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Luke 24:1-12 | “Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead?” | April 5, 2026

April 11, 2026·38 min·3 clips

The women came with spices for a dead Jesus but found the stone rolled away and the body gone, leaving them utterly perplexed.

1. This is an Easter Sunday sermon preached on April 5, 2026 at Christ Church Carpinteria on Luke 24:1-12, the resurrection account. 2. The pastor of Christ Church Carpinteria delivers the sermon; the congregation has been working through the Gospel of Luke in weekly sermons for over four years. 3. The sermon's central question is what the congregation can know with certainty about what happened at the tomb on the first Easter morning, addressed to both believers and skeptics. 4. Luke is described as a medical doctor who wrote his gospel as a commissioned research project for Theophilus, a wealthy, doubting man who wanted certainty about what he had heard concerning Jesus. 5. The literary structure of Luke 24:1-12 is described as a sandwich: unbelief of the women frames the outside, unbelief of the men closes it, and the angels' announcement sits in the middle as the central content. 6. The women arrive at the tomb bearing spices—items intended for the dead—showing they fully expected to find a dead Jesus and had no anticipation of resurrection. 7. Luke calls Jesus 'the Lord Jesus' for the first time in his gospel at the moment the tomb is found empty, a detail the preacher treats as a narrative signal. 8. The disciples receive the women's report and dismiss it as 'nonsense'—the Greek word connoting an idle tale—and the preacher uses this to argue that the disciples were ordinary, skeptical people, not gullible fanatics. 9. The preacher notes that all four gospel writers place women as the first witnesses to the empty tomb, which he argues is counterintuitive enough to support authenticity, since women's testimony was inadmissible in courts of that era. 10. The angels' first statement—'Why do you seek the living among the dead?'—is applied to all world religions that point to dead founders: Muhammad's tomb in Medina, Joseph Smith's burial site, and Buddha's ashes divided across eight shrines. 11. The preacher extends the rebuke to a form of Christianity that treats Jesus as merely a helpful moral teacher, calling this 'dead religion' with no more life-giving power than any other dead founder. 12. The central announcement—'He is not here, but he has risen'—is framed using 1 Corinthians 15: if Jesus is dead, God is a liar and Christians are the most pathetic people alive; if Jesus is alive, forgiveness, transformation, and eternal hope are real. 13. The preacher addresses the feeling of 'I wish it were true but it sounds too good to be true' by pointing to the doubting women, the unbelieving disciples, and Theophilus as historical companions in that feeling. 14. Certainty about the resurrection, the preacher argues, is not grounded in personal angelic experience or in being an eyewitness, but in the authority of God's own word—the angels' response is 'remember how he spoke to you' rather than 'look at us.' 15. Peter's response—running to the tomb, stooping to look in, seeing only the linen wrappings, and going away marveling—is interpreted as a man who previously trusted his own mind over Jesus's words now beginning the process of trusting God's word instead. 16. The empty linen wrappings are given as a rational detail: a grave robber would not unwrap a body before stealing it, so the wrappings alone refute the stolen-body theory. 17. The sermon closes with Romans 10:9—'If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved'—as the invitation. 18. The tone is direct and intellectually engaged, regularly validating doubt rather than dismissing it, and treating historical and philosophical objections as worth addressing. 19. Skeptical visitors, people wrestling with whether Christianity is factually true, and believers seeking assurance will find this sermon directly addressed to their position. 20. Listeners who prefer devotional or experiential preaching over textual and argumentative preaching may find this sermon more cerebral than emotional in its approach.

As heard by us

A careful resurrection sermon that asks the listener to trust the word over doubt.

Luke 24:1-12 is framed as a resurrection case built from the women at the tomb, the angels' question, the named witnesses, and the disciples' refusal to believe.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want Luke 24's empty tomb treated like evidence, not wallpaper.

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