My name is Greg Hampton. I don't think I've said that yet. I'm one of the pastors here at the house.
Thanks so much for being here today. If we've never met, I would love to meet you. I'd love to grab coffee with you or
talk about, I'd really like to talk about Jesus, but I'll talk about anything that you want. I just enjoy hanging out with people.
Today is the penultimate sermon. Yes, I said penultimate. I have wanted to use that word for so long.
Penultimate means the the one before the last one. That's all it means. It's just a fancy word.
So today is the penultimate sermon in our series, Through the Gospel
According to John, and I hope that you'll plan to be here next Sunday as we finish up this series with the last
chapter of the book of John. But now I'm curious with that two minutes for one question. What did you say?
Do you want someone to tell you it's the best movie they've ever seen before you ever go?
Do you want hints about what it's about, or do you want to go in with a completely clean slate?
What do you say? Just shout it out.
Clean slate.
Reviews. We got people that need to read reviews. Clean slate.
If we're reading reviews, we're watching it at home, okay?
If you guys know Eric Rowell, he's one of the elders here, and
he
really loves certain movies, especially like Marvel movies, especially Star Wars movies.
Anything related to those things especially, he will not even watch the trailer online.
If you bring it up, he'll go up, and he'll, he'll, he doesn't want to know a thing.
If he could get away without knowing that he's going to be in a movie,
if he could get away without knowing the title of the movie, he'd probably, if it was Spider-Man,
no, he doesn't even probably want to know the name of the movie. It's just Spider-Man.
That's all he needs to know. He'll show up because he wants to go in like with a completely clean slate.
He doesn't want any expectations.
He doesn't want you to build up what's going to happen.
He doesn't want you to tell it's going to be a bad movie because he knows that what you think
often affects what you experience. What you walk in with has already influenced the experience
that you are about to have. Our brains are wired to see what we're looking for.
If you go in with a bunch of information, it affects what you see.
Here's a great example. I got this video that I want you to watch. It's a little experiment.
This is a test of selective attention.
Count how many times the player is wearing white past the basketball.
How many passes did you count?
The correct answer is 15 passes.
But did you see the gorilla?
What?
This video is from research by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris and is copyrighted.
Show of hands who saw the gorilla the first time through.
Research shows that less than half of people will notice that the first time through because you had directions.
Someone told you what to do and so you ignored everything else.
Who saw the letter S on the wall?
There's two S's on the wall.
Now, here's the thing. If you watch that video again, even years from now, you're going to see the gorilla, right?
Because now you know what to look for. You know the instructions and you know the hidden instructions.
What if I told you that it might not be that different when it comes to how we approach God?
What if what we expect, what we are looking for actually affects what we experience?
With that, let's open our Bibles to John chapter 20.
If you don't have a Bible, we have Bibles on the tables. There's also Bibles on the bookshelf out in the lobby that you can take home with you.
They are free if you need one. Otherwise, you can download a Bible from one of the digital app stores.
We're going to be in John chapter 20. It's going to be 1 through 18.
It goes Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans. If you see any of those, you know that you're in the right neighborhood, okay?
We have a tradition of giving the Scriptures our full attention while they're read at this time of the service.
One of the ways we do that is by standing together as we are able. You do not have to, but if you'd like to, please stand with me at this time.
John 20, starting with verse 1.
Early on Sunday morning, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance.
She ran and found Simon Peter and the other disciples, the one whom Jesus loved.
She said, They have taken the Lord's body out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him.
Peter and the other disciples started out for the tomb. They were both running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.
He stooped and looked in and saw the linens wrapped lying there, but he didn't go in.
Then Simon Peter arrived and went inside. He also noticed the linens wrapped, wrappings lying there, while the cloth that had covered Jesus' head was folded up and lying apart from the other wrappings.
The disciple who had reached the tomb first also went in and he saw and believed, for until then, they still hadn't understood the Scriptures that said Jesus must rise from the dead.
Then they went home. Mary was standing outside the tomb crying, and as she wept, she stooped and looked in.
She saw two white-robed angels, one sitting at the head and the other at the foot of the place where the body of Jesus had been lying.
Dear woman, why are you crying? the angels asked her.
Because they have taken away my Lord, she replied. I don't know where they have put him.
She turned to leave and saw someone standing there. It was Jesus, but she didn't recognize him.
Dear woman, why are you crying? she asked, or Jesus asked. Who are you looking for?
Thinking he was the gardener. Sir, she said, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him and I will go and get him.
Mary, Jesus said. She turned to him and cried out, Reboni, which is Hebrew for teacher.
Let us pray. God of every tribe, every tongue, every color, every nation, we thank you for the Scriptures that they have persisted throughout the millennia.
We have them to read and consider and to learn from and whatever you have for us to learn today, I pray that it would stick.
That it would become a part of the framework of our faith, that our faith would become stronger as we become more like your son, Jesus.
Amen. Thanks, all. You can have a seat.
Mary goes to the tomb expecting to see really what anyone would have expected to see.
She expects to see a stone in front of the tomb and presumably with Jesus resting in the grave behind that stone.
That's not what she sees. And so what she does, she goes and she gets some friends because she's concerned.
Why? Not because she thinks Jesus has risen. That's actually clear from the text if you're reading it, right?
It says she goes to get Peter and John because she thinks someone has taken Jesus's body.
All she knows is it's early in the morning, that it's still dark, that the stone has somehow been rolled away.
And the most logical conclusion in this situation with the information available is that someone has stolen Jesus's body.
Even though Jesus had said that he would rise again, and even if they had remembered that teaching in that moment,
these people, Peter, John, Mary, they almost surely would have been thinking that he didn't mean immediately.
Think about when Lazarus died in John 11 and Jesus went to bring him back to life.
What happens is he gets there and Martha comes to talk to him and she's very upset.
And he tells her, Martha, I'm going to raise Lazarus from the dead. And what does Martha say?
She says, Jesus, I know he will be raised on the last day when all the dead are raised.
Jesus had to assure her in that moment that he was talking about right now.
So even though Jesus had said he would be raised from the dead, their theologically ingrained expectations,
was that if that was ever actually going to happen, it was probably something that would happen much later on what Martha called the last day.
Not Sunday morning. Remember, the expectations that we show up with can shape what we experience.
Now, Peter and John, when they get to the tomb and they go inside and they see his burial clothes left behind,
it's then that they realize that Jesus wasn't taken, Jesus wasn't stolen.
It says, then they remembered and believed.
But even then, we should ask ourselves, what is it that they believed?
Because they didn't come out of the tomb expecting Jesus to be standing there.
It literally says, what does it say they did? It says they came out of the tomb and they went home.
By the way, don't leave your friend weeping at a tomb.
That's not cool. That's not cool.
Especially don't leave them weeping at a tomb when you've had some big realization that apparently you didn't tell them about.
Peter and John have realized that Jesus has risen from the dead.
Maybe they didn't know to look for him right away just outside in the garden,
but they knew his body hadn't been stolen and they just go home.
They just leave her there alone in her grief thinking that Jesus has been taken.
And we know that this is what is happening and what she felt because that's what it says.
They leave. She looks in the tomb. She sees two angels and the angels ask her, why are you crying?
Maybe the angels are thinking, didn't Peter and John tell her about Jesus?
Mary says, I'm crying the same reason as before, right?
Because they have taken away my Lord.
She's still in the headspace of that expectation.
She doesn't even recognize that we know of. We're not sure that she recognizes that she's talking to angels.
She says, I don't know where they have taken him.
She's still working and walking in the same expectation that was created the moment that she saw the stone roll away.
And somehow seeing two angels didn't change that experience.
And we know that because it's what it says.
Verse 14, it says that she says this.
There's no response or she doesn't wait for a response. She turns to leave and she sees the gardener.
She does not recognize that it's Jesus because she's still in the same headspace of the expectations that had been built up.
Now, this is where some wonder how in the world didn't she know that this was Jesus?
Skeptics would say because it wasn't him.
This is all just a story that John made up. None of this happened.
And then even if parts of this did happen, it wasn't really Jesus. They just convinced themselves.
All of them convinced themselves that it was Jesus in the garden because it fits their narrative of these new beliefs that they had been taught.
And they wanted to keep believing.
Biblical scholars would say that every gospel tells the story differently, and they do.
And they would say that she doesn't recognize him because it serves the story that John is trying to tell.
That John is telling it this way because he's trying to communicate something.
The biblical theologian would say that she didn't recognize him because he had a new body.
That he probably looked a little bit different.
That it makes complete sense that she wouldn't recognize him right away.
The truth is that I don't know. We don't know.
None of us were there. There's no video evidence.
I suppose that if you believe that it was Jesus, that it has to be an issue of faith.
But I also know that most of us didn't see the gorilla.
So let's try again.
But this time, really pay attention and make sure that you see the gorilla.
The Monkey Business Illusion
Count how many times the player is wearing white past the ball.
The correct answer is 16 passes.
Did you spot the gorilla?
Yes.
Okay.
For people who haven't seen or heard about a video like this before, about half miss the gorilla.
If you knew about the gorilla, you probably saw it. But did you notice the curtain changing color or the player on the black team leaving the game?
Let's rewind and watch it again.
Here comes the gorilla and there goes a player and the curtain is changing from red to gold.
When you're looking for a gorilla, you often miss other unexpected events.
And that's the Monkey Business Illusion.
I cannot emphasize enough that what we expect, what our brain thinks is going to happen, has a dramatic effect on what we actually see and on what we actually experience and even what we end up missing.
It doesn't matter that we all saw the first experiment.
It does not matter that we all knew that there was going to be a gorilla. We all still missed something.
So I don't blame Mary for not seeing Jesus.
No one told Mary that he had risen.
Her theology almost surely placed his physical resurrection somewhere in the distant future.
Peter and John didn't tell her what they'd realized and remembered.
The angels didn't say anything and she's convinced that someone has stolen his body.
Mary had at least five levels of expectation, information, and experience shaping what she was seeing.
And the same thing happens to every single one of us every single day.
Everything that we have ever seen is shaping what we are now experiencing.
And the hope in this passage that breaks through all of that is found in verse 16.
When Jesus says Mary, when he says her name, it's in that moment that she sees him.
Some of us, maybe someone that's watching online or someone that's in this room, we're here and we're doing this out of habit.
We're doing this out of duty. We're doing this out of consistent experience.
Listen, spiritual habits are a good thing.
Maybe we didn't come expecting anything or maybe we came expecting something very specific.
Maybe we came expecting to hear some songs, expecting to hear a sermon,
but we didn't expect to actually see Jesus in the room.
Mary and Peter and John, they didn't go to the tomb expecting to see the risen Christ.
Maybe some of us are still walking through each of our days yet to expect to actually see him.
Maybe some of us didn't come here actually expecting to meet Jesus.
My hope for all of us, not just for this moment, not just for the rest of the day, but for each day,
is that you will hear Jesus say your name and that it will snap us out of it.
That his voice will cut through all of the regularly scheduled programming
and then all the layers of what we've experienced will divide.
And then maybe today that we can experience something because Jesus is in the garden.
Jesus is no longer in the tomb and Jesus is not hiding.
And he knows your name.
And if we listen, I think that we can hear him saying it.
Amen?