Risen!

Sermon by Rev. Mary Alice Mulligan, Ph.D.

Scripture: Isaiah 65:17-25, John 20:1-18

We spent most of Lent in the Gospel of Luke, asking Jesus questions. Then we entered Holy Week with Palms and Hosannas, watching Jesus enter Jerusalem. Even as the crowds cheered, the shadow of the cross was growing more ominous. Then we experienced the cleansing comfort of Jesus at the Last Supper, just before all hell broke loose. And some of us took time this weekend to hear or read through the painful scene of the Crucifixion. But after the agony and screaming, there was only silence. We, like the first disciples, found ourselves sitting in absolute emptiness all day Saturday. But now finally, it is Easter morning. Let’s read John 20:1-18.

Easter morning. For many people it is the most glorious day of the year. Humankind’s perverted malice, our temporary insanity, is erased. Those who witnessed their Savior’s murder and watched his cold body placed in the tomb, discover on Easter morning, the tomb is empty. There, in the early morning, God calls, “Come forth, the Risen Christ.” And the rock jumps away and Jesus arises! Where evil seems to have won, God’s power says, “Life!” But understand, this is not mere resuscitation. God’s breath is not merely breathed back into Jesus’ old brutalized body. Just as God called light from darkness at creation, God calls Jesus into a resurrected life, a new creation. Death is defeated. Julian of Norwich put it this way: “The worst conceivable thing has happened, and it has been mended.” She meant, humanity can, for a moment, snuff out the life of the only begotten Child of God, but God will mend it. Death itself has been swallowed up in God’s new life in Christ. He is the Prince of God’s New Order; King of kings and Lord of all creation. Resurrection morning. Alleluia!

But resurrection is confusing. The four Gospels report quite different scenes on Easter morning. Matthew and John show encounters of the Risen Christ with different women and different exchanges. Luke’s Gospel has no one seeing Jesus at the tomb at all, but reports later appearances that day, which none of the other Gospels report. And Mark’s earliest ending has women who also do not see Jesus, but interact with what is apparently an angel. Then they run away terrified and tell no one. 

Even if we just focus on the resurrection in John, still everyone is confused by the empty tomb. Peter and John have a race to get there. But then they don’t know what to make of the tomb. So they wander on home, baffled. Mary remains, but is only looking for his dead body. When she finds the tomb empty, her first thought is “someone stole the body.” She assumes adversaries have perpetrated yet another insult on her Teacher. Even after she converses with angels, her focus is only on finding the dead body. Amazingly, even when the Risen Christ himself appears in front of her, she cannot identify him. She assumes he is a worker, someone who might know where they have hidden the body. Jesus stands alive in front of her, and still she seeks a three day old corpse. It’s only finally when he calls her by name that she recognizes him. 

So we are not surprised when a two thousand year old miracle story doesn’t make much sense to our twenty-first century minds either. How are we supposed to believe in resurrection? We know from too many of our own experiences, dead means dead. None of us has had an empty tomb sighting recently, no matter how desperately we wanted one.

Truth be told, some of us are here because we always come to church on Easter, but we don’t expect things to change. The real world is still out there, where 1 in 5 people lives in such severe poverty they may not eat today, or tomorrow, or perhaps ever again. So how can we understand the empty tomb or the resurrected Jesus today? Who could believe, when the Gospel writers couldn’t even agree on what happened? The resurrection of Jesus baffles us.

Nevertheless, we can discover, Jesus isn’t still dead. God did something to defeat the powers of sin and death. As Christians, we believe death and sin do not have the last word. We do not have to have a detailed description of exactly what happened on Easter morning, because here’s the glorious truth. On Easter morning, people somehow experienced the presence of Jesus again. The Gospel writers show various appearances of the Resurrected Christ, not to pinpoint history but to teach us that God is still at work. We are told about the power of God at work which shifted the understanding of those early followers from the flesh and blood Jesus who was brutally executed, over to the amazing experiences of the Risen Christ. And those amazing experiences of the Risen Christ help to prepare us to eventually experience the presence of the Spirit of Christ among us. 

The story of the resurrection is not a once and for all event, like the crucifixion was. The resurrection has ongoing implications, for every believer, starting with the first witness. When Mary encounters the Risen Christ, she wants to make it a hugging, reunion celebration. But Christ has other ideas. She is sent out to tell the others, which by the way, makes her the first apostle of the resurrection. She is sent (the Greek word is “apostolos” meaning “the sent one”). The implications of the resurrection are ongoing. Still unfolding, we might say. Which is how it is for us, too. The Spirit of the Resurrected Christ is still teaching us, still pointing us forward, still sending us to “Go tell.” Which means, we are people of the resurrection, embracing the love of God in order to spread the love, God’s compassion, to others. God’s power is still erupting into life around us, because the Risen Christ is present.

Easter is a wonderful reminder that the power of God is still bringing life in the world. The tomb was empty because Jesus was raised from the dead. But more important even than that glorious event, Easter reminds us to celebrate the presence of the Risen Christ among us today. Alleluia!