If you were in church this past Easter, then you probably heard a sermon about Jesus’ empty tomb. At Hickory Grove, I preached from Mark 16:1-8 about the handful of women who went looking for Jesus’ body but found an angel instead.
What strikes me about that story is the angel’s simple, direct words, “You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here.” The women had approached that tomb with a belief about Jesus: he was a dead man.
Jesus had foretold His resurrection (Mark 8:31-9:1), but they didn’t get the memo. So, the angel filled them in. Jesus is not the dead and defeated prophet from Nazareth. He is the Risen One.
The problem here is that the women were looking for the wrong Jesus. They were looking for the good teacher from Nazareth who was cut down in His prime when they should’ve been looking for their risen Lord. So, they needed to be confronted lovingly by a messenger from heaven. They needed a gift of divine revelation to challenge their wrong view about Jesus and replace it with a right one. Only then could they find the One their hearts desired.
As John Calvin once wrote, “The human heart is an idol factory.” We cannot help but manufacture false images and ideas about who God is and what He’s like. For some, Jesus is the social justice warrior par excellence who came to tear down the system and fight for the little guy. For others, He’s the Teacher of Enlightenment who sketches a new plane of human existence.
Jesus the Rebel. Jesus the Radical. Jesus the Ideologue. Jesus the Activist. Too often, we treat Jesus like an ink blot on a Rorschach test; we see whatever we want to see.
The trouble with seeking our own personal version of Jesus is that, like the women at the tomb, we will never find Him. And when we don’t, we’ll either conclude that He doesn’t exist or we’ll double down and find ourselves a group of people who share our particular delusion.
What we all need is to be confronted and corrected by a divine messenger so that we can find the real Jesus — the Jesus who is infinitely better than anything we could ask or imagine. We have such a confrontation in the Bible. It is only there — in the words that the Spirit of the Son inspired to be written by the men He authorized to tell His story — that God shows us who Jesus really is.
A figment of our imagination cannot save us. A Jesus whose edges are sanded down and whose teaching is repackaged to fit our sensibilities can never show us the way to heaven. A Jesus who exists only to affirm us as we are cannot die to cover our sins and reconcile us to God. The Jesus of our imaginations is a dead Jesus. He is not here, there, or anywhere.
But the real Jesus is risen and ascended. He resides above and apart from our expectations. The great challenge for us all — whether you’re a skeptic or you’ve been following Jesus for 50 years — is to submit our expectations to the correction of His Word.
The real Jesus is alive. He is seated at the right hand of the Father. And He is inviting us all to come and see Him through the eyes of faith.
Kenny Silva is the Senior Pastor of Hickory Grove Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Mt. Juliet, a Guest Lecturer at Reformed Theological Seminary (Atlanta), and the host of Books ‘n Things with Dr. Kenny on YouTube. He received his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and is the author of several books, articles, and essays. Kenny resides in Lebanon with his wife and their four children.
