There’s only one headline that can make all the difference in your life — Matthew 28:1–10

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.

There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” Matthew 28:1–10

There’s only one headline that makes all the difference in your life.

1. Worldly headlines are temporary

2. Your headline is eternal

There’s a cartoon of a man stranded on a deserted island. After a long time living away from civilization, a ship finally comes to rescue him. When the sailor in charge of the rescue gets ashore, he hands the deserted man of all things a newspaper. “Compliments of the captain,” he says. “He wants you to read the headlines and decide whether you’d still like to be rescued.”

Like any good cartoon, it’s lighthearted but gets at a deeper truth. Because I know I’m not the only one that only take a certain amount of news headlines before I have to look away before you lose all hope in humanity. Maybe that’s a little dramatic. But maybe not. Because it’s been well observed that our world is full of bad. Bad times, bad events, bad things done by people with bad intentions. And unfortunately, the bad often is what makes the headlines.

It’s one thing for bad things to happen out there to people over there. We can sympathize with their pain for a certain amount of time, but we can also eventually put it out of our minds and go back to focusing on making our headlines as good as we can.

But it’s another thing entirely when the bad starts to happen in our life. When we get into a rut for one reason or another. When an unfortunate event derails our regular day-to-day. Or worst of all, when a horrible mistake that we’ve committed spirals into more evil for ourselves.

Our worship series for the Easter season is called Difference Maker, and it’s an appropriate title because it names something true about us. We live in a world where bad is too common, and we want to push back against it. Many of us set out to do exactly that. We become nurses to care for the sick, therapists to help the distressed. We become tech engineers, teachers, parents. We donate our time, our money, our energy to causes that make difference for the good.

But at some point, we all have to come to terms with the realization that we are finite people. No matter how hard we work, the difference we can make is limited. No matter how good our intentions are, the world keeps producing new headlines of bad news faster than we can erase the old ones. Our efforts matter—but they cannot finally fix our world. No matter how hard we try, the cartoon will always ring true, our world is such that it can always make us pause to think “maybe it would be nicer life to just be away from all the bad of the world instead of working tirelessly against it for only marginal differences.”

And you say, woah we went from lighthearted to depressing really quick! There’s plenty to live for in this world. There’s plenty of headlines that are worth being rescued back to society for. And you’re absolutely right. In fact, that’s why Easter is so important. In studying the Easter gosple, we can see that one headline in particular actually is able to make the difference that our world so desperately needs. It’s the breaking news of Easter that not only makes all the difference for our world, but all the difference for your life.

1. Wordly headlines are temporary

The women in our reading, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary—which, don’t you feel a little bit bad for “other” Mary? On my kickball team last fall there was a really outgoing and funny guy named Jake, and guess who our teammates called other Jake…other Mary, I feel your pain. But anyways, the two Marys had just experienced the worst news headline of their life. For the better part of the last three years, they had been following this man named Jesus. Jesus was a religious teacher, a Jewish rabbi, who was unlike any other teacher they had ever heard. He was wise far beyond his years, and when he spoke people could not believe the authority with which he delivered his words. And yet at the same time he was perfectly empathetic and loving toward them. Best of all, he claimed to be the Messiah. The Messiah was someone prophets had been speaking for hundreds even thousands of years about, a man who would come to set all that was wrong and bad in the world right. Jesus claimed to be this Messiah, and he did the miracles to back it up. And so the Marys and many, many others had put their hope in Jesus. They had made him the most important person in their life’s story. They spent every waking moment with him that they could, learning from him and waiting for the day when he would finally accomplish the Messiah’s mission to eradicate the bad, leaving only good in the world to enjoy.

But the headline that weighed on their hearts that morning seemed to be the opposite of good. It seemed that their hopes were misplaced. Jesus is dead. Not only that, he had been mercilessly crucified, the most painful way to go. Not only that, he had been cruelly mocked and beaten and spat upon. He was completely shamed. The man they had put all of their hopes in for a better life became an public ugly laughingstock.

Maybe you know the feeling that the Marys had that morning. That feeling when you put your hope in something to make the world, or at least your life, better, and then that hope fails. I’m talking about more than starting a new workout schedule and dropping off, or watching your sports team win all season only to lose the championship. I’m talking about something that you’ve built your life’s story around: maybe it’s your career that feels more like a calling, maybe it’s a hobby that you’re really good at, most likely it’s a relationship with a family member or friend that really makes you feel valued and important. When whatever or whoever it is for you ends, it’s terrible news. It’s like a news headline written just for you but one that you never wanted to read. When what was headlining your life comes to an end, it seems to wreck your story and leaves you feeling hopeless. And there’s a name for that situation—grief.

Grief is an inescapable part of our lives. The thing or person you place your hope in now, the thing or person that gives you a sense of worth, inescapably will come to an end. The poet John Donne wrote, “Send not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee,” meaning that when the church bells ring for a funeral, even if you’re not the one in the casket, or no one you know is the one in the casket, the bells may as well be for you because death and ending are the part of the human experience that we all share no matter who we are.

If this thought makes you uncomfortable, it’s because grief is not something humans were ever meant to be comfortable with, something we were never intended for. As a result, all this bad and ultimately all this death in our world is something philosophers have wrestled with for years. The Greek stoic philosophers said that death is inevitable, so you just can’t let it get to you. More recent philosophers have even said that the fact that all things come to an end is actually what gives our life meaning. Their headline would maybe read something like, “Death will come, so things matter while they last.” And that’s pretty good advice. It reminds us that we can make a difference, even if it’s a finite difference, even if whatever difference we make will eventually peter out and end. But in the end, that advice doesn’t do much to fix our problem, does it?

Transition: We need more than good advice, we need good news. We need more than a way of coping with our grief; we need news that changes grief. What if there’s a better headline. A headline that’s not just advice on how to deal with this immovable reality of death. A headline that would chase out all chance of despair from our lives. A headline that would make us jump at the opportunity to get off that deserted island and back to our world and our relationships, broken as they may be because we know that we can make a real difference that lasts.

2. Your headline is eternal

That’s the major news story that the Marys heard early on Easter morning. They went to the grave doubting whether they would ever let their hopes get so high about anything ever again. They went to grieve their friend Jesus, who despite their hopes had died just like everything else. They went wondering how they could possibly live on without him. And then this headline turns their world turns upside-down. There’s an angel from heaven who brings them something far better than good advice: the angel brings the good news to them, I know you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; he is risen. Unbelievable. That’s not how the world works, right? Did the Marys disbelieve? No, it’s just as he said the angel reminds them. He had promised multiple times he would rise. Did they still not comprehend? Come and see the place where he lay. They went and saw, and no body. And sure enough, there was the burial linens folded neatly, this was not some hasty grave robbery. Were there senses deceiving them? Everything they thought they knew about their world, that all things come to an end, was it wrong? The angel has to almost shake them and say Now I’ve told told you.

And they ran off, absolutely out of their mind with all kinds of emotions, can you even imagine? But then they hear his voice, Greetings. This had to be so fun for Jesus. To chase away their immense hopelessness with just a casual greeting. There he was, flesh and blood, body and soul. There was no mistaking it. They could do nothing but worship him for who he proved to be, God himself, powerful over death. It seemed too good to be true, but here he is.

For us too, this story, this reality, may seem too good to be true. Because we look around and our lives are still marked by good things coming to an end. Surely this headline, that Jesus was living again, can’t be real. This has to be a feel-good story, an effective coping mechanism, something other than what it purports to be, the historical account of death being defeated. And yet there Jesus stood. There is no indication that this was some sham story, in fact all the historical evidence, which we’ll get into next week, points undisputably in one direction, that the angel’s headline was true: Jesus, who was crucified, who had died and had been dead since Friday afternoon, now is alive by Sunday morning.

And because he lives, his headline of resurrection is yours too. The rejuvenated hope that the Marys had is yours too. And what joy that gives you. Because while philosophers may give good advice, that each fleeting moment is valuable because it is fleeting, you and I know deep down that that advice is ultimately unsatisfactory. We feel that because we’re human. And because we’re human, we have a sense deep down that something about our world being full of bad and full of endings and full of death is wrong. The book of Ecclesiastes says that God has put eternity on the hearts of humankind. You know it to be true, that you were meant for something more than this world full of death.

You see, when God created humans he never intended for us to die. Death is not a natural part of our world. Death entered into the perfect, eternal world that God created and tarnished it almost beyond recognition. But not quite. Because on the very day that the devil and humans brought evil and death into the world through sin, God made a promise. He promised to set things right. This was the first prophecy of the Messiah, that death would be defeated. The devil and the evil and the death that he wrought would be crushed. And that’s exactly what Jesus did. God himself came to earth as a human, fulfilled every prophecy spoken of him to a T, and crushed death forever. He has made the greatest difference for you, giving you new life, not a life where you have to learn to face endings and simply make the best of things until you too die, but the life that God always intended you to life. He has given you a life where death never has the final word.

And for whoever believes this, our lives take on a whole new meaning. Maybe you’ve heard of C.S. Lewis, he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, but what’s most remarkable about Lewis is that he grew up a Christian, rejected it for atheism as a teenager, until God brought him back in his 30s only to become maybe the most influential Christian author of modern times. C.S. Lewis understood how the good news of Jesus’ resurrection enables us to be incredible difference makers even as we live in this finite world. He wrote, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

This room today is full of people who are immortal. In the restaurant you go to tonight, you will be surrounded by people who are immortal. Everywhere you go in this city, you interact with people who will exist long past their death. The way that you treat these people makes a difference that is eternal. The love that you show to these people makes an eternal difference. Your role at your job, whether you work directly with people or with products that serve people, makes an eternal difference. The things that you create on your own time for the enjoyment of others makes an eternal difference. The people that you care about, the time that you spend with them laughing and crying with them, makes an eternal difference. Why? Because you and they will live forever. Those who put their hope in Jesus put their hope in the person who is able to give all things eternal meaning.

So friends, someone has given you a better headline. This morning someone has given you news that makes all the difference in the way you view every moment of every day, the way that you view yourself and every interaction you have. This headline will never fail you. This headline will never end. This headline allows you to make a difference, not because of any advice you’ve taken or any great thing you’ve accomplished, but solely because Jesus has first made all the difference for you. This headline is in bold font; it’s breaking news that never gets old; it takes up the entire front page of the story of your life, and it says this:

Christ is risen!