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The Sunday of the Resurrection,
(Easter Sunday)
April 4, 2010
Acts 10: 34-43* Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24*
I Corinthians 15: 19-26* Luke 24: 1-12
David M. McNair

The Sunday of the Resurrection is the greatest day of the church year.  It is also the only one that is set by the moon.  Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the Spring equinox.  As complicated as that sounds, it makes ancient sense, since it means that Easter coincides with the greening of the earth. Christ is risen and the whole world comes to life.  Sap rises in dormant trees, crocuses and blood root burst out of the hard ground, honeysuckle spills its sweet smell into the air.  Trillium, periwinkle, and forsythia explode with color like tiny fireworks.  All nature joins the chorus of YES to God’s creative power and YES to life over death. (1)

There is a tradition in the Lutheran Church where Lutheran pastors begin Easter Sunday sermons with a joke. Martin Luther once said that next to music and the word of God, what the devil hates most is laughter.  Today, the devil gets all three — the triple whammy!
Easter has an almost giddy joy about it.  Death, which we fear above all things – not just our own, but the death which can engulf us even while we live – is shown to be weak. On Easter, death is the bully exposed. Death is not the end. It is the door to greater life.  And this door is open to us every day, not just our last day.  “I have set before you life and death,” says the Lord God, “choose life.” “I have come that you might have life and have it in its fullness,” Jesus said.

Luke’s Easter account has a wonderful dramatic irony going on.  Do you think God ever gives a wink?  I think that God winks at us here when the angel asked, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”  It’s as if God is smiling knowing something the women and we don’t yet know – and God can’t wait for us to find it out. The resurrection stories invite us to know something new. They invite us to believe.  They tease us with smiles and laughter.

Do you remember the funeral scene in Mark Twain’s story Tom Sawyer? Tom, Huck Finn and Joe Harper had set off on a raft trip down the Mississippi River to be pirates. They had gotten lost, and after a while the town assumed they were dead.

So the town had a funeral service for the boys at the main church in town during Sunday morning worship. All through the Sunday School hour the people could talk about was what happened to the boys. When the bell rang for church to begin, they all filed over to the sanctuary for worship. The preacher talked about the boys in such moving and positive ways that the people began to feel guilt that they hadn’t seen such good traits in the boys while they were still living.  Why had they focused so on their faults and flaws?  Soon everyone was sobbing in grief.

Then, there was a creaking up in the back of the balcony and the sound of feet clattering down the stairs.  Then the back door crept open.  The minister, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief, stood transfixed by what he saw.  Down the aisle came Tom, Huck, and Joe.  They had gotten home safely and had been hiding in the balcony watching their own funeral service.

The congregation rushed to embrace them.  The minister shouted, “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow. Sing it everybody. Put your hearts into it.” 

The congregation piped right in, singing the Old Hundredth loud enough to shake the rafters:

“Praise God, from whom all blessings flow
Praise him, all creatures here below
Praise him above, ye heavenly host
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

Did you remember the scene?  We, the readers, knew the boys were alive while everyone in the story thought that they were dead.  It was like we were up in the balcony with Tom, Huck, and Joe watching the funeral service with them.  What fun!

In today’s text, it is like we are up on the balcony with Jesus watching his funeral in progress – only it’s really not a funeral.  As the women come to anoint the body, Jesus nudges us in the ribs with his elbow and says, “Just watch; you’re going to love this part!”

It was the first day of the week, the third day after Jesus’ death.  The women who had become part of Jesus’ circle of disciples came to anoint the body with spices. When they got there they saw that the stone had been rolled away and when they went inside, they saw that the body was gone. They were perplexed.  (Sometimes being perplexed is a step on the way to faith).

Jesus whispers to us beside him in the balcony: “Now, watch this.”
As they stood there two angels suddenly appeared in bright shining clothes. They ask, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” 
With these words we, God gives us the wink. Then, the angels announce the impossible news of Easter: “He is not here.  He is risen.”

Hearing these words, the women ran to tell the disciples what they had seen and heard. When the disciples heard the women, the text says “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”  What nonsense —a fairy tale — the delusion of a grief-stricken mind. 

Interesting, isn’t it, that God should choose to entrust women with the first message of Easter. Ancient sources suggest that women were not even permitted to give a testimony in court. A woman wasn’t considered a valid witness. But God chose women to be the first evangelists of the Easter gospel.  God will not let Easter be captured by human systems of dominance and oppression. The Apostle Paul said, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” (2)  God always turns things on its head. This is the way of God’s salvation throughout all history.

The empty tomb pictures something essential for us theologically. Rowan Williams, the Bishop of Canterbury, says that what we see in the tomb is an empty slab of stone with angels on each side which is an essentially and crucially Jewish image. It is a visual echo of the ark of the covenant which the people of Israel carried before them as they wandered in the wilderness. Israel’s ark of the covenant depicted and empty throne and cherubim on each side.  The throne was empty of any representation of God, not to depict God’s absence but rather to symbolize God’s otherness — God’s elusive presence. God cannot be captured by any image created by human hands or human imagination. God will be who God will be, where God will be, when God will be. We cannot control or conjure God with any word or image. So the empty tomb of Easter is an empty throne, depicting the elusive yet faithful presence of Jesus who leads, present-tense, us on. 

When God gave Moses God’s name, God said, “My name is Yhwh.”  Yahweh: not a noun but a verb. A form of the verb “to be” which no one really knows how to translate. God gave us an elusive name so that we never get our fix on God and turn God into an idol.  Essentially, God said to Moses “my name is Yahweh.  You will learn what this means.”
     
In Mark’s account of the resurrection, the angels say to the women, “Do not be alarmed…He has been raised…go, tell the disciples…  he is going ahead of you to Galilee.” (3) One scholar captures this message in these words: “Jesus is going ahead – not going away.” (4)

What Easter means is that the work of God begun in Jesus of Nazareth is going ahead in the lives of those who follow.
All the appearances of Jesus after the resurrection have this unpredictable, enigmatic quality. The women and disciples see him but do not recognize him at first. Here and there he appears in some transformed state, momentarily then he is gone. To the women on the way to tell the apostles about the empty tomb, to two unknown disciples along the road to Emmaus, to disciples afraid, huddled together behind locked doors, to Mary in the garden, to the disbelieving Thomas, to the disciples gone fishing.
What this suggests is that Jesus is now the Risen Christ but we can’t pin him down. He is unpredictable and elusive. He has gone ahead, not away, and we are still running to catch up. He is more than a dead founder, more than the memory of a heroic life or an inspiring example. He has gone ahead.

He came to the Christian killer Saul in a blinding light on the road to Damascus. He came Francis of Assisi in the kiss of a leper. He came to Simone Weil, an agnostic Jew, as she read the seventeenth century poem of George Herbert, “Love Bade Me Welcome.” He appeared to Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic worker movement, in a chance encounter with a friend’s mother kneeling in prayer. He came to Anne Lamott while she was weak from loss of blood after an abortion and at the end of her rope, addicted to drugs and booze. 

What have we been given to do and to be on Easter is to carry on “the unfinished business of the historical Jesus.” (5) Jesus has not gone away. He has gone ahead. Sometimes all we see is the back of a figure we think is him. Sometimes he is a she. Sometimes all we see is a cloud of dust. But there he is, going ahead.

On this day of mystery and great gladness may the words of Gerald Manley Hopkins be our prayer and by the grace of God, our experience:

“Let him easter in us
Be a dayspring to the dimness of us
be a crimson-cresseted dawn
more brightening [us and our world]
as his reign
rolls.”(6)

Notes: