An Uber driver picked up a passenger. They drove in silence for a long while – the driver, of course, in the front seat, and the passenger right behind him in the back. As the many miles went, by, the passenger leaned over to ask the driver a question and gently tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention.
The driver in turn screamed, lost control of the car, nearly hit a bus, drove up over the curb, and stopped just inches from a large plate glass store window. For a few moments, everything was silent in the car.
Then, the visibly shaking driver took a deep breath and said to his passenger, "Are you OK? You scared the living daylights out of me."
The equally shaken up passenger apologized to the driver and said, "I am so sorry. I did not realize that a mere tap on the shoulder would startle someone so badly."
"No, no, I'm the one who is sorry,” the driver replied. “It is entirely my fault. You see, today is my first day driving for Uber. For the past 25 years, I have been driving a hearse.”
Why do you come to church on Easter? After all, to be sitting here on these hard wooden pews is no longer one of our required cultural mores or a societal expectation.
Do you come to hear the preacher tell a faintly macabre but still funny joke? Or to smell the sweet fragrance of lilies and see spring flowers actually in bloom? Or to pretend that you are Pavarotti singing the Hallelujah Chorus with great gusto? Or because your spouse or mother reminded you that the last time you were in church was Christmas Eve?
Or do you come because you have experienced the world to be a pretty dark place these days, and you have tried everything else and wonder if maybe the preacher will say something – anything – that will bring meaning and perspective to it all? Why do you come to church on Easter?
If you come for the faintly macabre but still funny joke, well, you heard it. If you come for the lilies and spring flowers, what you smell and see is what you get. If you come to imagine yourself as Pavarotti singing the Hallelujah Chorus with great gusto, hang tight. And if you come because your spouse or mother reminded you that the last time you were in church was Christmas Eve – well, that is between you and your spouse or mother.
However, if you come because you have experienced the world as a pretty dark place these days – what with the release of the Mueller Report, the pain and suffering on our Southern border, too many tweets, and so much fake news you do not really know who to believe, and, to top it off, the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris this past Holy Week, which seems, as blogger Christine Sine notes, “to spread a pall of smoke over all our good intentions and unfulfilled dreams.” If you have come for that reason, then you are not all that different from Mary when she set out for the garden tomb where Jesus had been hastily buried just three days before.
Three of the Gospel accounts (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) tell us that the women waited until sunrise, or first light, or the breaking dawn to show up with their funeral spices. But not the Gospel of John: for this Gospel writer, Mary tiptoed into the graveyard while it was still dark – still dark - a metaphor for her world. No sunlight on the horizon yet, and she was afraid to even ask what will become the Easter question: In a world as dark as this one, is there any hope?
The Easter story begins where Friday’s story left off – in bleak and gloomy sorrow, in black despair, in the midst of death and broken dreams. All that Jesus stood for – compassion, non-violence, forgiveness - had been put on trial and found wanting.
When Jesus cried out in pain and breathed his last, the disciples’ vision for a future free of Roman oppression and of the poor being ground to dust under imperial feet died right along with him. As Reformed pastor Scott Hoezee noted, “Easter may lead to the light, but it begins in the darkness. Easter may ultimately be about things that are high, bright, light, and clear, but it begins in things that are low, dim, dark, and murky.”
All that being said, who knows why Mary would have wanted to go to the tomb anyway? After all, the now eleven disciples could be found either fitfully sleeping off the effects of Friday and Saturday or crying into their morning coffee cups. That, it would seem, was the best way to deal with a bad situation.
Maybe Mary kept tossing and turning and figured that actually seeing the grave and touching the cold rock that covered it would bring closure, trigger some good old-fashioned weeping and unbridled grief that would do her good. Who knows what she expected to accomplish – or to find, for that matter? One thing we can say for sure though is that she certainly was not expecting to find an empty tomb. That much is clear.
As Christian author and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor writes, "Resurrection [unlike springtime]...is entirely unnatural. When a human being goes into the ground, that is that....You say good-bye....and you go on with your life as best you can, knowing that the only place springtime happens in a cemetery is on the graves, not in them...." Her eyes dim with tears and carrying a hankie then, Mary resolutely walked to the cemetery and picked her way - in the dark - among the headstones until she came to Jesus’ grave.
There she discovered only a big gaping hole that left his tomb wide open. Horrified, she dropped her hankie, saw no need to investigate further, and immediately turned tail and ran to get help. The clues were obvious – grave robbers. One more sign of darkness in a world that was already too dark. “They have taken my Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him,” she declared to Peter and the other disciple.
The two of them hightailed it back to the graveyard with Mary, presumably to check out her terrible news. After all, you cannot always trust a hysterical woman when it comes to empty tombs and bodies disappearing!
Like the good detectives they fancied themselves to be, Peter and the other disciple took the matter in hand and confirmed that, yup, the stone is gone, yup, the corpse is gone too.
Odd thing about the burial linens though – still there and all folded up to boot. Makes no sense, so they scratched their heads and stroked their beards, looking very serious.
As Hoezee notes, “Scholars claim that it is highly unlikely some ancient grave robber would have taken the time required to unwrap a well-embalmed corpse. Thieves are usually interested in speed so as to reduce the chances of getting caught. And anyway, (earlier) we were told that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea had slicked up Jesus' body with aloe and myrrh (a lot of it: nearly seventy-five pounds).
Again, scholars claim that would have caused the grave wrappings to stick to Jesus' corpse like glue. But even if some thief did the highly unlikely and arduous thing of unwrapping the dead body, you would not expect him to then be so tidy as to fold and roll up everything in the orderly fashion Peter and (the other disciple) found.”
The Gospel writer tells us that the other disciple understood, but does not say exactly what he understood: That Mary’s story was true and maybe you could believe a woman every now and then? Peter apparently was confused by everything. In the end, the two men went home for a second cup of coffee – and left the hapless women to her weeping in the garden. And it is still dark.
Mary, however, was determined to get to the bottom of these nocturnal shenanigans, so she peeked into the tomb. That was when she saw two angels who asked her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
Her answer was unchanged: “They have taken my Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him.” And to herself she posed what would become the Easter question: In a world as dark as this one, is there any hope?
The angels were silent and so not much help. It was still dark when Mary turned to man who appeared to be the graveyard gardener getting an early start on the day.
Once more, she heard the same question: “Woman, why are you weeping?” Her answer remained consistent, but it was more of plea this time, spoken in a whisper from the very darkest part of her soul: “If you took him away, please just tell me where he is.”
And the man answered not with a GPS location of the corpse, but rather with her name, “Mary!”
Stunned, she replied, “Rabboni!”
You know, we can speculate endlessly about the historical facts of the resurrection. Except to do so is pointless because the details we have are so varied and scattered throughout each of the four Gospel accounts – everything from the number of women who ended up in the cemetery and who they were to whether or not the tomb was being guarded by Roman soldiers to whether one angel (or was it two?) were in the tomb or outside of the tomb, or maybe they were men who looked like angels – and were the women frightened or joyful, a little of both, or simply confused? The Gospel of Matthew even says there was an earthquake.
Worrying about the technical details is rather like trying to determine how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. And 17thcentury theologians concluded, counting angels is a colossal waste of time and energy – and I would say the same applies to trying to determine the process of resurrection! We each have a life to live with meaning and purpose, and that should be planty to keep us occupied. And besides, what happens in the dark will stay in the dark.
All I know – and perhaps deep down inside you sense it too or you would not be here (jokes, lilies and spring flowers, and the Hallelujah Chorus aside) – all I know is that something happened in the dark that first Easter morning: Something happened that restored hope in a world that seemed so dark, restored hope when all hope for the future had been dashed.
In the early part of World War II, I have been told, a Navy submarine was stuck on the bottom of the New York City harbor. It seemed that all was lost. There was no electricity, and the oxygen was quickly running out. In one last attempt to rescue the sailors from their steel coffin, the Navy sent a ship equipped with divers to the spot on the surface, directly above the disabled submarine.
A Navy diver descended to the dangerous depths in one last rescue attempt. The trapped sailors heard the metal boots of the diver on the exterior surface, and they moved to where they thought the rescuer would be.
In the darkness they tapped in Morse code, "Is there any hope?"
The diver, recognizing the message, signaled by tapping on the exterior of the sub, "Yes, there is hope."
Surely that is the message of Easter we desperately need this year. Surely it is the answer to what has become the Easter question: In a world as dark as this one, is there any hope? And the answer is yes, there is hope.
There is hope because long ago God said yes to Jesus and no to the authoritarian system of the Roman Empire. There is hope because God said yes to the power of love and no to the power of indifference, petty jealousies, resentment, and hate. There is hope because God said yes to all that Jesus stood for – justice, compassion, mercy - and no to the powers of the world – economic inequity, violence, and oppressive power. Hope was restored that first Easter morning, and, because of whatever happened in that garden graveyard, that restored hope has cascaded down through the ages to us now.
The resurrection is not a one-time event that occurred in a first century Palestinian cemetery in the dark and is, for us, only a debate in historical literalness.. No – whatever happened that morning that we confidently and faithfully as Christians call resurrection answered once and for all what has become the Easter question once and for all: IN a world as dark as this one, is there any hope?
And the answer is yes – always yes, even in the darkest of times. What matters then is not what actually happened in the cemetery garden and what all the technical details were. What matters is what happens now, today, when each one of you leaves this church – after the preacher has told the faintly macabre but still funny Easter joke, after the lilies and springtime flowers have all been taken home, after you have felt like Pavarotti for a few minutes and the Hallelujah Chorus has been sung.
You see, because of the resurrection, God has given us a legacy. And because you showed up here today – for whatever reason - you are now part of that legacy. From now on, you have been called to be people of hope in a world of darkness, living each day as if the answer to the Easter question really matters, living each day as a resounding “yes”.
You have been called to be people of hope – and if it is too difficult to use the image of a Risen Christ to live out that restored hope, then maybe you can imagine instead a burned cathedral in Paris - believing that, in God’s good time, it will be rebuilt, and a new life will emerge from its ashes. Notre Dame is a fitting metaphor for Easter – lifting up its message that we so desperately need this year.
Go forth then, be a productive and willing part of the legacy you now own, and answer the call to be people of hope by placing that hope in all that Jesus stood for – hope in the power of compassion, hope in the power of reconciliation, hope in the power of justice, hope in the power of God’s dream for this world. It is the only way you and I will be rebuilt. It is the only way we will survive.
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