Polk City UMC
Easter, April 15, 2001
Mark Haverland
John 20:1-18 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him." Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes. But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to here, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' " Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
Death has been very much in the air lately. Many of us experienced vicariously the death of a much loved father, grandfather, husband, friend with Nancy Petersen as her father died this past week. And if the concerns we share during worship are any indication, these past weeks have been filled with anxiety about death,. My own family waits in quiet dread at the immanent end to Faith's mother's life. I visit my ward in the nursing home here in Polk City and see his loneliness, incapacitation and depression. He looks to me like someone about to die and not pleased at the prospect. Dan Golbuff told me that other day that lots of the people in the nursing home get no visitors, seem to have no family that cares for them. They face their deaths alone. Their Alzheimer demented brain may be a blessing. These are tough time for such people. Anyone who faces death today and is not in agony is just not in touch with reality. It is a great irony that as modern medicine gets better at keeping us alive, it makes dying harder - harder to do and harder on everyone around. As I watch families struggle with death these days, dying seems like what a crucifixion must have been in the times of Jesus: prolonged, agonizing, and terrifying.
Death seems even more than ever like a dead-end preceded by an extremely complex maze. When we were in England two summers ago, we learned that mazes are constructed with many turns and curves and virtually no straight lines because witches can't turn corners. Witches have to fly in straight lines. We may avoid witches by taking a circuitous path to death, but we do not escape a devilish struggle.
This is not an easy thing for us contemporary Americans to take. We are determined to avoid death at any cost. I learned a while back that the gen-xers are starting cosmetic surgery IRAs in their twenties. They want to be ready to avoid looking their age when they are fifty and beyond. Today's young people won't admit to growing old much less to dying. Cosmetic surgery, I'm told, is a booming industry, even without insurance coverage. Does anyone doubt that the young today will force cosmetic surgery to be considered normal health care and covered by health insurance? Life-style medicine, as it's called, will be as important to those now under fifty as is the current life prolonging medicine is today. Roper Starch surveys indicate that young people fully expect replacement body parts to be standard medicine as they age and wear out their original equipment. Gerald Celente (author of Trends 2000) theorizes that baby boomers are watching their parents die and say to themselves: "Wait a minute; a generation as wonderful as ours can't die. We've always known our parents weren't cool. And it's way not cool to die. Let's not do it!"
Notice how in the movies of late which deal with death, people don't actually die. This is no accident. Buffy and the Vampire Slayer features Buffy and her boyfriend, Angel, who just won't die. Then there is Meet Joe Black, an interminable movie about the delayed termination of a tycoon. In What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams is killed in a car crash but incredibly reunited with wife, kids, and the family dog. Even Titanic features Jack and Rose happy after all, despite Jack's drowning, reunited on the grand staircase as if the whole iceberg thing was just a joke. When Meryl Streep actually dies of cancer in One True Thing (a much better book than Tuesdays with Morrie by the way) and really leaves her daughter behind, the movie bombed. We are convinced that death will not be, for us at least, well, a dead end. And I have to admit, as I watch people die, my only thought is: "I don't want to do that. I don't want to experience what they are experiencing". I want to think of myself as Elton John's "candle in the wind" that goes on forever.
The city council of Longmont, Colorado voted a few years back to replace "Dead-End" signs with "No Outlet" signs. One resident who favored the change said, "We just moved into a condo, right outside there's a dead-end sign...Every time you come home, you have to go by this sign. It just isn't very pleasant." No one wants a sign that announces that they live on a "dead-end' street, much less a "dead-end" life.
The problem with this is that it has nothing to do with our biblical faith and with the Easter story. Jesus really died. He did not appear to die. He was not asleep. He died a death more cruel and painful than we can be imagine. He wasn't dead for a moment on the operating groom table having an out-of-body experience. He was dead, sealed in the grave for three days. He didn't show some "immortal soul," some "divine spark" that lived on in him or in the hearts and minds of his disciples. Jesus was dead. The disciples did not deceive themselves about his death, did not have a sense that, though he was crucified, "he will live on in our memories," or pop back up in our dreams. The one whom they loved, in whom they had hoped, was dead. They came to the tomb in great grief. When they saw that the tomb was empty, they didn't think, "Jesus is immortal," they thought, "Somebody stole his body." There's a lot of weeping, of real grief in the story as John tells it here in John 20. Tears are the appropriate response to the reality, the finality, the totality of death, as we well know.
Yet, within a few days, Jesus's followers began to understand that what had happened to Jesus was "according to the Scriptures." That is, Israel believed that one day God was going to solve the problem of Israel's suffering and oppression and, while God was at it, God would solve the problem of evil and injustice in all the world. The Scriptures promised such a day of divine victory. On Easter, the disciples discovered this victory in the resurrection of Jesus. The cross, which they had thought was the end, the death of their relationship with Jesus, was really the beginning.
Nothing teaches us better than death the lesson that our bodies are not all there is. I remember my Aunt Esther telling of her husband Vernon's farm accident where he cut off a finger in a power take off pulley. It happened so quickly that it wasn't so dramatic an accident and really didn't cause much disability. But Esther wondered what to do with the finger. Should she just throw it away in the garbage, toss it out the window for the dog. It was, after all, a part of the man she loved. Should it be saved and placed in his coffin? I wish I could remember how they solved this dilemma. We know, however, that we are not our bodies. Some spark, some spirit lives within us that transcends our bodies. We can lose a limb, be crippled, even die, and yet.... the real me is never quite extinguished. In a sense, we are like those trick candles that can never quite be blown out. We noticed a few weeks ago that light passes right through a flame. When we projected on the screen through the altar candles, the flame cast no shadow. We're like that. You may be able to see right through us some day, but we'll be there none-the-less.
But we Christians, as did Esther, also believe that there is something special about the body. There is life after death, and God's people can expect it, but is that it won't be what Hollywood and lots of us think. We believe, as we say in the Creed, in "the resurrection of the body," Not the resuscitation of the body, a corpse that didn't really die suddenly coming back to life. We believe that dead Jesus was raised by a loving God who would not be defeated by death and evil.
Hollywood has it right in one respect. The resurrection of the body, Jesus or ours, means that this world matters, now. We may not know exactly how all this can happen, how our resurrected bodies will look. But we do believe that just as Jesus' body was raised, so shall ours.
This means that this world matters, the matter of this word matters. We're not bound for some disembodied spiritual Never-never-land. God has made a decisive bridgehead against the onslaught of death in the here and now. There is no pain we now face that is not transformed in the resurrection of Christ.
In Hollywood, when people die everything gets fuzzy, vaporous and pink. Here in church, we do Easter with the things of this world - candles and flowers, processions and banners, and music. Especially music! We love to sing on Easter. For us Easter is a world finally getting the tune. Most of the world marches to a dirge. We soar in song having been saved, healed, claimed by God.
I like to think of our lives, however, as taking place on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter. Yes, we know something about Sunday morning the disciples didn't know. They lived before the first Easter. But our lives still are stuck in the world of Saturday. We know Easter is coming because we believe the stories of that first Easter and anticipate its power to transform us and our world. But Jesus has still not come again to fulfill all the promise of that first Easter morning.
Imagine those women on Saturday. They probably talked and whispered their grief as we continue to do today. That sad in-between time weighed heavy on their souls. They retold their experiences of Jesus, laughing even at the memory of his life with them, as we do. Perhaps they too were relieved that the long ordeal of death was over and that Jesus was 'at peace," as we say today. Perhaps they wondered how they would get on with their lives, as they knew they must and as they already began to do, making plans to visit the grave to touch his cold flesh, dress the wounds, and make him ready for proper burial.
Their Saturday task was difficult, but really, all too ordinary. People die all the time, and we have to face it. Death, in the last analysis, is not unbelievable, even where we are surprised by it. Death is all too real and all to believable.
But we have a certain advantage in our Saturday vigil. The disciples were ready for almost anything but what they found. They were frightened at the empty tomb, terrified that grave robbers, or vandals, had stolen the body. It took a long time for them to realize that God had triumphed over sin and death for Jesus and for them. We too live in a perpetual Saturday for the victory over sin and death is still not complete. We still die. We still suffer. We still agonize over our sins. But we have the distinct advantage of knowing from the women who visited the tomb that Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed! Our Saturday lives are not so dreary because we know that the future holds something wonderful because God holds the future. The tomb, after all, was really empty!