In the name of the Risen ☩ Lord. Amen.
What a joy it is to see you all this morning in your Easter best. Easter is first and foremost a gift. It is the gift of new life from God and the joy that we have this morning is a gift as well. Each of you are a gift. It has been noted that the Resurrection is not an individual event that happened only to Jesus, but rather is the dawning of the new creation, of which we are all a part. Easter is a communal event because, by the grace and triumph of God’s love over the forces of sin and death, we are all raised to the new life of the Resurrection. So we are blessed beyond measure to have each of you with us this morning. By having more of the community of faith gathered here, we are that much closer to seeing the full grandeur of the Resurrection. In the name of the Risen Lord, welcome to each of you.
And that statement will be just a true next Sunday as it is today, so please accept this invitation to participate in the joy of this new life given to you by God. It has been said that we are an “Easter people,” and it is my sincere prayer that each of you encounter the depths of God’s love for you by being a regular part of this community of faith.
Easter can be a rather difficult day for us to enter into though. Christmas is far easier to wrap our minds around – people are born every day. But Resurrection, that might be harder to grasp. Today, I invite you to go as deep into the mystery, beauty, and joy of Easter as you can. The hope is that we are always growing deeper into our faith, but you don’t need to feel guilty for being where you are. So struggle with your doubts, don’t let them make you miss out on the joys of Easter. It’s okay to have questions, confusion and uncertainty don’t need to make you feel bad. If you believe with absolute certainty that Jesus rose up from the tomb on Easter, that’s fantastic. And if all you can believe is that it’s a joyful experience to be here in this beautiful church this morning, seeing your friends all around you, then start there, and come back again and again to see what this is all about. Resurrection isn’t something that you should expect to grasp on one Sunday.
Not only is that my pastoral advice to you this morning, but it’s also preaching the Easter text that we heard from Mark. The way Mark describes Easter morning, there is a lot of doubt, uncertainty, and fear. The women, who were going to do their faithful duties of anointing Jesus’ corpse, approach the tomb and see that the stone has been rolled away. That would be enough right there to make me turn around. Lots of horror and zombie movies start with a once occupied body bag being empty. But they have more courage than I do, so they keep going.
They then encounter a young man, presumably an angel, who tells them that Jesus, who had been crucified, has been raised and has gone on ahead of them to Galilee, as he promised that he would. If the message of Easter is joyful and victorious, we might expect there to be a lot of cheering and high-fiving by these women. But instead of excitement and praise, their reaction is terror and bewilderment. The angel had told them to go and tell this Good News to the disciples, but they stayed silent in fear. Mark’s Greek is even starker than this – a word-for-word translation of that final phrase is “and to no one nothing they said, they were afraid because.”
Mark doesn’t have a proper ending, he doesn’t even finish the thought. Scholars have debated for centuries what happened. Did Mark just keel over and die before he could finish the sentence? Was there more to the text, but as we know happened in ancient times, was the parchment torn and lost to history? Or was Mark perhaps making a profound theological claim by ending not only a sentence, but an entire book, with a preposition? Whatever the reason, it’s an unsatisfying ending. The Resurrection isn’t being proclaimed because the only witnesses are speechlessly afraid. The sentence is incomplete. And to top it all off, you may have noticed that this Resurrection appearance is missing something – namely, the Resurrection. Jesus is notably absent from the story of his own Resurrection. In a paradox, Mark leaves us with the only sign of Jesus’ Resurrected presence being his absence in a tomb. This is not the ending to the story that we would have ever drawn up.
But, I think, it’s actually a perfect ending. It leaves us not with a sense of closure, but rather with a sense of expectancy. This cliff-hanger invites us, the faithful readers, to enter into the story. Why might they have been afraid? Who will go and share this Good News? Might you be the herald of Easter joy? What will we find if we go to Galilee? Mark leaves us to wonder “What’s next?” The answer is, of course, “you are.”
As I mentioned earlier, one reason why the Resurrection can be hard to understand is that it can seem like we just don’t have any experiences of Resurrection to draw on. But if we pay attention, the Resurrection is actually something we encounter all the time, we just have to adjust our expectations. You might have noticed that today is April 1st, April Fools’ Day. And in the early Church, Easter was seen as the great practical joke played on the Devil. The Son of God is killed, making it seem as if evil would win. But even Death could not confine the love of God, and so an apparent defeat turns into a glorious victory. There is, indeed, a sense of humor that undergirds both Jesus’ Resurrection and Mark’s narration of it.
Three priests are meeting for lunch, and they decide that they need to be accountable to each other. The first priest makes his confession “I don't know how much of this religion stuff I believe anymore, but the paychecks keep on coming.” The second priest says “My sin is that I’ve been taking money from the offering plate and playing poker with that money.” The third priest says “My shortcoming is that I’m a terrible gossip, and I can’t wait to tell everyone about this.”
What’s the difference between a sacristy in the Baptist, Roman Catholic, and Episcopal church? Well, in a Baptist sacristy, you’ll find a picture of Jesus. In a Roman Catholic church, the sacristy has a picture of Mary. And an Episcopal sacristy has a full-length mirror.
Maybe you’ve heard about the two men who were shipwrecked on a deserted island. One man is frantic in trying to build smoke signals and laying out stones that say “SOS.” The other man is just sitting on the beach, enjoying the view. The first man screams at him, “We’re going to die out here, help me out so that someone might find us. Don’t you care that we’re stuck here?” The second man says, “Of course not, I pledge $10,000 a year at my parish, and we’re starting a capital campaign, my priest will find me.”
Laughter is helpful in celebrating the joy of Easter. Now, I know that explaining a joke is generally frowned upon, but there is something about the structure of comedy that helps us to understand the Resurrection. Good jokes are built upon an unexpected conclusion that points to a difference between perception and reality, between how things are and how they ought to be. In this sense, the Resurrection is a really good joke.
For one, the punchline to Jesus’ bloodied body hanging on the Cross being new life for all of Creation is completely unexpected. The Cross was seen as a dead-end. Even though Jesus has clearly told the disciples that he would rise again on the third day, no one was expecting it, and so when it happens, they are overcome with fear. It reminds us that you aren’t going to find the Resurrection in your life is you don’t expect to be surprised. If you aren’t open to being wrong, or to learning something new, or being surprised then you simply won’t ever experience the grace of the Resurrection. So one way to participate in the Resurrection is to be open – so you might seek out new experiences and see where God’s grace will meet you. You might try a new routine and see where God catches you unaware. You might pray in a new way, opening yourself to how God will be revealed in that practice. You might have a conversation with someone you’d typically ignore, and it very well may be that God will speak to you through them. Allow yourself to be surprised.
The second part of the comedic genius in the Resurrection is that it exposes the gap between perception and reality. The Resurrection is all around you constantly. The new Creation which Christ ushers in on Easter is inviting you to participate in it. The angel tells the women, “Go to Galilee.” You’ll remember that back in the opening verses of Mark, it says “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’” Mark is saying “You want to understand the Resurrection? Go back to the beginning and reread this story.” The power of the Resurrection was there when Jesus forgave sins, when he healed the sick, when he fed the hungry, when he taught us about love.
The power of the Resurrection is still found in those Galilees of our world. You want to experience the power of the Resurrection? Head over to Rowan Helping Ministries, or get involved with Communities in Schools, or volunteer to be a Guardian ad-litem, or visit a friend who has been going through a tough time, or speak Truth to power, or consider leading one of our daily services of Morning or Evening Prayer. Our perception is that these are nice things to do, but the reality is that they are actually moments when the grace, beauty, and love of the Resurrection are on full display. Our preference is to stay in our comfort zone and our perception is that the respectable and self-sufficient people are the ones whom God has blessed. But in reality, the power of the Resurrection isn’t found most readily in ivory towers or executive boardrooms, but rather in those places of Galilee-like ministries of our lives. The Resurrection reminds us of the humor that seemingly powerless love triumphs over loveless power. When you’re in on the joke, you realize that the Resurrection is something in which we live, and move, and have our being, both on this side of the grave and the other.
The abundant life that God intends for you is made available through the Resurrection of the Crucified Christ. Today, on Easter, we celebrate the dawning of this new creation and we give thanks that it is a new reality for us to thrive in. As the angel tells the women, don’t look for Jesus where he was, instead go and meet him where he is today. Meet him in prayer, in Sacraments, in loving service, in faithful ministry, in love which has the power to triumph over all darkness. Thanks be to God, that through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, we’re now in on the joke.
