Sermonette: Historical present tense

Some time ago, as a I prepared an Easter sermon, I learned something new. Well, to be fair to my college professors, I actually relearned something that I had forgotten since my college days. As I worked through John 20, I realized that there were funny notations connected with many of the verbs in the chapter. I looked into it, and discovered that this was the translator’s way of conveying that while the verbs translate accurately into the English past tense, in the Greek they are actually in a rare tense called "historical present tense." The historical present tense is a literary style of writing when an author writes a sentence that clearly has already happened, but he would write it in the present tense to give it more strength. Let me give you an example from the chapter:

“Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came early to the tomb, while it was still dark, and saw the stone already taken away from the tomb.”

–John 20:1 (NASB)

Now, if we take the same verse, but this time putting the verbs in the historical present tense as John originally wrote it, it reads like this (bold verbs altered to reflect historical present tense by me):

“Now on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene comes early to the tomb, while it is still dark, and sees the stone already taken away from the tomb."

–John 20:1 (NASB)

I only used one verse as an example, but these historical present tense verbs are all over John’s version of the resurrection. John uses this tense 19 times across the first 18 verses of Chapter 20. I believe that it is significant that John chose to use the historical present tense so fluidly across the story of humanity's first interaction with the risen Lord. I believe that John desired for his readers not to read the Easter story as something that happened, but as something that happens. He desired for his readers to see the story in their heads unfold, not as if it happened thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away, but as if it were happening in our place and time.

The truth is, we need to read the Easter story as if it is happening today, because the story only matters if we are applying it to our lives. John and the other gospel writers weren’t historians, simply writing for the sake of writing; no, they clearly had an intended goal. They wrote intending the readers to take the story of Jesus rising from the dead and to apply it their lives, regardless of the separation from the actual historical event. John’s greatest hope was that we would read story and picture ourselves as Mary Magdalene. That we would put our whole faith in Jesus, only to watch him die and have his body disappear. But then, like Mary, be filled with the greatest joy possible when we discover that not even death can take hold of Jesus.

So, my prayer is that each and every one of us read the story of Jesus’ resurrection not as if it happened years ago and miles away, but rather, as is if it is happening to each and every one of us right now.