The Shepherd Himself goes looking

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Midweek of Easter 2

Ezekiel 34:11-16  +  John 10:1-10

You may have seen in the news that the papal conclave began today, the secretive process for choosing a new pope. The whole world is watching and waiting to see who the next pope will be, and what stances he’ll take, and whether he’ll rescue or further destroy Western Civilization. It’s somewhat ironic that it’s happening this week, as we hear the Scripture readings about Christ the Good Shepherd. Because, of course, the pope claims to be the Chief Shepherd over all Christians on earth, the head, not only of the Roman Catholic Church, but of the Holy Christian Church—as if the Church could have another head besides Christ, as if there could be another chief shepherd over the whole Church besides Christ. For that claim alone, Christians should recognize the papacy as an abomination. And no matter who sits in the chair that they falsely claim to be the chair of Peter, no matter who is chosen, the office of the pope will bring only destruction to Christ’s sheep within the Roman Church. It will only serve to scatter them and drive them away from their true Shepherd, the Lord Jesus Christ. Because, while there are surely many sheep of the Good Shepherd still within the Roman Catholic Church, the office of the papacy, by its very nature, seeks to lead them, not toward the Lord Jesus and His Word, but away from Him.

It’s uncannily similar to the situation of Old Testament Israel at the time of the prophet Ezekiel, who wrote during the early years of the Babylonian captivity. There was no single shepherd or king or prophet or priest who had tried to lead the people of Israel astray. No, but the kings and priests, as a whole, and many false prophets, had thoroughly abandoned the sheep and had become self-serving instead, using their positions to hold onto their power and their possessions. In the verses before the text you heard this evening, the Lord, through Ezekiel, berated those worthless shepherds of Israel, even as Jeremiah had done not long before, because those shepherds had not been working to preach the Word of God to the sheep, had not been seeking the lost, had not been preaching the Law to the secure sinners, or offering the comfort of the Gospel to the fearful and guilt-ridden sheep. They had not been pointing people ahead to the coming of the Messiah. Their ministry had become a business to them, a political role, an institutional position, not at all unlike the ministries that flood the Christian Church today, both in Rome and outside of Rome. Those worthless shepherds had so decimated the Church of Israel spiritually that God had to come in and decimate them politically, too, sending the Babylonians against them, sending Israel into captivity. The sheep, for their part, weren’t innocent in all of it, but the shepherds bore the greater guilt.

And so, with His flock scattered as far as Babylon, largely because of the unfaithfulness of the shepherds, the Lord announced His solution: ‘For thus says the Lord GOD: “Indeed I Myself will search for My sheep and seek them out.

Much like the prophet Isaiah, as we saw during our Wednesday evening services last year, the prophet Ezekiel’s prophecies often have a double or a twofold fulfillment. God Himself would intervene in history, first, to bring His people Israel back from captivity in Babylon, back to the land of Israel. God Himself, through rulers whom He would raise up, like Cyrus and Darius and Nehemiah and Ezra, would resettle His people in their land. That was the first fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy.

But it was a minor fulfillment, a stop-gap fulfillment, because the sheep would just go back to their wandering ways, and the new shepherds who would arise in Israel would, for the most part, be just as bad as the old shepherds, so that, by the time of Jesus, God’s evaluation of Israel was that they were like “sheep without a shepherd.”

And so, about 575 years after Ezekiel prophesied, the Lord fulfilled this prophecy in the most direct and personal way possible. He didn’t go looking for His sheep through anyone else. He went looking Himself, in person. He sent His only-begotten Son, God, the Son of God, to Israel.

I’m going to reread the rest of the verses you heard from Ezekiel 34. And, while some things in the text have a first fulfillment in the return from Babylon, we’re going to focus on the second, bigger fulfillment at the time of Christ—and afterward! Listen again to the rest of the text:

As a shepherd seeks out his flock on the day he is among his scattered sheep, so will I seek out My sheep and deliver them from all the places where they were scattered on a cloudy and dark day. And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them to their own land; I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, in the valleys and in all the inhabited places of the country. I will feed them in good pasture, and their fold shall be on the high mountains of Israel. There they shall lie down in a good fold and feed in rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I will feed My flock, and I will make them lie down,” says the Lord GOD. “I will seek what was lost and bring back what was driven away, bind up the broken and strengthen what was sick;

Jesus did all of that during the course of His earthly ministry. He came, as He said, to seek and to save what was lost. He came calling the lost sheep to repentance and offering them a Father’s welcome back into the kingdom of God, to those who were willing to be carried back on Jesus’ shoulders. He fed them with the truth, with the Gospel, with God’s promise of forgiveness through Christ. He treated the broken and the sick, both physically and spiritually, and assured all who came to Him that He would give them eternal life and an eternal inheritance in the kingdom of God.

But notice what Ezekiel said the Lord would also do: but I will destroy the fat and the strong, and feed them in judgment. That’s what Jesus did with the scribes and Pharisees. He didn’t physically destroy them. He destroyed them with the sword of His mouth, with His word, as He exposed their hypocrisy, charged them with sin in the sight of God, and assured them that, in the sight of God, they stood already judged.

Ezekiel doesn’t touch on the other part of Christ’s shepherding in this text, how the Shepherd would lay down His life for the sheep, to make atonement for their sins. That was the awful price of their readmittance into God’s favor. But it’s also the very thing the Father sent the Good Shepherd to do, and He did it gladly and willingly for all who were and who would become His precious sheep.

Of course, in this Easter season, we focus less on the suffering and death of Christ and more on His mighty resurrection from the dead. In this Easter season, we focus on how the risen Lord Jesus continues to shepherd His flock through the ministry of the Word. Because it’s still Him doing it, even though He uses flawed and weak men as His mouthpieces. It’s the still the voice of the true Shepherd that you hear when you hear His Gospel purely preached, and His Word rightly explained, and when His words are spoken in connection with His Sacraments. It’s still the Lord God Himself, coming to His sheep who are still in the world, to seek the lost, to comfort the broken and the sick, and to gather His flock of Christians to Himself within His Holy Christian Church.

But there is still a third fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy, just as there was a third fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecies. Because, after Jesus is done gathering His sheep throughout the world, the LORD Himself will come again, in person, in glory, to gather His sheep on His right hand and to send all the others to His left.

And among those on His left will be all the false prophets who claimed to be the Chief Shepherd and the Holy Father of all Christians. They fooled many people here on earth, but they could never fool the Good Shepherd as they tried to steal His sheep from Him, nor, in the end, could they fool the true sheep of the Lord Jesus, because, as Jesus said in the Gospel, His sheep know the voice of their true Shepherd, and will by no means follow a stranger, but will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.

Always flee from the voice of the stranger, who presents you with an alternate gospel, and with doctrines of men instead of the teaching of God. You know your Shepherd’s voice. You’ve learned it from His Holy, inspired Scriptures. Keep listening. Keep following. And you can be confident that He knows and cares for each and every one of you, and will never let anyone snatch you from His hand. Amen.

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Called to follow the Good Shepherd

Posted on May 4, 2025 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Easter 2 – Misericordias Domini

1 Peter 2:21-25  +  John 10:11-16

The second Sunday after Easter is traditionally celebrated as Good Shepherd Sunday because of the Gospel you heard from John 10. And it’s all the more fitting today as we celebrate a confirmation. Two confirmations, actually. Because what is it to be confirmed? What is it to be a Christian, for that matter, other than to follow the Good Shepherd, our Lord Jesus Christ, wherever He goes?

Now, following the Shepherd does not mean becoming the Shepherd. That’s impossible. There can be only one Good Shepherd. Only the Lord Jesus could stand up to the wolf on behalf of the sheep, could stand up to the devil and take him on and defeat him, and rescue the captives from his kingdom, and gather His sheep and tend to them as His own. Only the Lord Jesus could suffer and die for the sins of the world and take up His life again. Only the Lord Jesus could turn unbelieving, impenitent sinners into believing sheep, who belong to Him, and who live within the sheepfold of His Holy Christian Church. Only the Lord Jesus knew how to go looking for His sheep and find them and bring them safely home into the Father’s house. Only the Lord Jesus could give life to the sheep, eternal life that knows no end, eternal life that includes the resurrection from the dead at the Last Day. He alone will speak over the graves of His believing sheep and raise us to life again and bring us into the heavenly sheepfold. Only the Lord Jesus knows His sheep perfectly and is known by them. And they follow Him wherever He goes.

But what does it mean to follow Him? Saint Peter gives us some examples in today’s epistle. He writes, For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow in his steps. To this you were called. To what were you called? To follow the Lord Jesus Christ, to follow in His steps.

Now again, there are steps that Jesus walked that no one else can ever walk. He is the eternal, only-begotten Son of God, whose first step toward our salvation was taking on human flesh in the first place, choosing to become man, born of the Virgin Mary. That’s not a step any of us can take. He took on the office of the Christ, as our true Prophet, Priest and King, to save us from our sins. That’s not a step any of us can take. He came preaching and teaching in the name of His Father. That’s only a step we can take if He Himself calls us to do it, if He calls us through the call of the Church, as it calls ministers of Christ to minister in His name.

But there are steps Jesus took in which Christians can walk by the power of the Holy Spirit and are called to walk. The first step that Peter mentions is this: He knew no sin, nor was any deceit found in his mouth. Well, that certainly wasn’t the natural state in which any of us was born. We all know sin by nature. And in one way or another, we all practice deceit by nature. Whether it’s to keep ourselves from getting in trouble, or whether it’s to take advantage of our neighbor. All have sinned, says the apostle Paul, and fall short of the glory of God. Or, as John puts it in his first epistle, If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. Whereas in the case of Christ the Good Shepherd, He never knew sin. He never practiced deceit. Ever. From the moment He was conceived, He was sinless, unlike the rest of us. He had no sinful flesh. No sinful nature.

So you can’t follow the Good Shepherd by being sinless. But the greatest gift Christ has given us is the forgiveness of sins. God promises to forgive us our sins, for the sake of Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. When we look to Christ, in repentance and faith, He wipes our slate clean before God. But when He does that, He also gives us His Holy Spirit. And He creates within us a new man, a new nature, who is able, at least to some degree, to walk with the Spirit. To say no to sin. To say yes to righteousness. To walk in holiness, as those who have been set free from sin and set apart from the sinful world. To live no longer for sin, but for Him who died for us and rose again. And so, in this way, you are called to follow in the footsteps of your Good Shepherd. To live for God and not for yourself. To recognize the path of sin in your life, each and every day, and to avoid it. To walk a different way, to walk in the way of Jesus, with love for God above all things, and with love for your neighbor, and with a special love for your fellow Christian. Your love can never equal His love or match His love. But you can strive to imitate it, to follow in His steps.

Liam and Kaity, you have learned God’s commandments. And you’ve learned Luther’s explanations of them, too. You know how Jesus walked, and you know how He calls on you to walk. So follow Him. All of you Christians, follow Him in this way, shunning sin, and running toward God’s commandments. Not as a way to be saved from sin, not as a way to earn eternal life, but as a way to follow in the footsteps of Him whom you call your Lord, your Savior, and your Shepherd.

But your Shepherd did not only show you by His example how to avoid sin and how to serve God by doing what was right. He also showed you by His example how to suffer with courage. Now, suffering isn’t something you choose. It’s not something you go looking for. You suffer things that other people do to you. But Jesus assures His sheep that if the world persecuted Him, then the world will also persecute His believers. If the devil went after Him, he will most certainly go after those who follow Jesus.

When that happens, there are two questions you will have to answer. First, will you agree to suffer for Jesus sake, or will you run away from suffering in order to save yourself? To accept the suffering that the devil and the world will bring on you is to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, who willingly accepted the suffering that His Father ordained for Him, who drank that cup of suffering, for as much as He didn’t want to drink it. So to follow Him is to accept the suffering that goes along with being a Christian. To follow Him is to walk toward suffering, if that’s what faithfulness to God requires, to take up your cross and follow Him.

The second question you will have to answer, if you are willing to follow Jesus into suffering, is how you will respond to it. Peter writes, When he was insulted, he did not hurl insults in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but turned it over to the one who judges justly. When the world comes after you for speaking the truth, when people mock you, or insult you, or exclude you, or make life hard for you because you hold to God’s Word and you follow Jesus, you could do what so many people do. You could grumble. You could complain. You could hurl insults back at those who insult you. You could make fun of people, just like they make fun of you, or even threaten them. But, as Peter reminds us, that’s not how Jesus responded to suffering, is it? He took it patiently. He took it without complaint. He turned it over to His Father, who judges justly, and who will see to it that those who hurt His children will answer for it in due time. So if you would follow in the steps of your Shepherd, you will respond to suffering in the same way, turning it all over to God the Father, turning it all over to the risen Lord Jesus, who reigns at the Father’s right hand.

And why will you do all this? Why will you follow Jesus in avoiding sin, and doing what’s right, and speaking the truth? Why will you follow Jesus toward suffering and not away from it? Because you believe in Him, which means you believe what Peter wrote about Him, that He Himself bore our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, should live for righteousness. By his wounds you were healed. For you were like sheep going astray. But now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.

Why will you follow in the steps of your Shepherd? Because all your steps were leading straight to hell, and would have led there, if the Shepherd hadn’t come in to face the wolf for you, if He hadn’t taken responsibility for your sins, if He hadn’t laid down His life for you, if He hadn’t called you by name to make you His own. But He did, and now you are. And so you love Him. And anyone who truly loves Jesus also wants to listen to Him, and to imitate Him, to be like Him, wants to follow Him, and does follow Him. See, He has shown you the way again today!

Liam and Kaity, you’ve been following Jesus ever since your baptism, and your parents have been guiding you by the hand along the way. But now you have learned more about what it means to follow Jesus and are about to confess, before God and before this congregation, your determination to follow Him for the rest of your lives, just as all the members here have, by the grace of God, made the same confession, and the same commitment. May God strengthen you by His Spirit, through His Word and through His Sacrament, to persevere in His grace and in your walk as Christians, to walk according to your calling to follow in the steps of the Good Shepherd all the days of your life, until you follow Him into the eternal life of His heavenly pasture. May the blessing once written to the Hebrews be upon you today, and upon all the Christians here: May the God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you complete in every good work to do His will, working in you what is well pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.

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The living Christ authorizes His ministers, like Thomas

Posted on April 27, 2025 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Easter 1

1 John 5:4-10  +  John 20:19-31

The order of events on the first Easter Sunday is a little hard to pin down. Each Gospel writer was moved by the Holy Spirit to include certain details about that day, not always in order, but always with obvious excitement, even writing, as they were, several decades later, still so excited to share with the world some parts of the resurrection story. Matthew skips Jesus’ Easter appearance to His disciples entirely and takes us straight to His meeting with them on a mountain in Galilee some weeks later. Mark takes us to the table in the upper room where the eleven were gathered—the same table where they had celebrated Passover with Jesus and had received the Lord’s Supper from Jesus a few days earlier—and tells us how Jesus rebuked them for disbelieving the reports of those who had seen Him alive. Luke includes that story about the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, which we heard on Wednesday, and adds a little bit about Jesus eating a piece of broiled fish in front of the disciples, to prove that He was not just alive again, but alive with His own, real, human body made of flesh and blood.

For the apostle John, it had been nearly six decades between the resurrection and the time he wrote his Gospel, but the Holy Spirit still called to his mind certain details from that first Easter Sunday that no other Evangelist had recorded. And so we have this wonderful account of Thomas and his struggle to believe, and, as part of that account, a repetition of that special authority Jesus gave to His Church through the apostolic ministry to forgive or to retain sins in Jesus’ name.

First, let’s have a look at Thomas. Jesus appeared to ten of the twelve disciples on Easter evening, and, according to Luke’s account, it seems that other disciples were there with them, too. Judas was dead by suicide. Thomas was out and about. The doors were locked, for fear of the Jews, because, if they succeeded in killing Jesus Himself, why should they stop with Him? Why not go after the ones closest to Him, even as they had been planning on killing Lazarus, too? Worse, if God had not seen fit to rescue His beloved, sinless Son from the Jews, what hope did His disciples have left?

And then Jesus appeared in the middle of the room before their very eyes, just as He had disappeared before the very eyes of the two disciples in Emmaus, as soon as they recognized Him. Jesus had real flesh and blood and yet was able to appear and disappear at will, no longer submitting to the laws of nature as He had before. He doesn’t have to. He’s true God as well as true man, and does as He pleases.

He greeted His fearful disciples with a word of peace, and after a few minutes (and a few bites of food) they were convinced that it was really Him. And they rejoiced. And after a little while, Jesu disappeared again. Why didn’t He just wait for Thomas to get back? Because He wanted you and me to have this story, and to learn a lesson from it.

Thomas walked in the door a moment too late, and he wouldn’t believe his brother apostles, or the women who had reported seeing Jesus earlier that day, or the two who had come back from Emmaus. “Not unless I see the nail prints in His hands and put my fingers into them. Not unless I can thrust my hand into His pierced side. I know what I saw with my own eyes: a Jesus who was crucified, who died, who was pierced with a spear and whose blood came pouring out. You don’t come back from that. No one does. Human reason and experience say so.”

And the Lord allowed Thomas to stew in the unbelief that flowed from his human reason and experience for a whole week, until the following Sunday, and waited until Thomas was with them before appearing again. Peace to you, He said, and then turned and looked straight at Thomas, and held out His hands, still bearing the nail prints as a testimony to His suffering, and said, “Reach out your hand, Thomas, and put your fingers here. Take your hand, Thomas, and thrust it into My side, if you must. Whatever it takes. Be no longer unbelieving, but believing!” And Thomas said, “My Lord and my God!”

Yeah, he finally got it. The one whom he had been referring to as Lord for the last three years was also God. That’s why He could rise from the dead. Man can’t conquer death, but God can. And now Thomas knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this man, Jesus, is the very God who has power over life and death.

With that in mind, consider the authority Jesus spoke upon His apostles on that first Easter Sunday. First, He breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit! The breathing on them was a picture of the Holy Spirit proceeding from His mouth like breath, the Spirit whom He, their Lord and their God, would send upon them 50 days from then, on the day of Pentecost. When the Spirit came upon them on that day, like breath from heaven, they were to remember this act of Jesus breathing on them and understand that it was Jesus, from the right hand of God, sending the Holy Spirit down upon His Church to begin the lengthy process of building it until He comes again.

And the tools for building it would be, not hammers, but keys. The keys of the kingdom of heaven. Keys that would be wielded with heaven’s own authority. Keys not made of metal, but keys made of words. As my Father has sent me, so I also send you…If you forgive the sins of any, their sins are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, their sins are retained. This is not a new command or authority. It’s the same one Jesus had spoken about months earlier. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. It’s the same command and authority recorded with different words by Mark: Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. It’s the same command and authority referred to in Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus told them that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And it’s the same command and authority that He gave them again on that mountain in Galilee, recorded in Matthew’s Gospel: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you. Jesus, as Lord and God, gave this command and authority to His Church, through the apostolic ministry, to preach the Gospel and to administer the Sacraments in the name of Jesus, who is both Lord and God. That’s how He would build His Church, through what we often refer to as the Means or the “tools” of Grace, wielded by the ministers whom He would continue to send until the end of the age.

Using the keys or the Means of Grace includes the speaking and the baptizing in the name of God that Peter did on the day of Pentecost, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins! It includes the appeal of St. Paul to the jailor in Philippi, Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved!, or as he summarized it to the Corinthians, Be reconciled to God! For God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. It includes the administration of the Lord’s Supper, too, where God’s forgiveness is handed out to God’s believing people, one by one. And it also includes, where necessary, the retaining of sins, as Peter did with Ananias and Sapphira, or with Simon the Sorcerer, or as Paul did with the sinner in Corinth who was flaunting his adultery. Whether it’s the forgiving of sins or the retaining of sins, Jesus set it up in His Church going forward that God would deal with men and build His kingdom through the keys wielded by the apostolic ministry of His Holy Christian Church.

A ministry that included men like Thomas, who had their moments of shameful unbelief. A ministry that included men like Peter, who had faltered before and would falter again, needing to be corrected by a minister like Paul, who had a previous reputation of locking Christians up in jail. A ministry that included also the Apostle John, who carried out his God-given ministry throughout the first century, of which this Gospel of John was a part. With the authority and with the inspiration of the Spirit that the Lord Jesus gave him, he wrote for us, not everything that Jesus ever said or did, but only the things the Spirit guided him to remember and to record, all for a purpose, which he states at the end of our reading: that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, by believing, you may have life in his name.

This is the same ministry, with the same Means of Grace, that has been passed on from generation to generation, so that the Church would always have the necessary, Spirit-filled tools for creating and preserving faith. This is the same ministry that is being carried out among you today, which you support, and which you are here making use of right now, according to Christ’s command. He never planned for any of you to see Him in this life, as the apostles did. What He did plan for was for you to hear His Word, to believe through what you hear, and to continue to receive the ministry of His Word and Sacraments, so that you might make it all the way through this earthly life, still hoping, still rejoicing, still believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, crucified and risen from the dead, and that, by believing, you, too, may have life in His name. May God grant it, for Jesus’ sake! Amen.

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Revealed in the preaching of His death and resurrection

Posted on April 23, 2025 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for the Week of Easter

Luke 24:13-35

What a wonderful story we have before us in the Gospel during this Easter week! What a beautiful scene St. Luke paints for us! Two downcast disciples of Jesus—not from among the eleven apostles but obviously sincere believers in Jesus who had spent considerable time with Jesus and the Eleven—walking sullenly down to the village of Emmaus. They had thought that Jesus was the Christ. They had thought that He would redeem Israel. But after seeing Him suffer and die two days earlier, rejected by the leaders of Israel, they thought they must’ve made a mistake. Jesus couldn’t be the Messiah foretold in the Old Testament Scriptures, could He?

Then Jesus comes out of nowhere, walking alongside them, and doesn’t allow them to recognize Him. Why? Why not just announce Himself and begin the Easter celebration? Because they needed a firmer foundation than their eyesight alone could provide. They needed to know the Christ from the Scriptures, and know Him better than they did, because what they knew about the Christ from the Scriptures up until now was far too vague and not nearly enough. They knew He would be a miracle-working Prophet. They knew He would redeem Israel. They knew He would reign on the throne of His father David forever. That was all true, but, again, it’s not nearly enough, which is obvious, because, according to their understanding, the Christ should not have suffered and died.

So Jesus, still not letting them recognize Him, rebukes them: Foolish men! You’re so slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Didn’t the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter into His glory? And then He patiently walked them through the whole Old Testament, showing them passage after passage that spoke of the suffering of the Christ.

Surely He pointed them to the very first promise of a Savior, given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, where God said to the devil, in his serpent-form: I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel. They probably focused on the “He will crush your head” part, without ever putting it together that the devil would also attack the woman’s Offspring, striking His heel, as a serpent strikes the heel of a man—a strike that can often be fatal, and in the case of the Christ, it was.

Then Jesus surely walked them through the events of Holy Week, maybe going through it all in order. Maybe He reminded them of Zechariah’s prophecy of the King riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. Or maybe He began with another prophecy from Zechariah, prophesying Judas’ betrayal: “So they paid me thirty pieces of silver. And the Lord said to me, ‘Throw it to the potter’—the handsome price at which they valued me!”

Then on to Maundy Thursday in the Garden of Gethsemane, He likely quoted Zechariah again, telling how all Jesus’ disciples would flee when the Christ was arrested: “Awake, sword, against my shepherd, against the man who is close to me! … Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.”

He could have continued with Psalm 109, where David prophesies the wicked and false accusations that were made against Jesus by the Jews: For wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me, speaking against me with lying tongues … In return for my love they accuse me. And Isaiah speaks of how they would commit violence against the Christ, and about He would respond to their attacks: I offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard; I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting.

But it wouldn’t be the Jews alone conspiring against the Christ. David had said in Psalm 2, Why do the nations rage, And the people plot a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, And the rulers take counsel together, Against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying, “Let us break Their bonds in pieces And cast away Their cords from us.” And so the Jews got the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, involved, who also conspired with King Herod in Jesus’ trial, fulfilling this prophecy, even as the crowds cried out, Crucify Him! Crucify Him!, fulfilling a prophecy in Psalm 69, Those who hate me without reason outnumber the hairs of my head. And then Pilate condemned Him, even though, as Isaiah had said would happen, He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in His mouth…By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

As Jesus walked along with the two disciples, getting closer to Emmaus, He must have quoted extensively from Isaiah 52 and 53, where it says of the coming Christ: “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain … Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering … He was pierced for our transgressions … By his wounds we are healed … He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth.

Yes, He was wounded and “pierced,” as Psalm 22 said He would be. They pierce my hands and my feet. And they divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. Meanwhile, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, fulfilling another prophecy, He made intercession for the transgressors. And He was numbered with the transgressors, one hanging on a cross on His right and another on His left.

Maybe these two disciples on the road to Emmaus had been there on Good Friday to hear the chief priests and Pharisees mocking Jesus with almost the exact words from Psalm 22, where the Messiah lamented: I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people. All those who see Me ridicule Me; They shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, “He trusted in the Lord, let Him rescue Him; Let Him deliver Him, since He delights in Him!”

You have to think that Jesus reminded the disciples of the words He cried out after three hours of intense suffering in darkness, words taken directly from Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And when He said, “I thirst,” the soldiers fulfilled the prophecy from Psalm 69, They gave me vinegar for my thirst.

The death of Christ was specifically prophesied in several places. In Psalm 22: You have brought Me to the dust of death. In Isaiah: He was cut off from the land of the living… he poured out his life unto death. And in Daniel: After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing.”

Even after He died, the prophecies continued. When the soldiers found Jesus dead, they didn’t break His bones as they had done with the other two, fulfilling the Passover Lamb prophecy from Genesis, Not one of his bones will be broken. Instead, they pierced His side with a spear, fulfilling Zechariah’s prophecy, “They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child.” And then, even in His burial in rich Joseph’s tomb, Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled: “He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death.”

But death would not be the end for the Christ. After His suffering and death, the prophecies continued from Psalm 22: For the LORD has not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted One; nor has He hidden His face from Him; nut when He cried to Him, the LORD heard. Or Psalm 16, which Peter would later quote: For You will not leave my soul in Sheol, nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption. You will show me the path of life. Or from Isaiah 53: After You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand.

All the while, as Jesus unfolded and decrypted the Scriptures for these two disciples, their hearts were burning within them. How could they have missed all these prophecies? They weren’t mistaken about Jesus being the Christ. On the contrary, the Christ had to suffer everything that Jesus suffered, in order to redeem Israel from sin, death, and the devil. And He also had to rise from the dead to “justify many” through His Gospel, and to build His kingdom, which would include both Jews and Gentiles, and to reign over God’s people forever. So, maybe the stories of His empty tomb this morning make sense! Maybe the tomb is empty, because Jesus is the Christ, who not only died, but has risen from the dead! Maybe His kingdom is just getting started!

And so it was. And so Jesus revealed Himself to those disciples at the dinner table. But only after revealing Himself to them first through the Word of God. That was always His plan. To build His Church through the Word of God, which came to include the eyewitness accounts of those who saw the risen Lord. So keep studying the Scriptures, and the Holy Spirit will continue to open your hearts, too, so that you see the Lord’s death and resurrection, as they were both foretold and fulfilled. This is how the Lord will comfort your hearts in every trouble, in every trial. This is how the living Christ will grow and extend His kingdom until the end of the age, through the preaching of His suffering, death, and resurrection. And you get to be a part of it! Amen.

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The empty tomb is peace for all who believe

Posted on April 20, 2025 by Rev. Paul Rydecki
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Sermon for Easter Sunday

1 Corinthians 5:6-8  +  Mark 16:1-8

Fellow believers in Christ crucified: The crucified One is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia! Praise the LORD!

When we say that Jesus lives, we don’t mean it figuratively. We don’t mean that He lives in our hearts, or in our memories. We mean that the real Son of God, who took on real flesh and blood, born of the virgin Mary, who truly suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried, actually came back to life on the third day after His death, stepped out of His tomb, and, throughout that day and the coming days, appeared openly to all His disciples—who were glad, but surprised, to see Him.

It really shouldn’t have surprised them as much as it did. They had confessed Him to be the Christ, the Son of the living God. And He, the Christ, had told His disciples how He would be nailed to a cross, die, and rise on the third day, which was the very same thing that was prophesied about the Christ in the words of King David in Psalm 16 a thousand years before, “I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure. For you will not abandon my soul to the grave, or let your holy one see corruption.”

As the apostles pointed out to the Jewish crowds later on, King David, who wrote those words of Psalm 16, most certainly died and most certainly decayed in his grave. But the Holy One about whom he was writing, the Son of David, the Christ—He was not abandoned to the grave or left in the tomb. He was raised from the dead.

That’s what the angel announced to those wonderful, devoted women who went to the tomb that first Easter morning to serve Jesus one last time, to finish taking care of His body, which, they assumed, was already beginning to see corruption. They expected to have trouble rolling away the big stone that blocked the entrance, but, no, they saw that it had already been rolled away, and they saw an angel waiting there to give them the good news. Do not be afraid. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the One who was crucified. He has risen; He is not here. See the place where they laid Him!

Wouldn’t you like to have seen it, too? The place where they laid Him? The stone rolled away, the empty tomb, the neatly folded linens lying there, no longer wrapped around Jesus’ body, and the angel sitting where Jesus had been? Or what if you had seen the empty tomb? Then what? Then you would have been just as afraid, just as terrified as those women were. Because an empty tomb, all by itself, doesn’t calm anyone’s fears.

The fact that Jesus’ tomb was empty, the fact that the Son of David, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, has risen from the dead, is neither good news nor bad news, all by itself. It just is. It’s a fact. It happened. But what does it mean? Is it a fact that saves or is it a fact that damns? The only way to know what it means is to hear what God reveals about it in the preaching of the gospel.

And what does God reveal in the gospel about the Son of David, Jesus Christ, risen from the dead?

Well, in Psalm 2, a Psalm about the coming Christ, it says, Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and you perish in the way, for His wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in Him. So those who take refuge in the risen Son of God are blessed! But those who do not seek refuge in Him will be the objects of His wrath and will perish eternally.

According to the gospel, then, the empty tomb of Jesus means that His enemies and all who hate Him or His beloved Church had better be very afraid. The resurrection of Jesus is terrible news for the devil and his demons. It’s terrible news for the one who denies the existence of God, or who wants to get to heaven by serving some other god, or by offering God his own goodness and decency. It’s also terrible news for all who refuse to repent of their sins. Because if Jesus is dead, then you get to decide what’s right and wrong for your life, and then, when you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s it. But if Jesus is alive, then everything He said is true, and there will also be a resurrection of all the dead and a Day of reckoning, for all. So for the impenitent and unbelieving, the empty tomb of Jesus is cause for fear.

But for those who want a sure refuge from God’s wrath, for those who wish to be reconciled to God through the death of Christ, for those who want Jesus for a Savior, the gospel reveals this truth: that Jesus was delivered up for our sins and raised to life for our justification. His death was sufficient payment for all sin, for every sin, for the worst sinner; and His resurrection means that all who hope in Him, all who trust in Him, all who look to Him for forgiveness of their sins are declared innocent before God’s own courtroom in heaven. The empty tomb means the justification of all who believe in the risen Lord Jesus.

And with justification comes every gift and benefit of Christ: the adoption as God’s children, the full acceptance into eternal life, the daily forgiveness of sins in this Christian Church, and the promise of your own empty tomb when Jesus returns with salvation for His waiting people.

But even those faithful women didn’t understand all that when they first arrived at the tomb on that first day of the week. Jesus’ empty tomb, all by itself, is still a scary thing, and those women remained afraid until, later that morning, they saw Jesus for themselves and, more importantly, heard His gospel, His word of peace. Then they rejoiced with a joy that nothing could ever take away.

You have to see Jesus for yourself, too. But not with your eyes. Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed, Jesus said. Believed what? Believed that the tomb of Jesus was and remains empty? Yes, but only if you believe in the One who stepped out of that tomb. Believe in God’s promise of forgiveness in Christ. Believe in His Gospel. Believe in the word of God the Father, who emptied Jesus’ tomb by raising His Son from the dead. This word from God that He has commissioned me to preach to you today is better than seeing a thousand empty tombs. Because here in the Word you don’t see the place where Jesus isn’t. You actually get to see Jesus in the only way that can save you from eternal death and grant you eternal life. Because here in the Word of God, here in the Sacrament of Christ’s Holy Supper, the risen Lord Jesus comes to you today with a message: “He who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.” Those words would be utterly meaningless if Jesus had remained in the tomb. But He didn’t. So believe in Him who rose from the dead, because, for you who believe, the empty tomb of the crucified One means peace with God, and joy, and life everlasting. Amen.

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