Sermon for Easter, April 17, 2022
I’d like you to close your eyes for a few
seconds, and picture for yourself the story we just heard. Really; indulge me. Close your eyes, and just take few seconds to
see it – the tomb, the stone, the angels, Mary, Jesus. Look at the scene in your mind’s eye. What’s the landscape like? Is the breeze blowing? Is it clear or cloudy, chilly or warm?
OK, open your eyes. As we each painted this scene, I’m curious how
many of you saw this story happening in the morning light? That’s definitely what Google sees. If you search Google for “resurrection of
Jesus,” nearly
all the images show bright light streaming into a cave, or a well-lit
Jesus stepping out of the tomb in triumph.
It’s the final scene of the movie The Passion of the Christ, as Jesus rises
from death and steps into the brilliance of resurrection.
But wait.
Stop the movie. Let’s hear the first couple of phrases from this morning’s story one
more time. There are five little words
there most of us probably missed: “Early on the first day of the week, while
it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb…” (John 20:1). And, by the way, this wasn’t “dark” the way we
think about darkness. Many of us have never
experienced dark like the dark of the world before electrification. But today, if you go to a place like rural
Haiti, you realize just how dark the darkness is when there are no streetlights
or floodlights around.
So, it’s true dark, ancient dark,
that’s enveloping this scene. In fact,
at least spiritually speaking, it’s been dark a long time in John’s telling of
the passion story. Back on Thursday
night, at the Last Supper, Jesus tells his friends that one of them will betray
him, and he identifies Judas as the culprit. Judas leaves the room to go get the police;
and as soon as he does, the story says, “It was night” (John 13:30). Spiritually, it’s been night the whole time
from that moment to Easter morning. The powers
of evil, the powers of this world, the powers opposed to God’s reign and rule –
they’ve seemed to be ruling strong. And
as Mary comes to the tomb that morning, it’s still night.
What’s she doing there? In John’s Gospel, there’s no mention of women
coming to prepare Jesus’ body for burial.
Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus have already done that work on Friday
afternoon. So, why is Mary Magdalene
coming to the tomb alone in the dark? Maybe it’s not so complicated. Maybe she couldn’t sleep, and it just felt
right to come and grieve close to the person she’d loved most in the world. If you’ve ever lost someone who meant
everything to you, maybe you know how she felt.
Mary knows she can’t be with her crucified Lord, but at least she can come
to his resting place and talk with him there, like we do when we go visit a
loved one’s grave.
So, at the tomb, she comes across evidence
that will break her heart even harder but then heal it like new. She finds that the stone has been removed – but,
unlike the version of this story in the other Gospels, there’s no earthquake,
no soldiers running away in terror, no drama other than Mary’s compounding grief.
She goes to get Peter and John to help
her look for the body … and perhaps to get torches so they can see something. The three come back, and Peter and John investigate.
Then the two of them go home, leaving Mary
is standing there, weeping.
Finally, Mary sticks her torch into the
tomb, and she sees something different from what the guys saw: two angels in
white, sitting where the body had been. The
angels ask her why she’s crying. Well, because
someone’s added insult to injury, stealing her Lord’s dead body. Then she turns around and sees Jesus but doesn’t
recognize him … because it’s really dark. Mary thinks he’s the gardener, and she asks
him where the body’s been moved so she can take it away. Then Jesus speaks her name, and that’s what
makes her know who’s standing there, alive, before her. It’s the Good Shepherd, who calls his sheep by
name and whose sheep know his voice. So,
Jesus tells her to go tell the others that she’s seen him, alive and well. Mary finds the other disciples and announces, “I
have seen the Lord!” The irony, of
course, is that she’s seen the Lord while it was still dark.
It’s stories like this that convince me Scripture
still speaks to us and always will. I
won’t ask for a show of hands this time, but I’ll ask anyway: How many of us feel
like we’ve been living through night? There’s
COVID, two years lost in so many ways. There’s
war raging in Ukraine – and in eight other places in the world, each of which have
seen more than 1,000 people killed in warfare just since this January.1 There’s our changing climate. There’s violence in our cities – at least 15 people
shot or stabbed in metro KC in just in the past two weeks. There’s the anxiety that our children won’t
have the lives their parents have had, a fear only worsened by the highest
inflation in more than 40 years.2
There’s despair, including 14 percent of American youth experiencing
major depression last year.3
And on and on and on – I mean, a few days ago, the Wall Street
Journal ran an article on the resurgent presence of evil in the world.4 Now, the promise of Easter is that new life isn’t
just a hope but a reality, that love actually overcomes the power of sin and
death, that resurrection happens. But for
many of us, the sun hasn’t exactly risen yet on resurrected life. Maybe we’re standing there, at the empty tomb,
along with Mary and Peter and John, holding our torches, trying to stab the night
into submission but fearing that it’s always creeping up behind us anyway.
But what if, when we turn around, it’s Jesus
we find instead? What if he’s already up
and alive, even in this night we still know? Maybe he’s calling your name and asking you to
see God doing the last thing you’d expect – working resurrection in the dark.
We each have a part to play in that. Look back to the story. Jesus doesn’t defeat the power of sin and
death with a massive solo show of strength.
He doesn’t gather a heavenly army, and lay siege to the Temple, and
shout to the world that Caesar and Satan have met their match. Instead, he stands there in the darkness, the
light of a torch making shadows dance on his face, and he simply calls out a
name – “Mary.” Then he asks her to go and
tell the others what she’s seen. And, remarkably
enough, she goes – the apostle to the apostles, the first witness of
resurrection.
That was quite a cosmic roll of the dice
for Jesus. Think about it. Mary easily could have talked herself out of proclaiming
resurrection, convincing herself she must have been dreaming. Mary could have assumed that surely Jesus would
have appeared to other people, too, and let herself off the hook so she didn’t
have to stand by such a crazy story. Mary
could have just said, like Moses on Mt. Sinai, “Please, Lord, send someone else”
(Exodus 4:13). But instead, she “went
and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’” (John 20:18). Mary took the risk and trusted resurrection in
the dark.
This morning, that’s our call, too. You know, the pandemic is easing, but it’s
not over. Russia is still killing thousands
in Ukraine. The earth’s climate is still
changing. Prices are still rising. Fear and anxiety are still growing. But we can choose to trust in resurrection anyway
– not as pious Pollyannas, sure that everything will be just fine, but as people
of the risen King, people who have seen the Lord and decided to follow him into
the daylight.
What does that look like? What would it be like truly to trust that sin
and death may still be with us but that God’s already won the decisive
battle? Well, it would look like us
following Mary Magdalene’s lead. Jesus
is trusting each of us to speak and live resurrection through words and actions
that will never go viral but that matter deeply anyway. Faced with a pandemic now becoming endemic,
get out there and get reconnected in the ways that make best sense for you. Faced
with the evil of war crimes thousands of miles away, help us sponsor a refugee
family. Faced with the fear of a
changing climate, advocate for good stewardship, use fewer resources, and
support companies that do the same. Faced
with economic uncertainty, help those hardest hit when prices rise and
opportunity falls. Faced with anxiety
or depression, embrace that truth and seek help, or stand with those who need help.
In the dark of Easter morning, Jesus’
first words to Mary Magdalene are these: “Why are you weeping? [What] are you looking for?” (John 20:15) When we bring our broken hearts to God, looking
for daylight with no evidence of dawn, Jesus might just say the same to us: “Why
are you weeping? What are you looking
for?” New life defeats death when no one’s
watching. No bright lights, no
earthquakes, no Hollywood cinematography. Before we can see it, God’s already doing it.
So, if you feel this morning that you’re lost in the dark, know that the risen Christ is right behind you, calling your name. Even if you can’t see him well enough to make out his face, Jesus is still asking you to trust resurrection – to go and bear witness to the unlikely truth that the sun is rising to end our endless night.
1.
“List
of ongoing armed conflicts.” Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts.
Accessed April 15, 2022.
2.
Wiseman,
Paul, Anne D’Innocenzio, and Mae Anderson. “US inflation jumped 8.5% in past
year, highest since 1981.” AP News. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/us-inflation-rate-historic-high-4ba3435cc3730198e299690a9d968038.
Accessed April 15, 2022.
3.
“Youth
Ranking 2021.” Mental Health America. Available at: https://www.mhanational.org/issues/2021/mental-health-america-youth-data.
Accessed April 15, 2022.
4.
Henninger,
Daniel. “The Devil Resurfaces in Ukraine.” Wall Street Journal, April
13, 2022. Available at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-devil-resurfaces-ukraine-putin-aleppo-syria-grozny-killing-bucha-massacre-attrocity-shooting-subway-brooklyn-holocaust-11649883912.
Accessed Aril 14, 2022.
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