Scripture: Colossians 3:1-4; Matthew 28:1-10; Acts 1:11; Luke 12:16-21 Series: Easter
An Easter Sunday sermon titled ‘Upside Down’ preaching Colossians 3:1-4 alongside Matthew 28:1-10. The empty tomb flips the disciples’ world, and Paul’s call to ‘set your minds on things above’ is read against two false models: Model One (above=good/perfect, earthly=bad/material) and Model Two (Gnosticism, spiritual good vs material evil). The pastor rejects both, arguing ‘things of the earth’ really means prideful self-sufficiency that treats one’s own desires as complete and instrumentalizes others (the rich fool’s barns, the sin against the Holy Spirit). Model Three: because Jesus truly, bodily rose, ‘above’ means seeking Jesus concretely in neighbors made in God’s image, not in the clouds (Acts 1:11). Truth-telling becomes a resurrection mindset and act of faith. The resurrection frees us from anxiety and self-reliance, lets others encounter Jesus in us, and affirms each hearer as beloved. He introduces an Easter Practices Generator (QR code) to live the full Easter season, closing with Buechner: the gospel is bad news before good news, but we are loved and bled for anyway.
Illustrations: world-turned-upside-down-bad-news, foods-restaurants-vacations-buckets, gnostic-gnosis-spelling, rich-fool-bigger-barns, acts-disciples-staring-sky, jesus-bffs-good-team, resurrected-jesus-stranger-neighbor, jesus-different-to-each-witness, get-out-of-jail-free-card, church-sense-vs-business-sense, easter-practices-generator-qr, buechner-bleeding-bled-for
April 5, 2026
Easter Sunday
Colossians 3:1-4 Matthew 28:1-10
Upside Down
Colossians 3:1-4
So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.
Matthew 28:1-10
After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of 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.”
The tomb is empty. What they expected to see was not there. He was not there. The absence of the body of their Lord flipped their lives. Their world had been turned upside down. It seemed like bad news at first. If you told a friend, “my world turned upside down today,” they would most likely brace for bad news.
We like the world to stay how we expect it to be. We categorize our world based on how we expect it to be; we put things in buckets. We all have the foods that we like, the foods we don’t like. The restaurants we like to go to. The vacations we enjoy. The parts of our job that we find enjoyable, the parts of our job we could do without. We do it with the people in our lives — the people in our friends’ lives, in our families’ lives. Some of it intentionally, some of it unintentionally. We categorize. We do it to survive. We process the world around us in chunks. We set our mind to the things around us.
In the letter to the Colossians, Paul is committing the people of Colossae to think of what is above: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” And I want to hold on to this idea and this phrase on this Easter Sunday — the things that are above, the things that are on earth — because I think there’s a paradox going on here that we need to untangle in order to really get to the heart of Easter.
Now, a flat reading of this is what I am going to call Model One : there are things above — angels, clouds, saying all the right things, doing all the right things, doing what people expect of you. Then there are earthly things — dirt, disease, poverty, mistakes, the opposite of those above-coded things. This is one way to look at it. Things above: good. Things below: bad. Things above: doing everything perfectly. Things below: making mistakes. That’s Model One.
The next one, Model Two, is what has been called Gnosticism. It’s spelled in a funny way, with a G — G-N-O-S-T-I-C. Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge, like agnostic — someone who doesn’t have knowledge of a situation, who is without knowledge. But a Gnostic, historically, was someone who claimed to have a special kind of knowledge. And what that ended up looking like was the belief that the material world was bad and wicked, but the spiritual world was good and kind. So everything that was physical and material was bad, and Jesus came to save us from that bad materiality and let us enter the spiritual world. This is Model Two.
I’m going to be transparent here: I think both of these options are very bad and wrong readings of Paul, as well as wrong understandings of Christianity. Now, if we proof-text this a little bit and just look at Colossians alone, there are some logical results we might get. But when we read it together with the Gospel — when we understand it together with the resurrection of Jesus Christ — “things above” and “things of earth” take on a radically different meaning, which gets us to Model Three.
What is being implied here by “things of the earth” is not normal things. It’s not earthly things that matter, material things. It’s not even mistakes or sins. Instead, we should understand by “the things of the earth” is the idea that we are everything we need. That my desires are all good and justifiable. That my actions are all good and justifiable. That the buckets and expectations in which we place the people in our lives and the things in our lives are satisfactory and complete. This supposedly natural way of living is precisely where our mind cannot be.
This gets to what is, in some of the Gospels, referred to as the sin against the Holy Spirit — a notion of a pride so strong that you are indifferent to the rest of the world except for your own benefit and what you see as your own benefit. These are earthly things.
This is the rich landowner who had so much wealth and so much from his harvest that he filled up his barns, and so he wanted to go tear down his barns and build bigger barns so he could be satisfied in himself. That’s the earthly mind that Paul is encouraging the people of Colossae to avoid. They have been raised with Christ, so they can seek the things that are above.
Now, the irony is that the things above may look like what Model One thinks are earthly things — and definitely what Model Two thinks are earthly things. Because to seek what is above is not just to go into your mind. It’s not just to escape your current reality. What is above is to seek Jesus. And Jesus is not to be found far away. Jesus isn’t found in the sky. Jesus never says, ‘Look for me in the clouds.’ In Acts 1:11, after Jesus ascends into heaven, the disciples are mocked when they look to the sky after his ascension. They don’t wait and stare up. They go back to Jerusalem.
Jesus is found concretely in our neighbors around us. That is where Jesus is not only seated but living and active.
Model Three can look like an exact inversion of the first two, based on what you do and how you act. You can go through Model One all your life and never give any regard to the people around you, whether they’re made in the image of God or not. You can do all the ‘right’ things and live the ‘right’ sort of life, a commendable life to most people that still ignores the people around you who could be Jesus in your midst.
You can go through Model Two all your life and never for a second think about it. You are taken care of. You are on the good team. You are going to heaven. You and Jesus are BFFs and you don’t even have to do anything different.
But in Model Three, we’re confronted by the existence of our neighbors. We are confronted by them because our goal is no longer to escape them or defeat them.
Now, we may try to define “neighbor” down so tiny that we don’t have to think about anyone — but then we’re coming back into Model One. And if that is the life you want to live, you can live that life. But that is not what is offered by faith. That’s not what is offered by God. That is not what the resurrection of Jesus Christ offers us. It’s not that minimal life of self-satisfaction that instrumentalizes everyone else. Instead, we can see our neighbor as made in the image of God and as a possible encounter with Jesus himself.
Resurrection Encounters
The resurrection encounters with Jesus are confusing to the women and the people involved. Those people don’t really know what to make of it. People who have known Jesus and followed him are still confused and scared after the resurrection. After his new form — the resurrection body of Jesus looks different, so that the people around him don’t recognize him. Jesus doesn’t look like a zombie or a ghost. He looks like a stranger to them. He looks like a neighbor.
What is interesting to imagine is that he might have looked different to each of them. What if the resurrected Jesus looked different for the women than he did for Peter and John?
For each of us, we look at our neighbors in a different way. This is not categorizing into buckets — this is just the reality. We see Jesus in a different way. There’s not a hierarchy to this, but I think it’s important for us to clarify that we don’t all look in the same way. We don’t all encounter our neighbors in the same way. For those of us who are visually impaired, we don’t encounter our neighbors in the same way. And again, Jesus is present there.
Jesus rose from the dead. Not as a metaphor but a reality. The tomb was empty. Not in our hearts but in Jerusalem. The radical consequences of that amazing reality mean that we don’t only get a get-out-of-jail-free card for the afterlife, but that right now we see our world differently. We can see our world differently.
Whether you have been faithful all your life, or you are here on a lark, mercy is offered to you. Forgiveness is offered. You don’t have to live a life trapped by your desires and expectations. We don’t need to be shackled.
We don’t have to keep our thoughts on the earth. We don’t have to have our business sense and our church sense. We don’t have to think differently on Sunday than we do on Monday. Now, there may be consequences for that. There are going to be consequences in this world. There are going to be consequences for telling the truth.
Telling the Truth
Telling the truth is a resurrection mindset. It is looking to things above and not below, because every time you tell the truth, it is an act of faith. And every time you lie, it is an act of the earth. It is an act of deception. It is an act of power — you are claiming power over another person. Telling the truth, even those inconvenient, difficult truths, the ones that don’t make you look good, is believing more in God than in yourself.
See, the true reality is that the resurrection transforms our lives a lot more than just spiritualizing it. And we have freedom in that. We have freedom to see the people around us as possible encounters with Jesus.
We have the freedom to not be anxious about the people around us or the situations in our life.
But more than that, we also have the freedom for people to encounter us as Jesus — that we are made in the image of God. That you are made in the image of God. You are beloved. You are beloved. You are not a mistake. You’re not an accident. You are worth it.
You can live differently today. The church has done a good job of focusing on Lenten fasts and practices, but we have let the Easter season get away from us. Easter lasts until the end of May at Pentecost.
Easter Practices Generator
This year, I wanted to try something new: an Easter Practices Generator. If you go to this QR code, it will take you to a site that will generate a random Easter practice for you to try on. You are free to do it. Free to live in a different way that is not burdened by the expectations of this world which is collapsing. Free to live into the world Christ is building.
When the women went to the tomb, their world turned upside down. It seemed like bad news at first. The Gospel is always bad news before it is good news.1 The bad news is that you are a sinner. The bad news is that people are sinners in need of help, of saving. You can’t do it on your own, and to a world of self-reliance, that is humiliating and hard to bear. But it is also the news that you are loved anyway, despite being a sinner. Loved, “cherished, forgiven, bleeding to be sure, but also bled for.”
So on this Resurrection Sunday, may you take hold of your freedom in Christ — to set your mind on things above by living in this world fully, by not taking half measures, by not making excuses, by living fully, by letting go of that which keeps you from your neighbor, by letting go of that which keeps you from God. Truly, through Christ’s resurrection: freedom.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Footnotes
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Frederick Buchner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, 7. ↩