John 20:1-18

Several nights ago, I had a most unusual dream. It was one of those dreams that may not seem to make perfect sense in the cold light of day, but which has its own internal logic that makes perfect sense as you are experiencing it.

In this dream, I woke up in the middle of the night to discover a man silently crouching over me with a gun pointed at my head. Fortunately, that’s not something you see every night, but the sheer existence of this man in my bedroom wasn’t the most unusual thing about this incident. That honor goes to the fact that my armed intruder was somehow wedged into the two or three inches between my bed and the wall. Within my dream, that odd fact allowed me to understand within a second or two that my silent assailant was actually the angel of death.

Now, I really have no idea why the angel of death would need a weapon, but, as I said, dreams sometimes have an internal logic that melts away in the daylight. In any case, I knew without a doubt that it was time for me to die. And, instead of being afraid, I was very calm. I said, “If it’s God’s will, let it be so.”

I was absolutely certain that as soon as I said that, I would be dead. But several seconds went by and nothing happened. To be honest, I was shocked. As I thought about the fact that I was still alive, the angel of death disappeared and I realized that it had just been a dream.

Now I’m sure a psychologist could have a field day with that dream — teasing out evidence of some hidden childhood trauma, or mapping the barren wasteland along the fringes of my personality. But none of that is what interests me as the dreamer of that dream. What struck me was my calm and obedient reaction to what I was convinced was going to be my instant death.

To be sure, Easter — with its promise of life after death — may have played a role in that. The belief in life after death has always been a core Christian belief due to Easter and Jesus’ promise, “Because I live, you shall live also.” But Easter offers much more than the promise of life after death, as powerful as that is. Easter offers the certainty that God’s will for justice and wholeness will triumph in this life regardless of the apparent odds against it.

Not that anyone had the faintest glimmer of any of that when the first Easter morning dawned. Jesus had been whipped to within an inch of his life; he had been found innocent in a kangaroo court, but was condemned to die anyway; he was publicly humiliated by being paraded through the streets of Jerusalem naked and then subjected to one of the most intensely painful forms of execution ever devised in the warped imagination of humankind.

The four gospels mention several of Jesus’ women followers who witnessed much of that and who had seen the terrible results of everything that had been done to Jesus. Other gospels name a few of the women, who trudged toward the tomb near dawn on the first Easter morning. John’s gospel only names Mary, but those other women live on in a single word in John’s gospel when he has Mary report to the disciples, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

Jesus had been taken down from the cross just before sunset on Friday, which is the beginning of the Sabbath when work is strictly forbidden. So there had been no time to offer his body the usual preparations. The women who went to the tomb Easter morning were under no illusions as to what they would find when they arrived. They expected to see a broken and abused body already decomposing in the warm spring weather. That’s not something we tend to — or even want to — remember. We like our Easter celebrations to be light and frilly. But that was decidedly not the experience of Jesus’ original followers in those dreary hours after the crucifixion. Nor was it Jesus’ own experience, for that matter.

Mary and those anonymous women in John’s account are plodding toward the village of the dead to perform their final act of devotion to a man whom they’d come to respect and love — a man they had been sure would transform the world. But their belief in his power drew its last breath on Golgotha when Jesus proved to be no match for the indifferent injustice of Rome.

All those women had left was their disillusionment, their grief and the quiet comfort of the death rituals that gave them a reason to put one foot in front of the other. Because of that, they were entirely unprepared when they were confronted with the reality of God’s redemptive power shown through Christ’s rising from the dead.

Without doing any investigation beyond seeing that the stone had been rolled away from the tomb, Mary raced to tell the disciples that their murdered master had had to endure yet another indignity — having his body stolen from its tomb.

Two disciples run to the tomb to check on the situation. Both saw the empty tomb with its carefully-folded grave clothes and both leave without comment, although we’re told that the beloved disciple believed. Yet, we’re not told exactly what it was that he believed.

If he had a genuine belief in Jesus’ resurrection, you wouldn’t know it by his next action, which is to simply go home as if nothing had happened. That meant that both he and Peter were nowhere to be seen when the resurrected Jesus made his appearance to Mary.

And who exactly was that resurrected Jesus? Was he some kind of figment of Mary’s imagination? No. Was he some sort of disembodied spirit — like the angels in our cartoons who float on clouds and lazily strum harps? No. Jesus was very real. He was very much a flesh-and-blood person in a tangible body that somehow functioned in spite of the wounds that remained gapingly open.

You see, the ancient Hebrews knew nothing of the distinctions the Greeks made between body, mind and spirit — distinctions the Greeks passed on to those of us in western cultures. In Hebrew thought, it was all one. And that’s important to us today because of what that says to us about God’s faith in this world.

The crucified Christ didn’t enter into some sort of ethereal ghost-like existence totally outside the realm of our experience. Instead, he was restored to life in this world in a body that functioned just like ours — even if it apparently could quietly appear inside locked rooms.

But that distinction aside, God’s restoration of Jesus offered us evidence of the value God places on this world and of God’s ability to bring genuine hope into the most hopeless of situations.

Far too many people go through life with essentially the same expectations as Mary and those other women as they plodded along through the pre-dawn darkness toward the tomb of their dreams. The one who had temporarily lifted their vision beyond the horizon has been crushed, and it was all they could do to keep moving — zombies stumbling through a hollow life devoid of hope.

Perhaps you have experienced something like that. Perhaps you are trapped in a moment, constantly flogging yourself over a personal failure or endlessly replaying the memory of some tragedy that has paralyzed your heart. You punish yourself even though the past can’t be undone and everyone else has forgotten the incident that torments your every waking moment. But there is hope. Easter offers God’s own promise of forgiveness and a fresh start. God gives you the strength to learn from the past and move on.

Perhaps you’re dealing with serious illness — your own or that of a loved one. Or maybe chronic pain has closed in the boundaries of your life to the point where you wonder how you can struggle through another day. Then Easter reminds you that the risen Christ has experienced all of that and will be there to support you as you go through your own anguish. He can bring you healing or he can help you endure what can’t be cured.

Perhaps you are plagued by troubles at home — a marriage in trouble based on a love that now seems to be a distant echo from long ago or maybe finances that have spiraled out of control or children who are unwilling or unable to see the danger lurking in their choices and you feel unable to help or protect them. As one author (Anne Le Bas) says about those moments, “Easter isn’t always a straightforward dance of joy. Sometimes it is simply the gift of courage enough to keep walking through the darkness with God until the morning finally comes.”

Perhaps you have experienced a loss that you can’t seem to get beyond — the death of a loved one or the loss of a relationship or the end of a career that had formed the core of your self-identity. Of course, grief can never be rushed through, but eventually the light of Easter can break through and God’s healing will transform your pain.

In that regard, Kathy Donley tells of a friend whose husband indulged in a three-martini lunch one day. Then he climbed into his car and caused an accident which left a young woman seriously injured and hospitalized for months on end.

The husband’s guilt built and built over the course of the next several months, leading him into a spiral of massive depression. Eventually, the woman he had injured died. That proved to be too much for the man, so he took his own life.

Kathy writes that it was a “tragic situation, filled with unbearable grief for two families. My friend could not sleep the night after [her husband’s] death. Alone, she stayed awake all night watching the sky. In her despair, she was not even sure that the sun would rise again. Only when the sunrise came, and she had survived the night, did she feel that she could go on. She said to me, ‘I just had to get through that night. I had to see the sun rise again.’ Those words were the closest she could come to expressing the despair of the dark and the glimmer of hope that might come with the sunrise.

“When we are in the dark, because of grief, loneliness, and heartbreak, when we are bewildered, and perplexed, feeling abandoned by God and friends, the resurrection unequivocally, emphatically, definitively declares that death and despair cannot, do not, will not, have the last word.”

We live in a world filled with countless Good Fridays. Wars appear, multiply and drag on and on, taking massive tolls in lives and property. Accidents and natural disasters combine to undermine our emotional foundations. Injustices and hard-heartedness distort and destroy lives. But that all happens in a post-resurrection world.

The truth is that Christ has died. He was deader than a doornail. Or, more properly, he was deader than the iron spikes that fixed him onto the cross. But Christ is risen. And his resurrection proves that love is stronger than any evil hatred can possibly dish out.

Christ has risen from the dead, so he is alive now and always. There is no part of the world in which he is absent; no situation so desperate that he can’t infuse with new life.

He is hard at work in our Good Friday world binding up our wounds, picking us up when we stumble, shouldering our burdens, inspiring our vision and challenging us to join him in using his resurrecting power to create a better world. The risen Christ is calling all of us to join him in bringing his resurrection power to our hurting world. Will you join him? Amen.

(Comments to Jim at jmccrea@galenalink.com.)