the tomb’s door is moved, she dashes to tell Peter and Jesus’ other student — probably has to wake them or finds them, also, sleepless. Especially we need to remember: After these men come to the tomb a total of three people have seen that Jesus is gone, but only one believes. The empty tomb doesn’t prove Jesus has risen from the dead even for those who’ve been told ahead of time that Jesus would die and be raised. Beyond that, even when Jesus stands right beside Mary and asks, “Why are you weeping?” she doesn’t believe in Jesus’ resurrection. She only responds to the resurrected Jesus when he speaks her name. Mary comes here looking for a dead Jesus, but a resurrected Jesus has to find her and speak her name before she believes in him.
The gospel stories about Jesus’ resurrection show that the news of his living again knocked people out of kilter. Read the resurrection accounts in the four gospels and see how they disagree on the details they relate — exactly as you’d expect when people live through the world’s greatest event. Jesus’ resurrection is exciting and disorienting. Its consequences echo through lives and centuries and can never be measured. As new as Jesus’ resurrection was for the folk in Jerusalem two millennia ago, we already know the story. Most people attending church on Easter Sunday know about Jesus’ resurrection. People might not believe it, but at least they know that the church for 2,000 years has proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection. The church circles around and is held by Jesus’ resurrection as surely as our planet orbits the sun. Jesus’ resurrection is the center of the New Testament.
Nowadays, however, because we’ve heard it so much, the message of Jesus’ resurrection sometimes receives a bored, wearisome, or skeptical response. Our continued Christian affirmation that the tomb was empty won’t bring many people to faith, knowing that of the first three who physically saw the empty tomb, only one believed upon that evidence alone. Perhaps people would become more interested in Jesus’ resurrection if they saw indications that it makes a difference in people’s lives today. Nothing, even an empty tomb, is guaranteed to lead people to faith. Yet, we can at least turn our attention to modern-day demonstrations of God’s putting the world right through Jesus’ resurrection.
Looking at contemporary evidence of Jesus’ living in Christians is complicated by modern attitudes. Today it’s not just that people don’t want to run to the empty tomb. It’s not just that people don’t want to put out the effort to bend down to look in the tomb. Many people today, if the truth of their hearts be told, are afraid that they’ll get their hopes up only to have them smashed. It’s happened to many of us — life’s leading us to believe there’s good reason to trust Christ and to rely upon his Spirit. Then we’re slapped in the face by tragedy ripping our world apart, or by some ignorant preacher who seems to mention only hell, or by one of those well-known, old-fashioned, knock-down-drag-out church fights. We might have tried to believe once, but there’s so much to sap our hope and to dump our faith like a wrecked truck spilling its load on the freeway. We might not look like it, but many of us come to Easter morning spiritually similar to Mary of Magdala, shuffling our feet wearily, merely walking forward in life and not even knowing why. For all the reasons not to believe, can we risk that Jesus’ resurrection is really God’s way to start putting life, our life, back together again?
Jacob Daniel DeShazer died March 15, 2008 in Salem, Oregon. He was 95 and most people remember him as one of Jimmy Doolittle’s flyers who bombed Japan on April 18, 1942. That air strike was America’s first offensive effort against the Empire of Japan after the Japanese sneak attack upon US forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7, 1941. DeShazer’s crew bailed out over Japanese occupied territory in China. Some captured American airmen were executed. Jake was among those imprisoned for the rest of the war: 40 months, 36 months in solitary confinement. All the crewmen were beaten, tortured, and starved to near insanity. Jake hated his guards and all Japanese.
Then in May 1944, a guard delivered to Jake a Bible that the prisoners had received and were reading one by one. He had three weeks to keep it, during which he read it constantly and memorized much of it. On June 8, 1944, he accepted Christ as his Savior and Lord at which time he began to be flooded not only with the presence of God but with love for others, especially the Japanese. God met him there in prison, loved him, spoke to him, and summoned him to return to Japan after the war to spread the good news of God’s love in Christ.
Two months after being released as a starved and abused prisoner of war he was in college in the United States. He completed four years of study in three in order to hurry back to Japan to announce the alternate existence that God offers in Jesus Christ. God forgives us so we’ll forgive others. God loves us so we’ll love others. Jake spent thirty years speaking the good news of Jesus’ resurrection. At one meeting in Japan Japanese soldiers attended who’d been his prison guards. They listened to Jake tell of the new world begun through Jesus and they committed themselves to the living Christ. God was hurrying through Jake DeShazer to put the world back together.
Jake wrote a pamphlet titled “I Was a Prisoner of Japan.” Thirty million copies were printed and distributed not only in Japan, but around the world in twenty languages. A Japanese airman, Mitsuo Fuchida, was under subpoena to travel to Tokyo to testify in war crimes trials. He was terribly depressed and disillusioned. He’d believed in Japan and fought for his nation and yet Japan lost the war. As he got off the train in Tokyo an American man handed him a pamphlet. He put it in his pocket and later read of how Jake had been found by the resurrected Christ in a Japanese prison and how Jake now was sharing God’s love with the Japanese. Mitsuo Fuchida then bought a book about Jake. Mitsuo Fuchida had been pondering some unexplainably gracious actions by other Christians in Japan. He wanted to know more about Christianity. He bought a Bible and put off reading it; but, when he started, he read every day in the foreign book and pondered its meaning. Slowly the story that seems old to us, maybe even boring because we’ve heard it all our lives, or so good we don’t dare trust it, made a world of sense to him. When he read of Jesus’ praying on the cross to forgive those who crucified him, Mitsuo Fuchida recognized Christ as his own Savior.
Within a few months Mitsuo Fuchida met Jake DeShazer and the two men spoke at large meetings in Japan to tell of the new life in Christ. Jake continued to speak all around Japan and Mitsuo Fuchida came to the US to speak. People listened intently to these two men talk about how God can put the world back together; because, the American man had been a Doolittle raider who had bombed Japan in April 1942, and the Japanese man had been the pilot in December 1941, who led 360 airplanes to bomb Pearl Harbor.[1]
What John wrote in his gospel and what Christians have said or done throughout history convinces only a few that Jesus is alive again and that through him God is hurrying to put the world back together. Just hearing what happened to Jake DeShazer and Mitsuo Fuchida and what they said and did might intrigue people but it won’t lead many to trust Christ. Little can bring us to faith until we realize that Jesus, through all such things, is speaking to us, as he did to Mary that dark morning in the garden. We might not at first recognize the risen Jesus or perceive that he’s speaking our name. We might mistake him for someone else. But that urging, that voice within us summoning us to faith, is the risen Jesus hurrying to heal what’s broken in us and to put us back together. When we finally understand who’s whispering our name in the depth of our soul, then we, too, hurry into God’s world to help put it back together again.
Let us pray. Lord Jesus, no matter the dark or despair that might grip us, no matter the tragedies that have ambushed us, destroying family, friends, or national causes, this morning when we’ve been unsuccessful in finding you, we thank you for finding us. Speak our name in your life-giving, resurrected voice. Wipe away the skepticism or cynicism with which we defend ourselves against disappointment. Replace our doubt with certainty of your concern for us. Replace our hate with your love and help us forgive others as you have forgiven us so that we join you in putting your world back together again. In your name we pray. Amen.
1. C. Hoyt Watson, DeShazer (Coquitlam, B.C., Canada: Galaxy Communications, reprinted 1991). Gordon W. Prange, Donald M. Goldstein, and Katherine V. Dillon, God’s Samurai: Lead Pilot at Pearl Harbor (Washington: Brassey’s, 1990).