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Easter Sunday
by Jim McCrea John 20: 1-18 During the summer between my ninth and tenth grades, my Dad took my brother and me to Europe. It was the first time I'd ever been out of my cozy, suburban culture at all - let alone having never been out of the country. Even though European culture isn't all that radically different from our own, it was different enough to be fascinating to me. I especially loved the historical sites we saw on our tour. Perhaps the most powerful experience I had during those two weeks, came on our trip to the Coliseum in Rome. You have to understand that, unlike most people then or now, in our family every child was required to take at least two years of Latin in high school. So I had already been steeped in both classic language and cultures. I was well aware that the Coliseum had been built as a monument to the casual cruelty of the ancient Roman empire. It was a huge building roughly 160 feet high and capable of seating 50,000 people and was specially designed to showcase gladiatorial combat to the death, which was staged simply for the amusement of the crowd. The Coliseum's opening ceremony was a 100-day festival in which thousands of animals and gladiators were killed, baptizing the arena with showers of blood. And that blood only served as a foretaste of the hundreds of thousands of gallons that would be shed there over time and of the careless attitude toward life it represented. I was also aware of the large number of Christian martyrs who had given their lives in that place - facing ravenous lions or worse - rather than deny their faith. So I suppose that it's no surprise that when I entered the Coliseum I sensed a powerful presence of the past. It could easily have been my imagination, but I could feel a heavy sense of sadness and waste and even evil in that place. And isn't that the kind of experience Mary expected when she went to the tomb to anoint Jesus' body on that first Easter morning? Mary Magdalene was one of the few followers of Jesus who was courageous enough to go to the foot of the cross and weep for him, when the vast majority of his other disciples abandoned him and cowered behind closed doors in fear for their own lives. And, in spite of what we may imagine, it clearly did take courage to stand in front of a condemned criminal and mourn him. After all, there is a famous story from the history of that time in which a mother was sentenced to death because she cried at her son's execution. Her tears were considered signs of her own treason. But Mary Magdalene obviously wasn't worried about that. She was a woman who had endured a hard life. The gospel writers tell us that Jesus had cured her from seven demons. Whether you see that as literal spiritual forces or some form of mental illness or what one author (Claire Clyburn) poetically describes as being plagued by "demons of despair, self-doubt, pain, anguish, fear, too many to name," the end result was the same. She was a transformed person and from that moment she devoted her life and energy to the one who had cured her. And yet she had experienced the callous cruelty of a governor who had declared Jesus innocent only to condemn him to death anyway. Mary had seen the results of a savage beating that left Jesus barely able to stand, she had seen him brutally nailed to a cross - the most painful and lingering form of execution the Romans could imagine - and she had seen him die. She was plagued by the same sense of disbelief and horror at that tragic waste of life that I had experienced in the Coliseum. Her only goal on that Sunday morning was to somehow put one foot in front of the other so that she could offer one final gesture of love to Jesus before she buried her hopes with him forever. What had his life meant? What did all his miracles and his fine words amount to when the raw military power of an occupying country could crush him so thoroughly? What would she do with herself now that the central focus of her life was gone? All these thoughts must have rushed through her head as she trudged her way slowly to the garden tomb in the pre-dawn darkness. But what she found when she got there wasn't at all what she had expected. And, of course, the familiar story of her gradually-dawning awareness of Jesus' resurrection is the thing that drew us all here this morning. Mary had come to the end of her rope - her dreams shattered, her hopes crushed - and she was met with unexpected, vibrant, joy-giving life. There isn't a one of us who hasn't felt the blows of pain or the corrosive power of fear or sifted the ashes of our hopes through our fingers. We know all too well the chilling numbness of grief over the loss of a job, the frightening erosion of our health, the devastating power of a tattered relationship and the despair of death. And we come here hungering after the miraculous happy ending Mary found. Yet, deep down, we sometimes don't honestly believe that things like that happen anymore. So we wrap our griefs and loneliness around ourselves and cling to our tombs. We think of Easter as little more than a pretty story that can offer us only a little bit of temporary relief. But when we think that, we miss the whole point because Christ has risen from the dead! That isn't some amusing fable or some quirk of ancient history. That's a promise to each of us that can transform our lives and recreate our world. And it's a promise that will show its inherent truth whether we believe in it or not. You see, Good Friday did happen. Our world did its worst to Jesus and he died in a brutal, agonizing fashion. But he came back to life and now death no longer has any power over him. In fact, nothing can hold him back. He has absorbed the worst our world could devise and transformed it into life. Now that same creative, transforming power is available to us here and now - the power that healed the sick and raised the dead, that walked on the waves and rolled the stars into place - that power is present to refashion our tears into laughter and joy. The God of creation wants to take our broken areas and re-create them into sources of strength. He wants to take our world of war and injustice and pain and remake it into a place of peace and wholeness and love. But we have a hard time believing that because we have so much more experience with loss than we do with resurrection. And to be honest, there's something a bit unsettling about trusting God for resurrections. As one author put it, "Who and what is Christ if not the suffering and death of self - the pouring out and emptying of self in the service of God who has made us, and who can yet save us? "No wonder we are afraid of Easter. We know how to deal with dead Saviors. We honor them with perfumes and spices, so that we can return to the sanity and predictability of our normal lives. We want to remember the past with awe, but we prefer our present less unsettling. The only question we are prepared to ask is: 'Who will move the stone for us?' "[...] Far more terrifying is the prospect of a resurrection that comes with new expectations of us. Far more terrifying is a risen Lord who invites us now to join in life with transforming, resurrection power. "[...] We would rather embalm God in the certainty of our past, entombed and contained in the surroundings of the familiar, than entrust our lives to the transformation of resurrection power - after all, a dead God can be safely approached, and honored at any distance, near or far. A Living God, however, may explode into our present and wreak the havoc of life-changing, world-changing transformation! "All aspects of our faith are easier when they do not change. Indeed, the message of the cross is clearest when we observe Jesus, nailed and immobile. It becomes complex when Jesus comes out of the tomb, on the loose, with places to go. Yet, what is Easter, if not the Real, Living Presence of a Real, Living God who has begun to wreak havoc in the present - the old creation (our familiar surroundings) trembles and quakes at God's presence. A new creation appears as a threshold we are invited to cross." Where are the places in your life in which you have buried your hopes? Where have you reconciled yourself to the idea that you are beaten and the world has won? Wherever those places may be, know that God's promise of resurrection is for you. When you come to the place where all hope is gone, you will find that God is already living there, offering healing and new life. We are an Easter people, formed in the womb of the tomb that holds our broken dreams. We serve a God who is stronger than death, who is stronger than our sins and fears, who is stronger than any form of evil the world may impose, no matter how invincible it may seem. God will always have the last word and that word is life. So trust the good news: Jesus Christ has risen from the dead for you. And you have been given that gift so that you may share in the work of resurrecting the world. Christ goes before us and with him on our side, new life is inevitable. Amen.
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