Is the Church on Its Resurrection Watch? Luke 24: 1-12

Luke departs from the norm in narrating the Resurrection story, inconspicuously using the third-person pronoun “they” ten times in the first nine verses of the account. “They” form the verb conjugation of the plural person. It is only at verse nine that Luke gives names to characters, Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Mary the mother of James. It was “they” who “told these things to the apostles” verse 10c.

The apostles were conspicuously absent from the tomb. They, the apostles, were given second-hand accounts for the resurrection.  

In a Substack article, A Word About Our Current Crisis, Dr. Warren H. Stewart writes,

“The Church that follows that Brown Palestinian Jew who is the Son of God and who overturned the moneychangers in the Temple during Holy Week as documented in Matthew 21:12-14 and Mark 11:15-18, is the only power on Earth to defeat the bullies.”

The power which Christ gives us authoritatively is derived from the resurrection. If there is no resurrection, we, the church, are left powerless.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15, ^“But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen. And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

Theologically, we may infer from the absence of the apostles at the empty tomb that they had missed their assignment or their “watch”, even as Christ had told them of His pending crucifixion and resurrection.

‘Watch’ is a biblical principle, emphasizing the need to remain on guard, awake and vigilant. Its first mention is in Genesis 2:15, where “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden to work it and take care of it”, meaning to keep the garden and “watch” over it.

That the apostles received second-hand accounts of the empty tomb, according to Luke, portends danger in the twenty-first century as, on the eve of war and at the nexus of the fifty-eighth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and a president who promises to “rain down destruction” to the “glory of God”, we need the church to be on watch at the resurrection and the power it brings us as believers!

Dr. Stewart concludes his piece with this piercing question: “Church, what are we going to do?” In the middle of a crisis teetering on world war, in a season of guided missiles and misguided policies, what are we going to do?

The church must not be the harbingers of second-hand accounts, but rather the heralders of the victory of the cross and the power of the resurrection. We are witnesses to resurrection power and we embody that power.

So, we must, in the voice of the prophets, declare to the powers that be: don’t miss the resurrection! We must declare to the hopeless: there is power in the resurrection!

If the church is on its watch, we, like Peter who peers into the empty tomb and sees the evidence of a risen savior, will then run and go tell the story!  We will run with a sense of urgency and exclamation. We will run with purpose and not aimlessly (I Cor. 9:21-27). We will “lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily besets us and run with endurance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1).

We must run and tell the story of that Brown Palestinian Jew who has the power to defeat darkness and who has bequeathed that power to us!

Pastor C. can be reached at info@pastorwericcroomes.com