Ashley is the beautiful and very athletic twenty-year-old daughter of some dear friends in Arkansas.  Not many weeks ago, while playing basketball in a college tournament, she suddenly collapsed onto the floor.  By the time the first person reached her she was turning blue; she had not only stopped breathing but her heart had also completely stopped beating.  Doctors later confirmed that she had suffered from a previously undiagnosed condition that allowed her heart to electrically misfire.  For all practical purposes she was dead when she hit the floor.  Had it not been for the skill and quick response of paramedics already on the scene, she would not have survived.  Using electric defibrillation, they were able to restart her stalled heart and she quickly started breathing again.  She’ll live the rest of her life dependent on a pacemaker.  But, she’ll also live telling the story of what’s it like to have been dead and then brought back to life. 

Now, when Ashley goes to tell that story she won’t be able to tell it as though she is alive because of anything she did.  She’ll have to tell the story in terms of something someone else did for her she could have never done for herself.  That’s because, when you’re that dead, you can’t even scream for help.  You can’t attend a self-help seminar on how to come back to life from the dead.  You can’t call your pastor and friends and ask them to pray for you.  You can’t read a book on the ten practical things to do when you find yourself dead on the floor.  All you can do is what anyone does when they are that dead, just lie there until someone else comes along who knows how to handle dead bodies.  It’s hard for us to believe.  But, there was a time when Jesus was that dead.

When he was in the tomb he was so dead that he couldn’t even hope that someone would do something for him.  He was so dead that he couldn’t cry out for help.  And, when you’re that dead, all you can do is lie there.  Had someone not done something for Jesus he could not do for himself, some form of him would still be there.  So, let’s get the form right. 

Glendon Shirley taught third graders for forty years.  She said that one year she was asking her class to remember that Easter was about more than eggs and bunnies.  That it was about Jesus being raised from the dead.  One of her little third grade boys interrupted by saying, “I don’t believe any of that about Jesus, I’m a Jew.”  Trying to keep the door to faith open, Glendon graciously said, “Well, you do know that Jesus was a Jew, too, don’t you?”  To that, a little girl in the room gasped and said, “Ms. Shirley, I didn’t know that.  I knew that God was a Baptist but I didn’t know that Jesus was a Jew.”  Just a tad confused about the form of God, wouldn’t you agree?  So, let’s be sure we’re not.  Let’s get the form right.

Dead.  That’s the form.  Jesus, Son of God, God in the flesh, dead.  As dead as dead gets.  He was dead because he had assumed upon himself our moral guilt and it did to him what it would do to us had he not taken it upon himself.  “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, (2 Corinthians 5:21)” the scripture says.  Like a dry sponge soaks up water, Jesus had absorbed into his very body and soul the moral guilt of all people of all time.  The guilt of every sin you and I and every person who ever lived, past, present and future, Jesus took upon himself that day.  And, it killed him.

The Old Testament records how every year on the Day of Atonement the high priest would take a goat and symbolically transfer the sins of the people to the goat.  The goat would then be sent out into the wilderness in order to escape with the people’s sins, thus our modern term, “scapegoat.”  On the cross, God took all of our sins and transferred them, not symbolically, but, in very real fact, onto Jesus.  The weight of it all killed him.  In the tomb, he was as dead as that much sin can make you.  And, it was only when Jesus was that dead that God was then able to do what it is that we celebrate on this Easter morning, raise him from the dead.  The cornerstone of the first Christian sermons was the fact that men had crucified Jesus but “God raised him from the dead on the third day (Acts 10:40).”  Over and over again, when you read the writings of the first Christians, they repeat those exact words about Jesus when he was that dead, “God raised him from the dead.”  The apostle Paul wrote that Jesus “was crucified in weakness, yet he lives by God’s power (2 Corinthians 13:4).”  All Jesus could do was lie there until God, his Father, came into that tomb and did something for him he could not do for himself.

On this day of all days, we magnify Jesus’ holiness and majesty, as well we should.  But, we would not be able to do that if it were not, first, for the fact that, at one time, Jesus was so weak that death took him down.  “Crucified in weakness,” the scripture says of Jesus.  When he left heaven’s glory and became one of us, he took our form and all the weaknesses that go with it.  In doing so he exposed himself to the death that weakness brings with it.  It was through Christ’s weakness, however, that God demonstrated his power to bring what is dead back to life.  If Jesus had not become as weak as we are we would have never known that nothing is ever so dead God can’t bring it back to life.  It’s very important to note that, when you’re that dead, God can raise you to live again.  It’s also important to note that not even God can resurrect what isn’t first dead.  What isn’t yet dead will never know the power of God to live again. 

The problem with some of us is that we’re just not dead enough yet.  We’re still reading the books and doing the seminars.  There is still too much life in some of us for God to show what he can do with what is completely dead.  We still think there is a way we can fix ourselves or self-improve ourselves into a higher form of life.  Too many of us are still rolling over in our graves trying to find a way out.  And, maybe more than any generation that’s ever lived, we’ve been set up for that by all the progress we have already made. 

Just this past week researchers at UCLA and the University of Pittsburgh have discovered that our body fat, of all things, may hold possibilities of new life.  All this time we’ve been told how bad our fat is.  But, it’s been discovered that our body fat is a great source of stem cells.  In very crude laymen’s terms, stem cells are something like baby cells.  They carry the genetic code for nearly any kind of tissue in our bodies.  They have just haven’t been “turned on” yet to become anything in particular.  With the right genetic key, a stem cell can be instructed to grow muscle or cartilage or skin or even nerve tissue.  Someday, if your kidney goes bad, they’ll be able to grow you a new one.  You lose an arm or leg in an accident, they’ll be able to just grow you a new one.  Your heart is damaged by disease, they’ll be able to, literally, patch it up with new muscle they grow from stem cells they harvest from the fat your body was so good at growing you had a heart attack in the first place.  Marvelous, isn’t it?

I can’t wait to hear those conversations at the dinner table.  When I was growing up, we couldn’t get through Sunday lunch at my grandmother’s table without her describing someone’s latest gall bladder surgery or colonoscopy.  It’s like the older we get the harder it is to distinguish between our own body parts and the chicken parts on our plate.  You know, parts is parts.  Now, it’s like we’ll never die.  We’ll just keep patching ourselves up.  As long as we can fix it we don’t need what only God can do.  As long as there is any life in us, we’ll keep trying.  Like someone still kicking around in the tomb of addiction who says, “I can quit drinking anytime I want to,” as long as there is breath in us we’ll keep trying to find a way to fix whatever it is in us that keeps us looking for a fix.  We’ll do nearly anything but admit the dilemma of our brokenness and failure.  Until we’re dead.  So dead we can’t even ask for help or even hope that anyone will find us lying there.  Not until we’re that dead will we ever really know that what God did for Jesus, he wants to do for us.  He doesn’t want to patch us up.  That he isn’t in the business of patching up old hearts but, instead, giving us totally new ones.  He wants to wake us up, literally, from death to life.

But, only when we’re that dead can God’s power do what God’s power alone can do.  All those things in us that defy being remodeled and reshaped and fixed up are nothing less than opportunities for God to demonstrate his power to bring to life what was hopelessly dead.  That’s why the apostle Paul wrote, “we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”  It’s only in our weakness that God’s power demonstrates itself.  The closer we get to death, the closer we get to life.  That’s the way, the only way, resurrection power works.  There is no other way. 

We fear death as though it’s the end.  And, if our sin were the only factor in the equation, we’d have good reason to be afraid.  When God’s power raised Jesus from the dead, the equation for all men for all time was changed.  Now, death has been transformed from the wall of ultimate futility into which we crash at the end of life-long struggle into the door through which the power of God can make its entrance into the tombs of our failure and death and bring new life.  Christian hope is not just that God acted in history to bring his son back to life.  The hope of the Christian faith is that “the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus.”  The closer we get to death, the closer we get to life. 

A few weeks ago I saw a niece whom I had not seen in quite some time.  When we pulled up to her house and got out of the car she said to me, “For a minute, I thought you were your father.”  Now, as best I know, no one has ever accused my dad of looking as young as me.  More than once, I’ve been accused of looking as old as him.  It’s an odd thing, the closer I get to death, the more the life of my father is being revealed in my very body.  When you think about it, that’s not all bad.  Someday we can sit around the dinner table and show each other pictures of our newest body part.  At a minimum, the closer I get to dying, the less and less people will be able to tell the difference between my father and me.  Do, you see it?  The closer you get to death, the more your heavenly Father’s life will be revealed in you. 

So, as the scripture says, “we do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day (for) we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.”  The closer we get to death, the more we look like our Father. 

Just before Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb (John 11) his sisters were despairing that Jesus had waited too late.  Someone even cautioned Jesus about messing with the body.  It’d been dead for four days.  By now, they feared the odor.  Best just leave stinking bodies to lie, they figured.  But, about whatever it was that killed Lazarus, Jesus had already told his disciples, “‘This sickness will not end in death.  No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.’”  So, they finally obeyed Jesus and rolled the stone that sealed Lazarus’ tomb away.  Then, calling Lazarus out of the tomb, Jesus did the one thing that gives this day its meaning for all of us.  He proved that the best stuff God ever did came out of places where all he had to work with was death. Max Lucado, in The Applause of Heaven, tells about a man who was dying and whose priest went to see him in the hospital.  When the priest entered the man’s room he noticed an empty chair sitting by his bed and asked the dying man if someone had been to visit that day.  The man said, “No, I placed Jesus on that chair and I talk to him.”  He went on to explain that, years before when he was just learning to pray, a friend told him to talk to Jesus as if he were just a good friend sitting in a chair in the same room.  He said, “When I’m strong enough I will pull that chair up and I’ll talk to Jesus and I’ll let him talk to me and sometimes I reach out and let him take my hand.” 

A couple of weeks later the man’s daughter went to visit the priest at his home and to tell him that her father had died.  She had not been there when he died she told him.  But, she said of her father, “he seemed so content I just left him for a couple of hours.  But, when I got back he was gone.  But, it was a strange sight, really.  When I got back his head wasn’t resting on the pillow.  His head was just resting on a chair beside the bed.”

Just before Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he said, “‘I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.’”  Then he asked, “‘Do you believe this?’”  How you’ve answered that question has everything to do with whether you’re still trying to fix what is hopelessly broken or whether you’ve finally laid down to die in Jesus’ arms.  And, it also has everything to do with whether or not you’ll live to tell the story of what it was like to have been dead and then brought back to life again. 

Amen.