Sermon — Easter Sunday, March 31, 2024
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Alleluia! Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
“Alleluia! Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed”—Or is he?
If you were Mary or Mary or Salome on that first Easter morning, you might not be so sure. These women, the most faithful of the disciples, come to the tomb in shock. Jesus’ death on Good Friday was the last thing they’d expected. They had stayed with Jesus to the end. They were the only ones to see where he was laid to rest, but there had been no time to bury him. So they wait in grief and mourning through the long Sabbath day of rest, and as soon as it ends they rush out to buy spices so they can go and prepare his body in the tomb. Their minds are numb, and all they can do is to ask one another, again and again: Who will roll away the stone that’s covering the entrance to the tomb? They weren’t expecting to see Jesus die, but they’re certainly expecting to find him dead.
But the stone has been rolled away. And Jesus’ body is gone. After a cryptic message from a mysterious young man, the women flee in fear. And their Easter morning culminates, not in Alleluias and candy-filled eggs, not with the sight of flowers beginning to bloom or the taste of a festive Easter brunch, but with terror and amazement and speechless, wordless fear.
Now, it is unlikely that you will flee from church this morning. But in other ways, you may find yourself very much in the position of those women at the tomb. In fact, all of us are. Whether you’ve been dragged here this morning by your family against your will, or you’ve been a faithful Christian all your life, the situation is the same: When you hear the message of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday in 2024, you are put in the position of Mary and Mary and Salome. You’ve been told the good news of the Resurrection, but you don’t get to see the Risen Lord. The tomb is empty, the body is gone, and some “young man, dressed in a white robe” (gesture at self) says that “he is risen!”—but there’s no proof. Not the kind that counts. Paul enumerates to the Corinthians a half-dozen times that Jesus appeared after rising from the dead, but we just get the words: “He is not here. He has been raised. He is going ahead of you to Galilee.”
Of all these things, I think it’s easiest to believe that “he is not here,” at least in his expected human form. (Let me double check… No. Unless he got a haircut.) But even then, on Easter Day, it was true. Jesus had been raised from the dead. But this was a Resurrection, not a resuscitation. He wasn’t there with the women in the same form, as if he’d woken up from a nap. He was alive, but his life had changed. He hadn’t come back to finish the work the disciples thought he was there to do, to establish the kingdom of God on earth and usher in an age of justice, love, and peace. “He is not here,” the young man says, the human Jesus that you knew is gone. That part of his life is staying in the past. He is not setting up his kingdom here.
And whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, surely you agree that the world we are living in is not the community of peace and love that Jesus had proclaimed. Surely this is not what Isaiah meant when he said that God will wipe away the tears from our eyes. Our whole world is ripped apart by war. Our own lives might not be going as smoothly as we’d imagined. We get sick and suffer and it’s easy to believe that Jesus is not here among us.
It’s harder to believe that “he has been raised.” And yet on Easter, that is the hope that we proclaim, in the face of all the rest. To say that Jesus has been raised is to say that suffering and death are never the end of the story. To say that Jesus has been raised is to say that the forces of violence and injustice do not win out in the end. To that say Jesus has been raised is to say that God loves you so much that long ago, God became human like you, and laid down God’s own life for you, so that one day you, too, would rise again. It’s this promise that’s the hard one to accept, and yet this one offers us our final greatest hope: that after all our heartbreak, and after all our joy; after all our loss and all our love we will one day live again in a world in which, finally, God will wipe away the tears from our eyes.
But the message of Easter is more than a hopeful promise about the future. The message of Easter is not just that if you suffer along meekly in this life “you’ll get pie in the sky when you die,” as Joe Hill wrote. What that young man tells the women at the tomb is not just that Jesus is not here, and it’s not just that he has been raised—It’s that he is going ahead of you. To Galilee, in fact. Back home, where they’d just come from. Jesus is not setting up the kingdom of God in the holy city, ruling over perfect people in perfect peace. Jesus is out there in the world. Back there at home. With us, however perfect or imperfect we may be. And if we’re looking for Jesus, that’s where we should look. That’s where God’s work is being done. Not in the place where they expect to mourn him, in the darkness of the tomb. But in the thousand places we will meet him, alive, transformed, and working in this world.
And maybe that’s the hardest thing. Maybe that’s the terrifying part, the final word that causes them to flee. Jesus is not here any more, not in the way we expect. But neither has he disappeared. He is out there, all around you, and every day the kingdom of God is being revealed. In every bud that survives the frost to bloom, God’s beauty is revealed. In every moment of unnecessary kindness from a neighbor or a friend, God’s love overflows. Every time you forgive someone for something they’ve done to hurt you, every time you are forgiven, our world is draws one step closer the dream of God. And with every step you take down the road of your life, Jesus is going ahead of you, reminding you, by whatever means he can, that God loves you exactly as you are, and inviting you walk in love without fear or regret, because when all the powers of evil and death have done their worst, he will raise you up nevertheless. And we have nothing to lose in this life but the chance to love one another, as he has loved us.
You know, there’s a funny thing about that last verse of the Gospel of Mark. “They said nothing to anyone,” Mark writes, “for they were afraid.” And yet here we are, two thousand years later, because they were afraid, but they also had a choice. They could choose to believe that Jesus had failed to live up to their hopes, that his body had been stolen, that the young man’s words were a hoax. They could sneak out of the city in fear, and go back to Galilee, and live the rest of their lives in the shadow of those days. But they chose instead to believe that it was true: that he was risen, and he was going ahead of them to Galilee. They chose to hope, instead, to live the rest of their lives looking for one more glimpse of the one who loved them, and taught them to love; and who was with them still along the way.
So: Alleluia! Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!