Second Service of Easter -- Easter Morning
April 12, 2009
John 20:1-18

Not Equal to Easter

You’re bound to notice, so let me admit this up front: This sermon will not do justice to Easter.

Clearly, the topic of an Easter morning sermon has to be Christ’s resurrection. That’s because the resurrection is the fulcrum upon which the Christian gospel pivots. Without the resurrection, the Christian faith has no leverage. It couldn’t lift a feather, much less the world. If Christ were not, at this very moment, alive, there would be no point in all this carrying on, and you will have dragged yourself out of bed on this lovely Sunday morning for nothing.

The Apostle Paul put it this way in his letter to the Christians in Corinth: "If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain." (I Corinthians 15:14).

There’s no getting around it. It’s resurrection or nothing. That’s why I’m telling you right now, I’m not up to the task. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is a topic so big, so unwieldy and so indescribably wonderful that no preacher, least of all this one, can begin to do it justice.

So, please give me a break. I’ll do the best I can, but news this good simply cannot be encapsulated. We can sing it. We can dance it. We can celebrate it at this Table, but we cannot capture it. Whatever else we do this morning, we won’t be doing justice to Easter.

Perhaps that’s why the Gospel writer Mark didn’t try. We read his version of the empty tomb story last night at the Easter Vigil. Unlike most preachers, Mark resists the temptation to elaborate.

Here’s how Mark tells it: Some women go to Jesus’ tomb, find the stone rolled away from the door, look inside, and hear a messenger say they were wasting their time looking for Jesus in a cemetery.

"Don’t look for Jesus here," the messenger tells them, "He’s not here. He has been raised." Look for him back in Galilee, and while you’re at it, tell those sorry male disciples who are hiding under their beds to do the same.

Well, that’s not a direct quote. But you get the idea. This news is so good – and so scary – that the women do no such thing. This time I am quoting: "So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

Who can blame them? If what the angel says is true, then the whole world has been turned upside down. Jesus, who was crucified, is alive. That means Governor Pontius Pilate and Caesar, his commander-in-chief in Rome, didn’t have the final word after all. The same goes for the High Priest and the religious authorities in Jerusalem, who worked so hard last Thursday night to get Jesus killed. The same goes for all the thugs and zealots in the world who think that by waging a war or setting off a bomb or throwing protestors in jail they can keep God’s love and justice from arising.

Today all bets are off. The kingdom Jesus had been talking about from day one of his ministry is taking shape. Women have been transformed from undertakers to evangelists. Caesar’s worst has proved no match for God’s best. The old order is bankrupt. Something new has begun.

News this good is disorienting, unprecedented, scary. Mark knows it, and so he doesn’t give us any more details. He leaves us with the men nowhere in sight and the women taciturn and terrified.

John, on the other hand, emphasizes the personal dimensions of Easter. In his version of this morning’s events, two male disciples do show up, but only after Mary Magdalene drags them out of bed with a report that the door of the tomb is ajar. Peter and the other disciple have a footrace, see the empty tomb, and go home, leaving Mary behind, in tears.

She sees two angels who ask her "Why are you weeping?"

"Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." She hears another voice, this time from outside the tomb.

"Woman, why are you weeping."

"Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will take him away."

And then Mary hears her name -- her name spoken as only Jesus could have spoken it, and she knows. She should be scared, but she isn’t. Instead she apparently throws her arms around him, even though she’s not supposed to. Mary leaves the empty tomb with a message to bear to the male disciples, and, eventually, to the whole world: "I have seen the Lord."

In Mark we get the big picture. News too good, and too terrifying to share just yet, news that the world has been set on its head. In John we get the small picture. Tears drying on Mary’s cheek. An unmistakable voice that speaks her name as no one else can speak it.

Both stories tell the same truth. Jesus is alive. Death has lost its sting. The grave as been robbed of its victory. Nothing can ever be the same again.

Through the centuries, ordinary people, just like you and me have been bearing witness to the reality of Easter. Easter changed the lives of those first witnesses, and it still changes lives. If you believe in the risen Christ, you see the world through Easter lenses. Seen through Easter, that same topsy-turvy kingdom Jesus preached, with the poor and powerless at the top and the rich and powerful at the bottom, doesn’t look so crazy. The world doesn’t have to stay the same because it is already headed in the kingdom’s direction.

Jim Lowry, a pastor in Great Falls, South Carolina, writes about one of those witnesses. It just happens to be Jim’s father, Bright Lowry. Jim writes:

In the dark of a hot night in the summer of 1958 . . . my father was awakened by an unexpected phone call. It was the chief of police of our small town in the Piedmont of South Carolina. The chief reported that one of his officers, Bean Pole Hammond by name, had caught Billy B __ , flashlight in hand, pilfering through the merchandise in my father's hardware store.

Billy, as it turned out, was a twelve-year-old throw-away yard child of a hard-living, down-on-her-luck woman who lived with her brood on the wrong edge of the wrong side of town.

Characteristically, even before asking about the condition of the store and its merchandise, my father's first question was what they had done with Billy B_. They had taken him twenty miles away to the county jail.

The next morning after breakfast, as was his unshakable custom, Pappy read from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. In 1958 it was yet a cutting edge thing to read from the RSV rather than the KJV. It was also a cutting edge venture that on that morning our father broke from his custom of reading straight through, a chapter a day, from Genesis through Revelation . . .

Pappy left his book mark in the place he had left off the day before and skipped to Matthew 25. He slowed down in his measured reading when he got to the verse where it says Jesus said, "I was in prison and you visited me." He slowed down again when he got to the verse where it says Jesus said, "In as much as you have done it to the least of these ... you have done it unto me." After that, without comment, he offered our family's morning prayer, including prayer for Billy B_. Then he got up and, after kissing Mom goodbye, drove the twenty miles to the county court house and talked his friend, the county judge, into "sentencing" Billy B_ to live with us for three months.

Thus it was that Billy B_, with neither shoes nor shirt and only one pair of high-water pants, came into our lives. He was welcomed as a son and brother with, as they say, all the rights and responsibilities appertaining thereunto. He lived with us for three months because he had to. For several years after that, mostly until he had graduated from high school and was old enough to live on his own, he lived with us as often as he needed or wanted a clean bed, clean clothes, and a place at the table. By most recent accounts, Billy, his wife, children and grandchildren are all getting on quite nicely.*

That’s the kind of thing Easter people do. They do it because their eyes have been corrected to see the world through Easter lenses. They do it because Jesus is alive and with him the kingdom he embodied. In fact, the whole creation is headed toward a future as open as that tomb Mary found so long ago, as the sun was beginning to rise on Easer Day.

I can’t explain it. I can’t encapsulate it. I can’t do justice to it. But I can tell you, it’s true.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

 

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*James S. Lowry, Journal for Preachers, Vol. XXXII, Number 3, Easter 2009)

 

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