Sermon delivered Sunday, April 16, 2017 (Easter Day) at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA -- my last Sunday serving that congregation as long-term supply priest.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Our observance of Easter is the liturgical high point of the year, one of the most joyful moments in the life of the church. Christ is risen! Life has triumphed over death! On this day, churches all over the world, from small communities like ours to the biggest cathedrals, pull out all the stops to put on the biggest celebration of the year.
But the first Easter wasn’t so purely joyful. The day the women discovered the empty tomb and Jesus began appearing to his followers, there were many other emotions that were likely more prominent than joy for the disciples. The stories of the first resurrection appearances show the disciples grappling with grief and sorrow, bewilderment, disbelief, and fear.
The Gospel of Mark tells us that after the angels appeared to the women at the tomb telling them Jesus had been raised, they fled from the tomb and said nothing to anyone, because they were terrified (Mark 16:8). John’s Gospel tells us that while Mary Magdelene was out weeping at the tomb, the disciples were gathered together in the upper room with the doors locked, out of fear (John 20:19) – presumably fear that they too would meet a similar fate as Jesus at the hands of the authorities. When they received the news that Jesus was alive... well, it seemed to them “an idle tale,” as the Gospel of Luke puts it (Luke 24:11). Even though they had seen Jesus raise dead people to life before – the daughter of the leader of the synagogue in Galilee (Mark 5:35-43), a widow’s son in the town of Nain (Luke 7:11-17), and Mary and Martha’s brother Lazarus (John 11:1-44), somehow the concept that Jesus could be alive after they’d seen him so brutally murdered was incomprehensible to them.
And perhaps rightfully so, because what happened to Jesus wasn’t exactly like what happened to the synagogue leader’s daughter, the widow’s son, or Lazarus. The disciples didn’t see the miracle in person, as they had with the people Jesus raised. The disciples only discovered it after the fact, after he was risen and began appearing to them. No one actually SAW him rise, and as our beloved forefather Thomas reminds us, it’s not just we modern scientific types who like to see things for ourselves in order to believe them.
Not only were there no witnesses to the actual event itself, but Jesus’s Resurrection had changed him in some pretty incredible ways. Although he still retained the scars and marks of his crucifixion, which the disciples were able to physically touch, and he ate and drank with them to prove that he was an actual physical being, not a ghost or some kind of apparition, he also wasn’t exactly the same as he had been before.
Presumably, the synagogue leader’s daughter, the widow’s son, and Lazarus all looked exactly the same before and after their resurrections, but when Jesus appears after his Resurrection, he’s not always immediately recognizable. The people who have spent many years traveling with him day after day don’t recognize him! Mary Magdelene mistakes him for the gardener. The disciples on the Road to Emmaus walk and talk with him along a long journey, not knowing who he is until he breaks bread with them when they arrive at home. And if that weren’t enough change, apparently he could also enter locked rooms without recourse to the doors, and appear and disappear at will.
Clearly, what happened to Jesus changed him in a way that the resurrection of Lazarus, the widow’s son, and the synagogue leader’s daughter did not change them. Their resurrections were a restoration of life and health to their physical bodies, but Jesus’s Resurrection was a complete transformation of the physical body. Presumably, all three of the people Jesus raised from the dead went on to die again at the end of their natural lives, but after his Resurrection, Jesus remained alive forever. His Resurrection wasn’t a simple resuscitation, bringing life back to his physical body. It was a complete transformation into a different plane of existence, one in which the physical body is still very real but the properties of this world no longer apply.
All of this was confusing and strange and mystifying to the disciples on that first Easter, as it still is to us if we take the time to really reflect on what we’re commemorating this day. When we say “Christ is risen,” when we talk about the power of life to overcome death, we’re talking about much more than the flowers blooming again after being dormant all winter, or the way in which new life can emerge from decaying matter in the natural world. Those transformations are certainly a kind of resurrection, bringing life from death, but at the end of the day, no matter how much we use that imagery at Easter, filling our churches with flowers, ultimately that image is a woefully inadequate metaphor for Christ’s Resurrection, and indeed all imagery or metaphors fall short to describe it. Because nothing that we can see or touch or feel with our senses could possibly come close to the complete radical transformation that was the Resurrection. That first Easter was like nothing humanity had ever known or experienced, before or since.
And as we all know, any time we experience significant change in our lives, it can be disruptive and unsettling. I’ve been reading a lot about transition lately, as I prepare to leave St. Cuthbert’s and begin my new ministry at the church of St. John the Baptist in Aptos, and all the psychologists will tell you that even good change, even positive change, even something that you’re happy about, causes stress. As human beings, for some reason, even though change is a regular part of our lives – we live in a world that is constantly changing, and we inhabit bodies that are constantly changing – most of us experience change as distressing in some way.
But no change you or I have experienced in our lives could possibly compare to the disruption the disciples were faced with on that first Easter. If we have mixed emotions when we move, or start a new job, or start a new relationship, or lose a loved one, imagine those experiences magnified about two hundredfold and maybe that would start to come close to something like what the disciples might have felt that first Easter morning.
Because unlike the resurrection of the synagogue leader’s daughter, the widow’s son and Lazarus, Jesus’s Resurrection wasn’t a restoration of the way things had been before. The families of the people Jesus raised were comforted that their loved one was healed and things could go back to how they’d always been before, but for the disciples, the fact that Jesus was now alive didn’t mean they would go back to wandering the countryside with him, and healing the sick and watching him teach. Instead, it meant that their entire lives were about to be changed, even more so than when they had left everything to follow him. They were about to embark on an entirely new journey, something that looked and felt totally different from what they had been doing before. And while some might have been excited and thrilled by that prospect, others were probably wary and skeptical, even scared. It was much more complex than the unadulterated joy we express on Easter morning in our liturgies. It was a direct experience of the power and presence of God that shook them to the core and completely rearranged their lives.
So while we rejoice in the Resurrection of Jesus, that central event of our faith that assures us of the promise of everlasting life, we also realize that that Resurrection also means that we are now tied to a life of transformation that leaves things unlike the way they were before. Through our baptism, we are joined to Christ; we become a part of his body. And as the Apostle Paul says, “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will surely be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:5) – a resurrection that means not the restoration of breath to our physical bodies, not an assurance that we will live forever in this world, in these bodies, as we are now, but a promise of complete transformation into a different plane of existence, a plane where death can no longer touch us, a plane where we too will receive our resurrected bodies, which may be as different from our physical bodies as Jesus’s resurrected body was from his. We don’t know exactly what that day will be like, and until then, we can only imagine, basing our guesses on the glimpses of God’s transformational power that we occasionally receive in this life.
“Christ is risen!” is a message not of restoration, but of revolution. It means incredible, mind-blowing change is not only possible but inevitable for those of us who have chosen to link our lives with his.
And if that thought brings you something other than pure joy, if you find yourself a bit wary of what that could mean for your life, remember that the disciples probably had mixed feelings about the Resurrection as well. The first thing Jesus said when he appeared to them after his Resurrection, as he stood before them, the embodiment of disruptive, unsettling change, was, “Peace be with you.” That was the first thing he said to them. “Peace be with you.” Peace to those who stood by him to the bitter end at the foot of the cross, and peace to those who deserted him and fled. “Peace be with you.”
Peace, and “remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). This new reality may turn your entire world upside down, it may transform you in ways that scare you, but do not be afraid. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,” Jesus says to the disciples the night before his death (John 14:27). And as he sends them forth after his Resurrection to spread this world-changing news, he tells them, “Remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” “Peace be with you.”
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