John 20: 1-18
Stories about golfers' fanaticism are legendary. Here's one to add to your repertoire.
- A golfer named George finally got home. "George," his wife scolded, "you promised you'd be home at four o'clock. Look, here it is eight o'clock." George protests, "But, honey, please listen to me. Poor old Fred is dead. He just dropped over right there on the eighth green." "Oh, that's terrible," his wife exclaimed. "It surely was," said George. "For the rest of the game it was hit the ball, drag Fred, hit the ball, drag Fred."
What do we associate with Easter? Easter bunnies, Easter eggs, crocuses blooming, hyacinths and tulips as gifts to Mom, springtime, the first robin, cocoons soon to bring forth butterflies. Ah, yes, the sweet resurrection of nature is all around us.
And we say that Jesus is like that, a variation of spring. We liken him to the lowly caterpillar who was wrapped in the cocoon of death on Calvary and on Easter Sunday emerged as a divine butterfly and went his way to sit at the right hand of God in heaven. A lovely springtime tableau but, of course, it's all pure parody, pure pagan drivel.
Easter is not bunnies and butterflies. Easter is about a body that somehow got loose. It's about a dead Jesus, horribly crucified, who came back to harass us. And that scares the hell out of us. Easter is about a Jesus who while alive was so radical, so counter-cultural that the prevailing culture killed him. He was a threat to the world as it was and is more of a threat now that he's footloose after the resurrection. Bunnies and butterflies we can handle, but a risen Christ, just as radical as he ever was, is too much. Maybe that's why we settle for spiritual Disneyland.
But the plain fact is that Jesus is not Disneyland. He is a way of life. He is not Dear Abby or Leo Buscaglia or, God forbid, Dr. Ruth dispensing advice and warm fuzzies and what we want to hear. He is demand. He is not flow, he is counter-flow, counter-culture, because the culture is wrong and selfish and sinful as it is. If you don't believe me, remember that this is the culture that gave us Hiroshima, Dachau, and Auschwitz; racism, discrimination, poverty in the midst of plenty, drugs that crossfire young lives into oblivion, and a Savings and Loan scandal so riddled with fraud that every American will pay for decades to come. To see just how much Jesus is opposite to these things, how counter-cultural Jesus is and the Christianity he founded is, look at life from the bottom up, from the other side.
Take a sensitive issue. Jesus speaks of no divorce and would not be swayed by jargon about "an exciting new option for personal freedom." Looked at from the bottom up, divorce is a painful tragedy; it is parents abandoning their children. Period. And that brutal fact hurts and continues to hurt as every study ever produced shows.
A very recent survey by Seventeen magazine shows that 24 percent of fifteen-year-old's have had sex. By age eighteen that figure climbs to 60 percent. From the bottom up view, the annual one and a half million babies being aborted are the most unfree in a free-sex culture. All over America parents who already have raised their families are newly bound in raising the second families of their teenage children. And those dying slowly from AIDS would like to take a second look, if they had the time, at the promises of the sexual revolution.
Don Mattingly of the New York Yankees just signed for nineteen million dollars--nineteen million dollars!--to play baseball while the poor in squalid Brazilian barrios or the homeless of New Jersey haven't even nineteen dollars or nineteen cents. Jesus weeps over that. The self-centered twenty-five-year-old adolescents who, as the newscasts show us, pay seven thousand dollars to have hyped-up stereos in their cars, who have that kind of disposable income to disturb neighborhoods and spend on themselves and their empty lives without a thought to the needy, they are very much a part of a culture that should find Jesus Christ disturbing--because he would find them disturbing.
The glitter and glitz of Atlantic City's multimillion dollar casinos stand in mock contrast to the squalor and poverty just a few streets away. The minority and elderly poor of that city are still waiting for some trickle of the millions spent each day in their city. Would Jesus go to Atlantic City? Not on your life. Unless it were to sit in the middle of the road with a half-fed child between his knees, midway between the casinos and squalor in silent witness until they carted him away for disturbing the peace. Unless it were to show Donald Trump a better way or to remind him and Ivana that they have three children who have a far more desperate need for parents than for publicity.
At this point, you say, hold it! Let's go back to some more golfers' jokes. A little lightness, please. At least bring in some bunnies and butterflies. After all it's Easter and I have my parents and children here and we want to hear something nice. It's part of the holiday.
But I tell you, I would like to say something soft and innocuous about Easter--but the fact is, it's not there. What is there is a Jesus who said that it's easier for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom. He said it. I didn't. He said to seek first the Kingdom of God, which he described as feeding the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty. In short, being concerned about others. He told those disturbing stories about the rich man and Lazarus at the gate; about the man who built bigger and bigger barns--security annuities only to die that night without having kissed his children.
He spoke about forgiving one's enemies as a condition for being forgiven ourselves, for being whole. He said that. I didn't. He said that we do not live by bread alone. He asked: What does it profit us if we gain the whole world and lose our very souls? He spoke of treating women with respect and not
even lusting after them in one's heart. He said nothing about safe sex. He spoke of compassion and he gave everyone he met a second chance. He said that we were to absolutely and without equivocation believe in God and God's wild, wild love for us and that we count far more than the sparrow that falls to the ground.
And what's more---and this is the clincher for which he was killed by the culture---he actually did those things! He fed the poor and healed the sick and took time with friends and prayed and threw out money-changers, hugged children, and had little patience with hypocrites, religious or otherwise. Oh, he was counter-cultural all right. His choice. His values. You can see that, in the long run, his culture could do nothing but pin him to a cross. And so they did.
But what a revolting development that was, as television's Chester A. Riley used to say. Jesus' Abba - the "daddy" he spoke so much of - turns right around and sets him free and he's at his mischief again! What are we to do? We've run out of crosses to nail him to, so we go one better. We make him over Into our image so we can go on living our lives and being very much a part of our culture so that no one knows we're Christian. As for Jesus, we drag him out for baptisms and first communions--so sweet---and Christmas, Easter, and funerals. For the rest of our lives, it's hit the ball, drag Jesus. Hit the ball, drag Jesus.
But that's not what he's all about. He's about happiness and a way of life. He's about the decisions we make at business and school. He's about honesty and caring and concern for others. He's about whistle-blowing and ethics. He's about chastity and fidelity. He's about truth. He's about making relationships work. He's about keeping one's word. He's about life--life here and hereafter for those who listen to him. He is about real joy and fulfillment. He is about a thirty-fold and a sixty-fold and a hundredfold abundance for those who are true disciples.
Jesus is radical, counter-cultural--and risen! He's a body got loose. That's the Easter message. He has nothing against caterpillars, eggs, and butterflies: they belong to Hallmark. He's looking for fellow radicals. They belong to him.
[Reprinted with permission from Telling Stories, Compelling Stories, pp. 163-167, copyright 1991 by William J. Bausch, Twenty-third Publications, Mystic, CT. [This resource, as well as many others, is available at a discount through the Homiletic Resource Center. If you enjoyed this homily, you might consider purchasing the BAUSCH TREASURY, a complete set of his homiletic books, including his new ones The Yellow Brick Road, The Word In And Out Of Season and A World of Stories for Preachers and Teachers, as well as all of his previous publications: