One Easter Sunday, a pastor invited the
children in the congregation (as pastors are wont to do) to come to the front
of the church for a children’s message.
She began by asking them, “Who knows why we celebrate Easter every
year?”
One child immediately chirped up, “Oh,
that’s when you go to the mall and sit on the big bunny rabbit’s lap and tell
him what you want in your Easter basket.”
Then another child piped up excitedly,
“No, no, no! Easter is when you get a tree and hang eggs on it—and you wake up
on Sunday and there are presents underneath it.”
At that point the pastor interrupted and gently said (so as not to crush
the emerging senses of self-esteem of her youngest congregants), “Those are
good guesses, but not quite right. Any
other ideas?” At that
point, another child shyly whispered, “Easter is when Jesus was crucified. He
died, and His disciples put his body in the grave. They rolled a big stone in
front of the opening. And the guards went to sleep. On the third day, there was
a big earthquake and the stone rolled away.”
The pastor
was quite encouraged now because the Youth Message seemed all-of-a-sudden to be
heading down a better path, so she asked the child to tell the congregation
what happened next.
“Well,”
the child replied solemnly. “When the
earthquake happened, the entire town came out by the grave. Because they knew
that if Jesus came out and saw his shadow, there would be six more weeks of
winter!”
OK - that
young child had part of the story right, but certainly not all of it. However, I wonder if we as adults are all
that different. Sometimes I think we
know some of the story, but not really all of it. And so my question is this: What really did happen that first Easter morning
– and more than that, what does it mean?
What’s in it for us?
Each of
the Gospels in the New Testament part of our Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John) tells the story a bit differently.
John has the Risen Christ looking suspiciously like the graveyard
gardener whom Mary Magdalene does not recognize at first as she scampers alone
through the morning dew of the cemetery.
Mark has three women discovering the empty tomb and all
of them running off terrified, telling no one. Matthew adds
a violent earthquake to his description, and he too has the women hustling off,
but in his version, they meet up with Jesus on their way back to tell the
disciples about the empty tomb.
The
account from Luke, the narrative we just read, has the women figuring no one
would believe their wild story (The gospel writer terms it “nonsense”), but
they manage to persuade Peter to come back with them to the graveyard – though we
are left wondering whether he believes any of this so-called “nonsense” either.
You see,
the women had expected to find a corpse in a borrowed tomb. That is why they had brought spices with them
– myrrh, embalming fluids, perfumes for anointing their friend Jesus’ body in
order to give it a proper burial – something they had not been able to do the
day he actually died, what with the Sabbath coming on and they being devout
Jews and all.
The women
had expected to find a corpse because Jesus was dead. He had been betrayed when Judas had planted a
kiss smack on his lips as a signal to the Roman soldiers who subsequently arrested
him in the garden – while he was praying, no less.
The
provincial governor, Pilate, tried Jesus and then sentenced him to death, but
not before having him flogged until his back was left bloody and painfully
scarred. Then he was crucified on the
City garbage heap between two criminals, and his side was eventually punctured
with a Roman spear, just to make sure there was no life left in him.
His mother
had wept at the foot of the cross, holding her grown son swaddled in his
blood-soaked loincloth, until Joseph of Arimathea finished going through all
the red tape of claiming the body and transported it to a rock tomb, rather
like the cave he had been born in, but now, of course, he lay in a manger of
death.
Jesus was
dead, all right – and so the women expected to find a corpse – that is, if they
could even get into the tomb in the first place – the rock sealing its entrance
being so big and all. That would be a
problem.
The Gospel
writer tell us that the women were “puzzled” (now that’s an understatement)
when they saw that the stone had been rolled away, leaving a gaping and dark
entrance hole to the tomb. Their terror
did not occur, however, until those men in white popped up next to them, told
them not to look for the living among the dead, in short, that they would never
find Jesus locked away in a cemetery.
According
to the Gospel writer of Luke, those women barely went inside the cave but took
the word of the men in white at face value and hightailed back to the
disciples, who were probably enjoying their morning coffee even as they hid
themselves away until the events of the past week were forgotten so that they too
would be forgotten, so that they could get on with their lives.
Peter, we
are told, did return to the tomb and found the grave clothes neatly folded in a
corner. He was neither puzzled nor
terrified (as the women had been) but rather “amazed” –though the Gospel writer does not say that he believed
either.
You know,
every Easter the pews in churches all over the world are filled, just like on
Christmas Eve. However, unlike Christmas
where the birth of a baby in a stable with angels fluttering around and
shepherds hurrying in from the hillsides and kings on camels traveling great
distances from foreign lands following stars somehow fits within our rational
mindset, many of us come with significant doubts about the authenticity of this
empty tomb story and consequently disbelief about this whole resurrection
business.
I
certainly cannot prove to you that it happened just like the Gospel writers of
Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John said it did because they were not
eyewitnesses. We have no eyewitness
accounts.
However,
because the story shows up in all four gospels – as well as other Gospels that
never made it into the New Testament – it tells me that something happened – something so significant that it caused one
person to tell another and then another and then another - and then to preach it and preach it and
preach it right down through the ages even to now – today - in this little
church in Raymond, Maine.
I believe
– and I do not think it is just because I am a pastor – that something happened such that the
disciples (and we even today) experienced (and experience) Jesus (even though
he had been crucified, dead, and buried) in a real and vibrant and
life-changing and transformative and – dare I say it – resurrected sort of way. I refuse to downgrade the significance of the
Easter story or the uniqueness of its message.
The way I
see it is if this had been a totally made up tale written a generation later in
order to make Jesus look ever so special and to convince people to join this new
movement within Judaism, the story would not have had the disciples so puzzled
and unbelieving, so profoundly stupid, so muddled by the whole experience. I mean, how persuasive would that have been?
It is
almost as if those early storytellers did not have the language to explain what
had happened that Easter dawn in the cemetery – and what subsequently happened
to them as they experienced a living relationship with this man they had
trusted, loved, and followed during his earthly lifetime.
When you
think about it, we do not really have the language to explain it all either. That being said, I think what we do when it
comes to Easter and this weird, mysterious resurrection business is retreat
into our world of logic and rationality.
We can accept angels at Christmas but not so readily at Easter. We can look the other way at a virgin birth
but not so with a rebirth.
Why is it
that we insist upon neatly packaging the resurrection? Why do we need to have it labeled, sorted,
and explained? Why do we feel compelled to pack it away in a conventional box? And
why oh why do we keep coming back to our churches each Easter Sunday to hear
the “nonsense” story one more time?
You know
what I think? I think we package the
resurrection neatly, put it in a box, keep coming back each Easter because we
are afraid that the story might be true.
That’s right. We are afraid it
might actually be true – and we want to be reinforced – one more time – in our hope
against hope that it is too crazy – too nonsensical – to be anything other than
fictional.
As
Presbyterian pastor, Thomas Long, wrote, “If the Jesus
story ended on Friday, then the disciples can simply be "the eleven,"
and after the appropriate rituals and a season of mourning, they can go back to
life as it was. If the story ended on Friday, then they can be … alumni of
Jesus’ school of religion (and) students of an inspiring though finally tragic
teacher. In short, if the story ends on Friday, we can close out the Book of
Luke” as well as Mark, Matthew, and John. If
the story ends on Friday, then life goes on, everything is dependable and
predictable, and we can remain unchanged – pretty sweet.
Because,
you see, if it is true, if the story ends not on Friday, but really does
continue to Sunday, to Easter, that means only one thing: that God is on the loose – and who knows what
might happen next. Easter is not just
the climax of the Christian calendar. If
Easter is really true, then it is the start of a whole new journey of
transformation, rebirth, and restoration – of ourselves, of our relationships,
of our world.
If we
decide that Christ is risen, that he lives, that in a manner beyond our
understanding, the resurrection happened, then we must necessarily believe on
the most foundational level that we are changed people, that the rules have
altered.
And I
don’t mean changed in regard to what is going to happen to us after we
die. Believe it or not, Jesus did not
give a hoot about an afterlife in his ministry.
He was concerned about now, today, life in this world.
If we
believe, as United Church of Canada pastor, Bruce Sanguin wrote, in “a story implying that Love is stronger than
violence, that life is the context for death, and that the kind of humanity
that Jesus represented could not be snuffed out by the kind of human being that
had executed him”, then we, as humanity, as sons and daughters of God Almighty,
have enormous potential.
But
not only that: if we believe in such a
story, we also have a deep and profound responsibility – as caretakers of
creation, as peacemakers and reconcilers, as facilitators and collaborators, as
justice-seekers, feeders of the hungry, advocates for the poor, and activists
for the weak and marginalized.
And I
am not sure that we really want to take that on, own up to our human potential,
and ultimately trust in the power of Love.
It is a whole lot easier to play out our rational do-loops every year
and neatly package up the resurrection and shelve it – rather than live
it.
You
see, as Bruce Sanguin wrote, “That’s the Easter story in a nutshell and now I’m
asking you which story you’re going to believe: the story of death or the story
of life; the story of God affirming human dignity or God abandoning us to the
worst in us. Christ is risen: Idle tale or Love’s testament?” You decide – and
live your life by that conviction.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church, Raymond, Maine
www.rvccme.org
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