Alleluia, the Lord is Risen! The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia!
We come together this Easter Day to celebrate. We know that this is a happy day, a day to put on our best clothes, a day to plan and prepare a wonderful meal, a day to come to church with the whole family, a day to sing glad hymns. But the people we encounter at the tomb in today’s Gospel didn’t know that. They weren’t having springtime thoughts about hyacinths breaking forth from dead earth, or caterpillars turning into butterflies. The thoughts about eggs and baby chicks or prolific little bunnies as signs of new life did not enter their minds, not only because those symbols came much later in Christian custom borrowed from pagan cultures; but because the people in our Gospel lesson were still in the middle of the story.
In St. John’s Gospel Mary Magdalene was the first one at the tomb that Sunday morning and dawn was just breaking when she arrived. She did not come to check if Jesus’ body was there; she came to grieve. The whole world had just come crashing down around her. She, among others, had centered all her hope and trust and love in Jesus and now he had been cruelly executed. When she arrived at the tomb she found that the stone which had sealed the entrance had been mysteriously rolled away. She is distraught when she finds it empty, thinking someone has taken away Jesus body, and stood weeping outside the tomb. When her Lord approached her, “Woman why are you weeping?” she didn’t recognize Jesus. She did not recognize him because her mind was fixed on finding a dead body. Not until Jesus spoke and called her by name did Mary know him. She had come to the tomb with grief in her heart, but now her weeping had been turned to joy.
And now here we are 2,000 years later, come to church to celebrate the Resurrection. Yes, here we are all dressed up and singing glad hymns and will probably have a good dinner when we leave. But are we not really like Mary Magdalene and the others in many ways? Don’t we carry grief in our hearts? Perhaps it is the loss of loved one that causes us grief. Perhaps it is the frustrations and disappointments we have suffered in our lives. Perhaps it is the weight of bad choices we have made, or we bear the wounds of pain caused by others. Perhaps physical ailments weigh us down. Yes, we believe that Christ is risen. Yes, we know we have cause for great joy this Easter day – but the grief is still there too.
Today as we celebrate the Resurrection, we are like Mary at the tomb. Jesus comes to us and he did to her – will we recognize him? We can lay our grief at his feet as he calls us by our name and then like with Mary we will know it is really he. Philips Brooks, 19th century Episcopal Bishop and author once said, “The great Easter truth is not that we are to live newly after death, but that we are to be new here and now by the power of the resurrection.” The real good news of Easter is that when we meet the risen Lord in the Garden there is the possibility of new life right now! The power of the Resurrection is not something that simply awaits us after bodily death, but something that comes to us at all times, proclaiming that new life is present and possible for us in the here and now – today!
It does seem like in so many ways people are longing for an Easter experience in their lives. Contemporary New Testament scholar and former bishop of Durham England, N. T. Wright, said in his book “Surprised by Hope”, “Those of you who are going to preach on Easter Day, please note that the resurrection stories of the Gospels do not say Jesus is raised, therefore we’re going to heaven or therefore we’re going to be raised. They say Jesus is raised, therefore, God’s new creation has begun and we’ve got a job to do.” We can surely say, then, that Easter is not just an historical event, or a future hope; but a profound reality for us now in the present. Oh yes, many of us have had grief and hurt as our companion, like those going to the tomb. But our promise is that we can let go of past hurts and can have a new life. Right here, right now, we can overcome our fear of death and trust in the Lord of life and love. Right here, right now, wherever we are, we can claim new life in our marriages and partnerships, and families, in our jobs, in our relationships, in our churches, in this broken but beautiful world. We can be new here and now by the power of the Resurrection. We can joyfully participate in the great adventure of God’s new life for us. We can let Easter get into us; let Easter come and live where we live; let Easter permeate our souls.
By letting go of what we thought we knew we are free to discover what is truly meaningful and how that meaning empowers us to live justly and compassionately. Even if we don’t at first recognize Jesus in the garden, we have to at least be there looking for Him. The Risen One is there; He awaits us on many occasions and meets us now. The Risen One waits for us in Scripture and Sacrament, in prayer and music, in community and service. The Risen One waits for us in the faces of those who love us both in this life and the next, and in the faces of those who need our love. The Risen One waits for us in the complexity and texture of our lives: in the dreams and in the broken dreams; in the pain and broken hearts; and in the joy.
Today we Christians accept that our world means something, that life is not just a freak coincidence in the universe. We believe that our lives are not random events lost among the dust and debris of history, footnotes in a book of no meaning or consequence. In the single event of the Resurrection everything is changed for all time. The risen Christ is unrestrained in the world today with power to raise us up from whatever is attempting to pull us down – power to complete what we cannot complete in ourselves – to lift us who now see through a glass darkly to then see face to face, to bring us who now know in part to then know as we are known. Until we discover a new vision of the Savior, a savior who has risen out of heartache and disappointment, we will never understand Easter.
After the Resurrection, things do not return to normal. Mary and the Disciples were not the same and after encountering the risen Christ; neither are we. There is no more “normal.” We can’t even count on the darkness. All we know for sure is that the risen Savior is on the loose. And He knows our names…
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