I. The importance of Christ's Resurrection is a thing which we must each learn for ourselves; it will not be felt by our being assured by others that it is important. But few persons of any education reach the age of manhood without having an opportunity to learn it, whether they choose to avail themselves of it, or to neglect it. Be the exciting cause what it may, the effect is almost sure to occur; we commune with our own hearts, and think of life and death, and ask ourselves what will be our condition when sixty years are over; whether, indeed, we shall then have died for ever, or whether we shall but have fallen asleep in Christ, to be awakened by Him when the number of His redeemed is full. It is then that the words of my text assume a very different character to our ears; then it seems no slight, no ordinary, blessing to be assured that the Lord is risen indeed.
II. The fact of our Lord's Resurrection implies two things: (1) That He was actually dead; and (2) that He was alive again after having died. The latter point was the only one which was disputed in former times; it was the original account given of the matter by the Jews, that His disciples came and stole away His body. But it is a remarkable instance, both of the force of truth in the long run, and of the sounder spirit of criticism which prevails in modern times, that this objection is now generally given up. No one who pretends to be a judge of human character can doubt the perfect honesty of the narrative in the two last Chapter s of St. John's Gospel; and admitting the honesty it is equally impossible to doubt the truth of it as to the fact of our Lord's showing Himself to His disciples after He had been crucified. But it is pretended now that He did not actually die under His Crucifixion; that the appearances were those of a living man, not of one risen from the dead. But where the death of the sufferer was so peculiarly important to those concerned in it, as in the case of our Lord; where He had Himself appealed to His rising again as the proof that He came from God; and where His enemies trusted to prove by His death that He had not come from Him it becomes an improbability beyond all calculation, that an event, in itself so extraordinary, should happen in the very case where its occurrence could not fail to be considered as miraculous. Eight-and-forty hours after His burial, He was seen, not only alive, but in perfect strength and vigour, presenting Himself to Mary Magdalene, in the garden in the morning; to two of His disciples at Emmaus, six miles distant from Jerusalem, in the afternoon; and to His Apostles at Jerusalem in the evening: not as a man saved by miracle from dying of wounds, which must at any rate have left him in a state of the most helpless weakness, but as He was, in truth, the Son of God, who had overcome death, and who retained only so much of His earthly nature as might prove to His Apostles that it was He Himself Jesus, who had been crucified, Jesus, who was now risen, to live for ever.
T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. iii., p. 94.
References: Luke 24:34. T. Armitage, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xiii., p. 332; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines of Sermons,p. 86. Luke 24:35. G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount,p. 157; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iv., p. 224.Luke 24:36. Thursday Penny Pulpit,4th series, p. 265; Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Gospels and Acts,p. 115.Luke 24:36-43. B. F. Westcott, The Revelation of the Risen Lord,p. 61; A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve,p. 463.Luke 24:38. Spurgeon, Evening by Evening,p. 297.