Before we look closely at this Easter Sunday sermon, preached by Rev Mitch Amoah at Blackburn Presbyterian Church, I want to acknowledge it contains several clear and welcome affirmations.
It preaches Christ’s bodily resurrection rather than a merely sentimental survival in memory. It gestures towards His death as substitutionary, saying that the perfect man took the punishment due for sinful thoughts, words, and deeds. It also rightly recognizes that the resurrection is the Father’s validation and vindication of Christ’s finished work.
The sermon’s treatment of Luke 24:1-27 also has an additional strength. The preacher does not pretend to know precisely which Old Testament texts Christ expounded to the Emmaus disciples. “I’m not exactly sure,” he says, before identifying plausible passages from Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Samuel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. This was no superficial mere listing of Old Testament passages pointing to Christ, but it was a missed opportunity of providing real depth to the sermon.
Several of these texts could have been opened to show how the Father was preparing his people for the work of Christ, and thus strengthen the understanding of the congregation of the sovereignty of God throughout history. Yet, he does not develop even one sufficiently to show why the Messiah had to suffer before entering His glory. Luke 24 does not merely announce that Jesus rose; it reveals that His suffering, resurrection, and exaltation were the necessary fulfillment of God’s redemptive purpose. So although the “must” of 24:7 was highlighted, the “why” of the must was missed.
The Righteousness That Is Missing
Also missing, and perhaps the most serious theological deficiency is the absence of Christ’s righteousness. The sermon says that Jesus came as “the perfect man” and that He “lived as we should have lived”. It says that He makes sinners “right with God through faith in him”. But there is no explanation of how this is so.
In fact, the word righteousness does not appear anywhere in the sermon. Neither does justification, imputation, or Christ’s obedience being credited to believers. Forgiveness is proclaimed, but acceptance and propitiation before God is not adequately explained. This matters profoundly if an Easter sermon is to glorify Christ and move the hearts and minds of his people.
The resurrection is more than evidence that Jesus “succeeded” where we failed. It is the Father’s public vindication of the righteous Son, even the vindication of righteousness itself. Somewhere in the sermon, some clarifying doctrinal teaching was needed. How is Christ’s resurrection from the grave relevant for me in daily life or is it purely “pie in the sky”? Christ was “raised for our justification” (Rom 4:25) and this we have now. In Him, the believer receives not only the removal of guilt but the positive judicial righteousness required to stand before a holy God. A resurrection sermon that omits this leaves the hearer with forgiveness as a benefit, without an account of how such ungodly people are accepted and enabled to live a new life in Christ.
And this leads onto the missing significance of the resurrection in this sermon. The sermon calls Jesus the risen King and the Lord of life and it promises “peace and forgiveness and eternal life”. Yet it does not unfold the eschatological meaning of the resurrection and how it is that eternal life is received as a present reality beyond the mere act of believism. Christ’s resurrection is not simply the happy conclusion to Good Friday or proof that Christianity is true. It is the beginning the last Adamic days and the beginning of the new creation.
All this hinges on the righteousness of Christ and the satisfaction of the Father’s wrath against his people’s sin. The risen Christ has entered into glory, and his people, though outwardly appearing weak and defeated, are already raised and seated with him in the heavenly places (Eph 2:6), awaiting the day when their hidden glory shall be revealed (Col 3:4). Christ’s physical resurrection also guarantees the resurrection of all people: some to eternal life and some to eternal damnation. His resurrection (and ascension) is the pledge that those united to Him will be raised bodily and that death itself will finally be destroyed.
Without this horizon, Easter becomes largely a matter of historical proof and individual emotional comfort. The sermon affirms the empty tomb but does not adequately show what the empty tomb means for the future of the world, the church, the body, judgment, and the coming kingdom.
The sermon’s closing appeal asks, “What’s stopping you from believing this if you don’t?”. It identifies shame, fear of others, and unwillingness to change as possible barriers. These may be appear as genuine obstacles, but the question does not reach the root of unbelief.
In Luke 24, the problem is not merely that people need more evidence or a more open-minded assessment of the evidence. The disciples had the empty tomb, eyewitness testimony, angelic testimony, and the Scriptures. Yet Christ calls these men “slow of heart to believe”. Their condition is spiritual blindness. Indeed, they were kept from recognizing Him, and later Christ opened their minds to understand the Scriptures (Luke 24:45). The opportunity to proclaim the sovereignty of God over all things was by-passed even here.
This sermon is primarily teaching moral reform of character. True, the sermon correctly says that the Spirit gives understanding and that believers strive with the Spirit’s help. However, it never states the necessity of being born again if the benefits of Christ’s work witnessed to by the resurrection are to be ours. It does not proclaim that the fallen heart is darkened in sin, hostile to God, and unable to come to Christ without the Spirit’s life-giving work. It calls for belief, but it does not distinguish saving faith from an assent to facts. Even demons possess orthodox knowledge of God and tremble (James 2:19).
The sermon is not empty. It contains fragments of gospel truths: Christ died in the sinner’s place, rose bodily, fulfilled Scripture, and offers forgiveness and life. But it is like a colander: significant truths remain, while essential gospel realities run through its gaps. The righteousness of Christ, justification, the new birth, the depth of sin, the eschatological reign of the risen Christ, and the necessity of repentance and Spirit-wrought faith are all left undeveloped or remain absent.
The result is a sermon that calls hearers to believe the evidence without sufficiently exposing their unbelief as sin. The urgency and necessity of the implications of Christ’s resurrection remain veiled in this sermon as gospel realities were by-passed in favor of easy believism.
