The creation account in Genesis begins in the dark: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.”. God intervened and spoke light, order and life.
All of that went wrong when a man and a woman stood in a garden and rejected God’s rule. As a result, darkness, chaos and death again captivated the scene.
The gospel of John echoes a lot of those themes in his account of Jesus, and maybe none more so than in the section we’ve come to in our study of John. We’re going to be reading John 20:1-18 this Sunday, the account of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.
The main purpose of John’s gospel, as he explained in chapter one, is to let us know that all that Jesus did and taught was revealing what God is like and what God is up to – and here in his resurrection we see it in full bloom: redemption; new creation….RESURRECTION!
As you read this account, put yourself in the place of Peter and the DWJL (the disciple whom Jesus loved) – how do you think you would have reacted to Mary’s news? What would you think was going on initially?
V9 says Pete and the DWJL returned to their own home (literally, to themselves). What ways do we turn back to ourselves when we go through dark and confusing times?
Mary was inconsolable. She was on task: find the corpse of Jesus and get it re-buried. She was so miserable and fixated on that problem that she didn’t even realize the solution to her dilemma was standing right in front of her. What can that tell us about how we perceive our troubles – how should resurrection and new creation affect our expectations?
Jesus and Mary are pictured standing in a garden – what does this harken back to? What is this image revealing to us about what has happened in Christ’s resurrection?
If I asked you who the first evangelist, ambassador, teacher and missionary of the gospel was…who would you say? I know who v 18 says it was.
This is the landing place that all of John’s gospel has been leading us to – I really hope you can join us this Sunday as we dig in and explore this passage together!
Click here for a pdf of the teaching slideshow.