This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.

Georgie, thank you very much. Well, please do keep your bibles open in Matthew, chapter 28 as we look together at this first Easter morning.

Easter Sunday is a day of mixed emotions. There's certainly the hallelujah emotion which we've enjoyed this morning. Jesus is risen. He's the king. He's Lord forever.

It's a day of victory, of celebration, as we sing a triumphant holy day, a day to join in hymns of joy.

And yet the first Easter morning captures a rawr emotion. You see how it was described in verse eight of our reading. So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy. Why fear? This is surely the best day ever, the apex of the christian good news.

Why might Mary and Mary have been filled with fears? Well, certainly the earthquake, that probably didn't help. Or the stone moving angel sat on top of it, who looked like lightning. And this passage dispels any myths about angels being cute or sweet. Angels are warriors, and they always introduce themselves by saying, do not be afraid because they look terrifyingly awesome.

And the roman soldiers were certainly afraid, weren't they? Verse four. And for fear of the angel, the guards trembled and became like dead men. That's quite some fear that leaves you stuck in your tracks, unable to move, unable to know what to think, how to respond. And the angel has to speak words to these women to calm their fears.

Verse five. But the angel said to the women, do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus, but perhaps they were filled with other fears, too.

What will these soldiers or the religious leaders do when they find out what's happened?

Who really is this man Jesus? We just spent three years of our life with him. He did all sorts of amazing things, said all sorts of amazing things. And now, as he said, the tomb is empty. Who is he really?

And if he's really risen, as he said, well, what does that mean for us? What's next?

And what are we to say? The angel said, go and tell the other disciples. Go and tell the brothers. But what should we say?

Will the others believe us?

I suspect, too, for you and for me, Easter has mixed emotions. It's a bit of a roller coaster weekend, isn't it? On the one hand, there is the triumph of Easter Sunday morning. But alongside the betrayal of Thursday, the pain of Friday, the uncertainty of Saturday, joys and sorrows so often intertwined. And today we celebrate.

And yet we know that many of us, perhaps ourselves, will be filled with fears and worries for our families, for our health, for our future, for our world.

And yet it's the words of the angel which replace our fears with joyful hope. The angel says, do not be afraid. Well, that's a great start. But why shouldn't we be afraid? What's the substance of this call?

How can the angels words and the events of Easter Sunday really give us hope? Well, the angel goes on to say two further things, and we'll look at them now, the angel says, come and see. Come and see. And then says, go and tell. Go and tell.

It's the message of the angel, and it's one which Jesus himself will repeat. The angel invites them. Come and see. Come and see. Now the angel begins with the truth, which defines easter morning.

It's there in verse six.

He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. The tomb is empty. Jesus is risen from the dead, as he said he would, as the scriptures before prophesied.

And so the angel continues, come see the place where he lay. The angel invites the women to see and believe the good news that he has declared to them. And again, Matthew is reminding us that these really are eyewitness testimonies. These events really happen. How else would we know these things unless Mary and Mary said to Matthew, please write these things down.

This is what we saw. This is what we heard. These verses are full of those kind of language. Verse two. It says, behold.

See. This is what they saw. Look. Verse three, it talks about his appearance. Mary, what did he look like?

Well, he was big and scary and white and like lightning.

The angel says, come and see. Did you see the empty tomb? Yeah. The angel invited us in, and we saw the place in the tomb where he lay, and he wasn't there anymore.

Verse seven. The angel says, you will see him. And of course, wonderfully they do, again and again. And multiple people, over 500, see him alive.

But the invitation to come and see has always been more than just seeing with your eyes. It's always been about seeing and savouring, enjoying Jesus. Come and see. It happens a few times in John's gospel, actually. Perhaps you remember some of these verses.

At the beginning of John's gospel, Nathaniel says, can anything good come out of Nazareth? And Philip simply responds with these words as he's met Jesus. He says, come and see.

Come and see. Can anything good come and have a look. Come and meet this Jesus. You won't be disappointed. Or do you remember the woman at the well who meets Jesus and is saved by Jesus?

And she goes back to her town and tells the town about Jesus. And she says these words. She says, come see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ so changed, so impacted was she by meeting with Jesus? She says to everyone, come and see.

Come and meet him. Come and enjoy and experience what I've just experienced, meeting, knowing, loving Jesus. Now, because of Easter Sunday, this invitation isn't just reserved for those first disciples. Come and see him is an invitation to each one of us. Come and meet the risen Lord.

Come and see Jesus. Come and know him, worship him, love him, join his family.

In a few moments, we will share communion together. We will be invited to feed Jesus, to receive him into our hearts, to enjoy the life that he's given. For us to come and see is an invitation to come and know and enjoy and truly know the risen Lord Jesus for ourselves. And of course, that's exactly what happens to Mary and Mary. They really do see Jesus, verse nine, that they've headed off to tell the disciples.

And behold, look, see.

Jesus met them and said, greetings. And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshipped him.

That's the appropriate response, isn't it, to seeing the risen Lord Jesus, who truly is declared as king of kings and lord of lords, the victor over death? What must we do? We must fall at his feet and worship. It's the only right response. And then Jesus repeats the message of the angel, verse ten.

He says, do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me. Come and see. Go and tell. Go and tell.

Come and see. No need to fear because you and they will see Jesus. You say Jesus is going to take the fears and worries of that first Easter morn and turn them into glorious hopes.

You see, I would suggest that knowing Jesus really does make a difference, really makes a difference to some of those things that we hold as fears, those worries we hold for future, for health, for family, for our world.

That's the verdict of Easter morning. The resurrection of Jesus transforms our fears. Because Jesus lives. The future is changed forever. Because Jesus lives.

My hope is not only for life now, but for life to come. Because Jesus lives. Because he's king on high, I can entrust all those I love to his care.

The angel says, come and see. They meet him, they worship him, and their lives and our lives can never be the same. After meeting the risen king, Jesus, come and see. The second thing the angel says is, go and tell. Go and tell.

And we'll think a little bit more about this next Sunday. Jeremy's going to be reaching from the great commission. The next bit of the passage but even as the women go to tell the good news, the angel says, go and tell. Go and tell the disciples.

The soldiers head in the other direction with their own needs to share. They go to tell the religious leaders, the chief priests, those who put Jesus to death. And presumably they recall the same events. So what's happened? What happened this morning?

Why are you here? Why aren't you on guard?

What is it? Earthquake. The ground shook.

And then this soldier in white, bigger and more mighty than anything you've seen, came down and moved that stone. The stone was rolled away. The tomb was empty. We were in shock. We were terrified.

Presumably they told them the story. They told them what happened.

But the leaders are unmoved, unchanged, still hard of heart. So we read in verse twelve, the soldiers are brined, and then they're told what they should be going and telling. Here's a new story to tell. Verse 13. Tell people his disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.

Of course, the credibility of this testimony, this account, as it's put here, is confirmed in verse 15. This story has been spread among the jews to this day. To this day, presumably at least 30 or 40 years on, this story is still being told.

And here's where it came from.

You see, from the very beginning, from that first Easter Sunday, these events have been under scrutiny. The good news has been challenged with counterclaims, and of course, the same happens today.

Not only does I question the christian claims, could the resurrection really be true? Surely miracles don't happen. Was Jesus even real?

All sorts of questions are asked, even as they were on the first day.

But for the sceptic, it's worth asking some deeper questions.

Do you want this to be true?

What difference would it make if it were true? What would change if this were true? Would it really be good news?

You see, sometimes we blind ourselves with the kind of the, what if so, could this really happen? You know, what about this? Perhaps the disciples stole his body. The chief priests, the religious leaders, they knew the truth. They'd seen all that Jesus had done.

In fact, it was the moment when Jesus rose Lazarus from the dead, when they saw a dead man brought to life. They said, well, he's got to go. He's got to be killed.

You see, it's not that it wasn't true. It's they didn't want it to be true. They couldn't handle the truth. Consider the story of Molly Wirthen. I was reading Molly's story last night, actually.

Molly is a journalist and associate professor at the University of North Carolina. She studies particularly religious history, and by her own admission, she's someone who's been interested in religious history, but would have always described herself as an agnostic. That is, until a couple of years ago, when she started to investigate things a little bit more deeply. Here's some of her words, some of her testimony. She says, I came to see that Christianity is a bit unique and really it stands or falls on this single claim about this thing that christians say happened in history, and that is that the tomb was empty and that Jesus rose from the dead.

I'm a historian of Christianity, but to my embarrassment, I just somehow absorbed the mid 20th century Jesus seminar sort of New Testament criticism view that it's all a bit fuzzy, who knows what really happened? But I'd never done my homework. It turns out there was a lot of interesting, provocative and compelling historical evidence around the set of events that I had realised.

What was really preventing me from engaging with this evidence is my own commitment to materialism, as in, just the stuff that we can see and touch is what's true. But if I'm willing to suspend that, what happens? You can walk right up to it and get to the point where you're still faced with a leap of faith. But it's no longer a ten mile leap into the dark. It's a leap based on a pretty reasonable body of evidence.

And it turns out that to reject that leap is a greater act of faith. You see, what Molly had found is that she'd known all these stories for years. She studied these things. She was a journalist, a teacher of history. She knew the Easter story, but she kind of just swallowed that usual story that gets told, oh, maybe the disciples stole the body, maybe he didn't really die, maybe he wasn't even real.

But what Molly found even more incredibly, not only of the Easter story was true, but that the Easter story could be her story, that this good news was credible, believable, it made sense with her vocation as a historian, and that, like the first disciples, she too could have a relationship with arisen Jesus friends. This Easter, the Easter story could be yours as well. After the service, I'd love you to take a copy of this book. It's called happily ever after. It's a little book, it's very short, very readable, and it's about the happy ending that is Easter.

But the best news, and what this book tries to tease out, is that this can be your ending too, that you can share and enjoy the new life, the resurrection life that Jesus brings this Easter Sunday that you can know him and enjoy him forever. You see, Easter is filled with mixed emotions. The shock of the empty tomb, the fear in encountering an angel. But ultimately, all these emotions are overtaken with the joy of meeting the risen Jesus and sharing in the hope of his resurrection life. Amen.