Easter Sunday sermon on pain, sin, grace, and the resurrection of Jesus
Rev Harry Newton delivers an Easter Sunday sermon at SumRed Church, arguing that the resurrection is historically credible and personally transformative.
Summary
Rev Harry Newton preaches an Easter Sunday sermon at SumRed Church, working through Matthew 28:1–10. He opens by framing pain — physical, psychological, and existential — as the unavoidable baseline of human experience, and argues that unresolved pain is the engine of sin, understood not as rule-breaking but as relationship-breaking. He then makes a case for the historical credibility of the resurrection, drawing on the work of scholar Richard Bauckham and pointing to details such as the female eyewitnesses and the inclusion of doubt in the accounts as evidence against myth-making. The sermon culminates in an explanation of grace as the costly, unearned love of God expressed through Jesus absorbing the relational debt of human sin on the cross, with Easter Sunday declared as God's announcement that love, not death, has the final word.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Rev Harry Newton: Happy Easter. That's so subdued — very Anglican of you all this morning. Do you know that the majority of Anglican churches are 80-something percent in the developing South, and when you go in, you can't hear yourself think because they're so loud. So, happy Easter! That's a little bit better.
As a salutation, we say "He has risen," and people respond, "He has risen indeed." So I might throw that out there a couple of times.
The Towel Rail and the Problem of Pain
I've got a good mate. His name's Sam. We call each other flamingos. Has anyone here watched Boston Legal? If you don't know Boston Legal, it's all right — us old people love it. In Boston Legal, there are these two characters who are best friends, a bit weird, and they always end the show out on the deck having a cognac or something, watching the cityscape. There's one episode where they dress up as flamingos, because they're flamingos for life — because they're best friends. Sam and I are flamingos for life. We have this ongoing joke that for the last fifteen-odd years, each time it's one of our birthdays, or a wedding, or a child's born, we give each other something flamingo-based. And I'm winning, because currently he's got flamingo lawn ornaments in his lawn, and I don't.
Anyway, the reason I mention Sam is that when Sam and I get together, we decide that we're going to right the world's problems. Anyone else ever do this? No? Well, it's a grumpy old man thing we do. We get together and we right the world's problems. "I'll tell you what's wrong with the world, Sam." "Oh no, Harry, you know what's wrong with the world." We both decide that part of the problem with the world is people are too soft these days. And Sam got to this point where he said, "You know the object in every household that summarises the problem with modern society?" I said, "Well, I guess the towel rail." "What? The towel rail." Now you'll be thinking, huh, why? And I thought the same thing. So I asked him. And Sam says to me, "Because does your life have to be that pampered that you can't have a slightly cold towel in the morning when you hop out of the shower?"
Now, regardless of your thoughts on that, Jordan Peterson — Canadian psychologist, I'm sure you've heard of him — once said that pain is metaphysically basic. In other words, pain is this one thing that you cannot deny as a reality in life. It's part of being human. And I think we can all kind of agree to that, because no one can deny the reality of pain. And as the towel rail proves, we spend the majority of our lives trying to avoid it.
Unless you're one of those strange people who likes to do something like the coast to coast, or like me and join the army because you could. Then we kind of embrace the suck, as we used to say as grunts. But even then, that's not real pain, because we genuinely try to avoid real pain, don't we?
Three Forms of Pain
There are three key types of pain. There's physical pain, there's psychological pain, and there's existential pain.
Physical pain — I took my daughter out last night on the seawall, and she's on a skateboard, and I told her she should do this or that trick. "Ooh, I'm not going to do that." "Why?" "I might hurt myself." She's not dumb. She's smart. Being hurt is unpleasant. Why would one hurt oneself if one could help it? Physical pain, illness, injury, long-term suffering — regardless of cause — many of us live with it or love someone who does. Physical pain is a reality we all understand.
But it's only one dimension of pain. There's also psychological pain — grief, anxiety, loneliness, betrayal. And there's existential pain too, isn't there? That soul-level ache, the sense that life has lost its meaning, that nothing matters. Think of philosophers like Nietzsche and Sartre who cry that life is absurd and God is dead. Some see those as cries of triumph. I think, actually, they're cries of despair. And part of the reason those cries have resonated across the Western world in philosophical thought is because we all, to some degree, can resonate with the sense of existential pain. We all know the reality of pain in our lives.
Hurt People Hurt People — and the Meaning of Sin
But what I've noticed about pain, especially when it's unresolved, is that it leads to damage — not just within us, but through us. There's a reason we say hurt people hurt people. Hurt people hurt people because they've withdrawn, and then they lash out. They self-protect, and then they lash out at something they love. They hurt those they love the most.
And this is where that small but powerful word in the Christian vocabulary — sin — comes in. Because at some point, pain ceases to sit within us and it starts shaping how we live and relate with others. There's a bit of confusion about what sin is, and I know it's a dirty word and it makes many of us uncomfortable, but that's okay. I think it's helpful to remember that sin at its most basic level isn't about breaking rules. It's about breaking relationships. Sin is anything and everything that harms your relationship with another, harms your relationship with the world around you, harms your relationship even within yourself — but ultimately, it harms your relationship between you and your creator, between you and God. And so much sin flows from us and harms our most precious relationships because of unresolved pain. How many times do people lash out at others because of something subconsciously underneath the surface that's been triggered?
Jesus and the Limits of Human Suffering
And that brings us to the cross. Each Easter, for over 2,000 years, Christians have focused on this one man, Jesus, who suffered at the very limit of what a human can endure. He suffered physically, psychologically, and existentially.
He suffered physically when he was pinned to an instrument of torture and left to slowly suffocate in his own bodily fluids while he bled out. We see him at the limit of psychological suffering when he's betrayed by his friends, abandoned by his followers, denied by his big supporter, spat on by passers-by, mocked and humiliated, stripped naked in front of his mother and left to bleed out while birds pecked at his eyes — pushed to the limit of both physical and psychological pain at the same time.
And it doesn't stop there. If you were here on Good Friday, we had a Good Friday service in Redcliffe's, and as part of it we read our way through the Jesus story. And part of what we hear is Jesus cry out, "My God, my God, why? Why have you forsaken me?" And when I read that, I can't help but think about the limit of existential pain that's being manifested right there in the person of Jesus. Because behind his desperate cry is a sense of loss, the experience of being forsaken.
And some of you know what that feels like. I mentioned my mate Sam before. I buried Sam's three children. Sam knows what it's like to feel completely forsaken by the God that he believes loves him. And maybe you know the same feeling.
Each Easter, we focus on this one man who suffers at the very limits of what a human can endure. Why? Why on earth should we care about one man's suffering? Well, for those of us who call ourselves Jesus followers, we care because we believe that he wasn't just a man. We believe that he was the God-man — all because of what happened on that Easter.
Why Easter Matters — Grace and the Cross
And the reason Easter matters is this: God is holy and pure. Think of a white orb, perfect, round, emanating light and goodness. If God were to turn a blind eye to that little word sin, then his pureness — that white orb — would start to be impacted, and it would cease to be pure. And in that sense, God would cease to be God. So God can't turn a blind eye to sin or evil, but he wants to see us restored into a right relationship with him. Hence, Easter.
Jesus took on the weight and the entirety of our sin. He died, and in this mysterious kind of way, he made it possible for us to approach our God in peace. That is what today is all about. Easter is great news, because we see Jesus take on the entirety of human suffering and sin, so that we might be restored into the right relationship with God.
Which sounds lovely. But why on earth should you believe it? Just because someone told you a great story, why on earth should we believe it?
The Historical Case for the Resurrection
Richard Bauckham is an author — he's a really good guy. He wrote a book called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. I really recommend it to you. He builds a case for how plausible and trustworthy the gospel accounts are. One of the things he makes clear is that when a lot of what we have in the Bible was written, the eyewitnesses were still alive.
He uses the example of the Gospel of Luke — one of four accounts of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, written by a guy called Luke. We did a big series on him last year; some of you might remember that. In it, Jesus comes to a village called Nain, and there's a boy who's died. The mum, who's also a widow, is crying — it's a funeral procession. And Jesus walks up and raises him to life. Now, if that didn't happen, and then a couple of years later someone writes it all down, and others start going around gossiping the story — and you were related to the mum, or you were the mum — how offensive would that be? But also, it'd be silly. This is not just a disagreement around vaccinations or your statement on politics or the economy or whether Bitcoin's legitimate. This is something that goes to someone's identity. She would have seen her little boy die and had to bury him. You would push back, wouldn't you? You wouldn't get away with that unless there was something true about it.
The same thing comes up in a letter written by a guy called Paul, who's a leader in the early church. He writes a letter to the church in Corinth, and in it he says that Jesus appeared to over 500 people — and then he adds, "most of whom are still alive." In other words, you can go verify, fact-check, go talk to them yourself. This is not myth-making language. If you're making up a myth, you do not write it like this. These aren't legends made up generations later. These are public events written down within the lifetime of the people who saw them.
Why the Women Witnesses Matter
Someone wrote them down. Maybe some people believed it. But the resurrection — really? And to be fair, with the exception of Jesus, death has a 99.9% recurring rate of success, and it's going to continue for some time to come, I'm sorry to say.
In our reading this morning, Matthew tells us how after the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. We're told there's this big earthquake — almost like creation itself is responding to something that's happening. And then we're told that an angel says to the women, "Do not be afraid. I know you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly, tell his disciples." And so they left the tomb quickly with great fear and great joy and ran to tell the disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them, saying, "Greetings." They came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshipped him.
What a great story. You should want it to be true, even if you don't believe it. But it does seem a little bit hard to believe. Why should you believe it just because someone said it?
My son very authoritatively told me how gravity works yesterday — and he was not right. But just because he told me compassionately, why should I believe him? Same thing for us.
To be fair, Jesus' own disciples struggled to believe it as well. In Luke's account, we hear that "these words seemed like an idle tale and the disciples would not believe the women." That is essentially what they're saying. The resurrection of Jesus wasn't something his followers were expecting. To them, it sounded like hysteria, bordering on lunacy.
But here's the thing. One of the most fascinating details, at least for me, about the Jesus accounts is that the first eyewitnesses are all women — Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James, and Salome. In the ancient world, women couldn't even own property. They couldn't give testimony in court. They were considered to have no legal standing. So why would you make up a story about a bodily resurrection of a Jewish spiritual leader and say that the first people to see him were women? You wouldn't, unless that's what happened — because otherwise you're simply undermining what you're trying to get across.
Women like Mary Magdalene and Salome lived long lives and were well known throughout the Mediterranean region. They were respected leaders in Christian communities across the region, and people would come to them and ask what happened, and again and again and again they said words to the effect of, "We were there, we saw it happen, the tomb was empty."
Doubt in the Accounts — Not How You Write a Legend
But people are gullible, aren't they? I took my kids to the circus recently, and my daughter turns to me and goes, "That clown — I don't know how he's not dead." To be fair, I think he actually stuffed up one of the tricks by accident, because he fell and landed on his head. But the point is, we can be tricked into believing things.
Matthew, the author of our account this morning that Eleanor read for us, tells us that later, when the risen Jesus appeared to the followers right in front of them, still some of them doubted. They touched him, they spoke to him, they saw him eat things, they heard him speak — and they still asked, "How? Who? What's going on?" That is not how you write a legend. Legends do not include doubts in the heroes.
Who has read Lord of the Rings? My son's reading it and he loves it. There's that bit with Gimli up on the battlements with an axe, cutting off people's heads, and the language is all grand. That's how you write a legend. You don't write a legend about someone coming back to life and have people going, "Oh, I don't know, mate, I don't know if I believe that. Am I hallucinating?" That's not myth-making language. But that is how real life works. Even back then, people didn't just believe what they were told, just like today.
And if you think we're simply smarter than people 2,000 years ago — in evolutionary anthropological study and in clinical psychology, there is a whole body of research showing that apart from our education levels having gone up, at a biological level our base IQ capacity has not increased in 2,000 years. Just because they lived 2,000 years ago doesn't mean they were more susceptible to believing wild yarns. In fact, it was probably harder for a first-century Jew to believe in the resurrection than it is for you and for me. As hard as it is to believe in someone coming back to life, for them it would have been unthinkable — even offensive — because they were Jews, fiercely monotheistic. The last people on earth who would ever worship a human being as God were Jews.
So what changed their minds? Something must have — something so persuasive, so undeniable, that it turned their entire worldview upside down.
What Kind of Evidence Would You Need?
If you're someone who's unsure about this whole Jesus thing, let me ask: what kind of evidence would you need? What would it take to move your doubts? It's a little bit like a detective who builds a case with lots of circumstantial evidence and gets to the point where they have to make a decision — am I going to charge this person or not? There's a degree of that for you. You need to look at all the evidence in front of you and get to that decision: am I going to believe this or not?
The early Christians had doubts too. And yet somehow they came to believe, and their lives were changed. And here's the cool thing — they went on to change the world. There are genuinely good reasons to believe that that first Easter really happened, and that Jesus died brutally on the cross and rose again.
Why Would God Do This? The Answer Is Grace
And if that really happened, the real question is why. Why on earth would you go through that?
In the early church, there was a heresy called Docetism. The basic idea was that Jesus was fully divine, not at all human, and he didn't actually die on the cross — someone died in his stead, and it was all a kind of pageantry. Who on earth would do that? Why would you die on someone else's behalf? It doesn't make sense. But the reason they thought this was that for them, the idea of God becoming human and allowing himself to be crucified in the manner of a criminal was completely unbecoming of God. It completely stripped away his mana — the thing that made him other.
So the question is why. Why would God do this? If Jesus really is the God-man, why would he willingly enter into our pain?
The answer is found in one simple word: grace. I went to youth group when I was younger, and I remember saying to my youth leader, "What's grace?" Because this is where that word summarises the essence of the Christian faith. And he was like, "Oh, you know, it's in the Bible, mate. You'll find it." Not helpful.
What is grace? Grace is the unearned, unmerited favour of God. It's not something you earn. It's not reserved for the religious, the conservative, the liberal, the fill-in-the-blank virtue statement. Grace is for anyone and everyone who needs it. It is for you, it is for me, it is for everyone, regardless of their spiritual orientation.
And here's the thing — grace is not soft or sentimental. To quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered by Hitler, discipleship entails costly grace.
If someone really wrongs you — and I mean really wrongs you, cuts you so deep that it aches — you can respond in three key ways. You can get even, you can bury it inside, or you can forgive them.
Who here has watched a Mel Gibson movie? They're all the same plot. Someone dies or gets hurt, Mel Gibson grabs a gun and kills their entire family, and then he stands there covered in blood looking very manly, gazing off into the distance with an American flag somewhere in the background. The narrative there is that I will get revenge on those who have hurt me and therefore I'll be fulfilled. Not true. If you try getting revenge on someone, you just end up feeling hollow.
Or what if you bottle it up instead? Let it fester. Let the hurt slowly erode your spirit. I know someone I love deeply. They were wronged many years ago — twenty, twenty-five years ago — and they have never dealt with it. And this person now, in the twilight of their life, is a husk of the person I knew when I was young. It's really sad. It's just eaten their soul from the inside.
So the third option we have is to forgive — which sounds nice, but forgiveness comes at a cost. I've walked with people through some really horrific times in their lives. Some of the evil that has been perpetrated against some of the people I've had the privilege of walking alongside — and perhaps some of you have also experienced great acts of evil against you — to simply say to someone, "Oh, forgive," is offensive. And it's not easy. And we all know that if we are the forgiver, we carry the weight of the hurt the other has caused us.
And yet that is what the Christian understanding of Easter is all about. That is exactly what God did through Jesus on the cross. Instead of making us pay the relational debt that sin creates, he absorbed the cost upon himself. That's what happened on the cross. The hurt that we cause in this world — he takes it upon himself. The damage we do to others and to ourselves and to the world — he bears it. And the distance that we create between us and God, Jesus has bridged it. Not because we deserve it, but because he loves us. That's what the cross reminds us of — the cost of grace. And Jesus is the one who pays it.
Easter Is God's Declaration That Love Wins
And today, Easter Sunday, is God's declaration that grace has won. That pain, sin, shame, and even death itself do not get to have the last word — love does.
On that first Easter morning, when the women came to the tomb expecting more grief, instead they heard these words: "He is not here, for he has risen." And then a moment later, they met Jesus, and he said to them, "Do not be afraid." Not because life's easy, not because your grief isn't legitimate, not because you haven't experienced or aren't experiencing real pain — but because "I am alive."
What This Demands of You
And if that is true — if the Jesus story is true — it demands something of you. You can't sit on the fence and say, "Oh well, I'll go one way or the other depending on how I feel." No. It is either true or it's not.
And if you're not at the point where you can make your mind up, that is okay. That's absolutely fine. But what you could do is ask God. You could say to God, "If you're real, if this is all true, show me." I suspect he'll do just that.
And to quote John Newton, who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace, God really works in thunderstorms more often than gentle rain. When you come to God and say, "If you're real, show me" — be expectant. But don't do the thing of making up conditions in your head. Nothing silly like, "If a Japanese admiral walks past that window right now, I'm going to choose to believe in you." Just be open to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.
And if you do believe in Jesus — if you've heard all this and you go, "I believe, but I struggle with doubt" — you're in good company. Because in the Bible, there's that man whose child is dying, and he says to Jesus, "I believe; help me in my unbelief." That can be your prayer too.
And finally, if you do believe and you're settled in your belief — awesome. Pray for others who aren't. But hold on. Hold on to the promise of grace. Never fall into the trap of thinking that you are saved and okay because of your own merits, but simply because of the merits of God. Because that's what Easter is all about.