Easter Sunday, March 31 2024
Penelope Bridges
Alleluia, Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!
Do you want to know a secret?
When have you enjoyed the experience of holding a delicious secret: maybe the beginning of a pregnancy, or planning a surprise birthday party? You revel in the tension between the knowledge and your desire to share. It is such good news, but you can’t tell it, not yet. You have to wait for the right moment. Sssh, Mark says throughout his Gospel, don’t tell anyone. And today, he wants us to keep the secret just a bit longer; according to the oldest manuscripts that we have, he ends his Gospel right here, cut off like a piece of music that lacks its final chord. “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Hold onto the secret.
The women come to the tomb in grief. The dream of the Kingdom that Jesus preached has turned to nightmare; their beloved teacher is dead; there is no hope, no future for the movement. But these women are courageous enough to confront reality, however heartbreaking. They expect to find his broken body, and they are willing to do the unpleasant and desolating labor of preparing it for burial. They have come to do what must be done. But the powerful, the decision makers, those who count, those who can bear witness, they are nowhere to be seen. They have turned their backs on this tragic moment.
Where are the Apostles? Hiding in an upper room. The Romans? Their shift has ended – Friday was just another day’s work, nothing special, just another rebel executed to keep the peace. The temple authorities? Celebrating the decisive defeat of a leader they had feared and hated, because he represented a threat to their precarious power.
Astonishingly, for this day of celebration, our Gospel story this morning lacks any positive emotion. There is no joy, no “surprise!”, no relief or renewal; just alarm, amazement, terror, all the way to the very last word: afraid. A strange kind of Easter proclamation. Why did the news that Jesus was risen create terror for the women? Had they reasoned that their lives, turned upside down by his ministry, might get easier, safer, more anonymous now he was dead? Had they already started to turn the corner back to their old life?
Terror and amazement seized the women. This was their reaction to the empty tomb and the message of resurrection. Maybe because they didn’t understand it, and we fear what we don’t understand. Tom Wright, a Church of England bishop, writes that the best reason for believing that Jesus actually rose from the dead is that it is so unbelievable that nobody who wanted to convince others would make it up. The only reason the disciples could have for spreading this story, Bishop Wright says, is if it really happened. Bodily resurrection was a totally foreign concept to these women at the tomb, and so it was a frightening prospect.
We fear what we don’t understand. We fear the unknown. We fear those who are mentally ill because we can’t see their illness. We fear the strange, the foreign. We fear change when it comes without explanation or warning. We fear the darkness and mystery of death. And in this culture, at this time in our history, there is much to fear, with war and famine in the Holy Land, Sudan, and Ukraine; anarchy in Haiti; ever-increasing hardship due to climate change; ever-widening political divides in our own communities; an epidemic of loneliness; and more.
We cry out: Where shall we find new life? Where might we find the kind of community that Jesus named the Kingdom of God? We are suffering death at many levels: the death of peaceful coexistence; the death of lifelong security; even, perhaps, the death of our planet. Yes, there is much to fear.
And there is also good reason, a positive reason, to acknowledge and even share in some of the terror and amazement that seized the women at the empty tomb. Because what God did on that first Easter was beyond extraordinary. It was awe-inspiring. It was cosmic. It was a new thing. It was something that nobody had ever seen before, a dead man raised to life, and not just to his former life, but to a new kind of life, wounded but powerful; a life that would allow him to appear and disappear, to walk through walls, to offer a message that transcends time and space; a message that has transformed the world and made all things new.
As the popular praise song goes, our God is an awesome God. All things are possible for God, even defeating the power of death. The empty tomb proclaims to the world that God is all-powerful, that against all odds Jesus lives, that love wins.
So, in the midst of our fear, our awe, our incomprehension, we can celebrate Easter. Because God did this incredible thing for us. And if we believe that Jesus died for love of us and rose from the dead to give us eternal life, we can let go of our fear of death, because as St. Paul tells us, “We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 6:9-11)
And elsewhere Paul writes, “We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye… Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where O death is your victory? Where O death is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:51-52, 54-55).
And if death’s sting has been drawn, we are free. Free to live transformed lives. Free to live in hope; and hope is what we most desperately need today.
The other New Testament readings that we have heard this morning testify to events that happened after the resurrection: that Jesus appeared to the disciples, wounded but alive, a physical body; that he ate and drank with them, and that he commissioned them to share the good news with all the world. The Scripture takes us from keeping silence in fear to speaking out and proclaiming the resurrection. (You know, Bishop, we really should be reading them in reverse order).
Peter embodies this transformation, from the man who cowered in the courtyard and denied knowing Jesus, to the powerful and courageous preacher whose words we hear in Acts: “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” (Acts 10:39-43)
Today we celebrate Easter, but that doesn’t negate the experience of Holy Week that we have already come through. It does, however, point us to the possibility that whatever Holy Week times we might encounter, there is always the hope of Easter on the other side.
When have you walked the way of the cross, the journey from Holy Week to Easter? A serious illness, treatment, and recovery. A disastrous fire, loss, uncertainty about the future, a new beginning. A death that changes all of life, and the gradual emergence of new possibilities and opportunities. Life is full of Holy Weeks, small and great, but the good news of the resurrection is always there to remind us that Good Friday is followed by Easter, that death doesn’t have the last word, that our God is the God of the living, not of the dead, that Jesus is alive, that the world has changed forever. Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!
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