1Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” 3Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. 4The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. 8Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10Then the disciples returned to their homes.
11But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; 12and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. 13They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). 17Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” 18Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
“Have You Seen Him?”
Jesus died. Those close to him were both surprised and shattered. Stricken with fear and grief, they were in no mood to be looking for that "silver lining" that supposedly comes with every cloud. But some people did think about his death. And all we have of that time and that thinking, are the stories, shaped and reshaped, told and retold, by people of faith from generation to generation. And yet it’s in those stories that they were saying something important, not about his death, but about his life. But only because his life mattered, especially when they heard him say something, or do something, that moved them, deeply. So they began to speak of his death in ways that affirmed his life. And they came to see that he stood for something so important he was willing to give his life for it. That something was the vision of life called the kingdom of God.
Resurrection is a boundary breaking event. It’s also a threshold, a moment at which one door closes, but another opens. It’s a time of calling into question the past and yet it opens the future to new beginnings and new life. Those who, for whatever reason, long to remain entombed in the past will find resurrection unbelievable, unrealistic, naïve. Those who will dare to embrace the future find resurrection a source of courage and power.
The earliest reference that we have of Jesus’ appearances after his death is a list recorded in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians – a letter written twenty years after Jesus died. The very first account of the empty tomb and the promise of his appearances in Galilee is found in the Gospel According to Mark – and that was written some thirty-five or forty years after Jesus’ death.2 Matthew and Luke’s versions come some time after that; and the Gospel According to John is a complete anomaly. The stories are all different. As uncomfortable as it may seem, there’s really no alternative to reading all of the different texts for ourselves. We may have heard a whole lot of Easter sermons; we may have even read a lot of opinions – the more the better, in fact – but ultimately it’s up to us to decide where the truth lies and why all of these stories were told.
According to the best information collected and collated by biblical scholars,3 the last historical event in the life of Jesus of Nazareth was his death on April 7th in the year 30 of the Common Era4 that came as a direct result of his torture and crucifixion. No coroner was present to mark the time and list all of the medical facts of his death, but the stories left behind by his followers, and the meaning that they inserted following that event, put the matter simply and directly: he died and was buried. Jesus hadn’t just fainted. He was dead. And he never came back to life. The Passover festival of that year came and went and life returned to normal. It’s more than likely that most – if not all – of his closest disciples weren’t even there to watch him die and had no idea what happened to his body. They’d all run away in fear for their own lives. Somewhere in the hills of Galilee, ashamed of their cowardice and crushed by the scandal of those last days in Jerusalem, they hid from the terror that was Rome and the quislings of their own community who ruled alongside the governor, Pontius Pilate.
The scandal wasn’t that Jesus had been tried on trumped up charges and condemned to die. Given the political situation of that time his death was inevitable. All of Judaism’s heroes met the same fate – his cousin John (called the Baptist) was just the most recent example – because they were a threat to the way of life cherished by the Roman hierarchy and the religious establishment. Jesus knew what was going to happen to him, and he’d accepted it with incredible courage, trusting totally in his vision that God was meant to rule the world, not Caesar. By living the way in which he talked, he dramatically demonstrated his conviction that not even death would shake his faith in God.
The scandal wasn’t that he was crucified. The scandal was that his disciples lost faith in what he’d proclaimed. He had trusted completely in God, right up to the very end, but they feared other men more than they feared God. The fact that they finally overcame their fear and gave birth to Christianity, is a fact almost as astonishing as the testimony that they began to make about Jesus. Easter happened when the disciples came to believe that God would have the last word, not Rome.
So, along with the vast majority of progressive Christian scholars, in my opinion Easter has nothing at all to do with the resuscitation of a corpse and its ethereal appearances afterward. But it has everything to do with finding new life in the face of death. Jesus’ scattered and disillusioned followers finally came to reaffirm their own commitment to the values and vision that were the hallmark of their teacher’s words, actions, and very life. They came to believe that “in his words were God’s words” and that his vision of a new way of living – given to them long before he died – was one that no executioner or cross could ever kill. Jesus was dead. But he wasn’t dead to them.
How about us? Have you seen him? How do you and I care for each other in ways that liberate and don’t suffocate or oppress? How is the well-being of our neighbor a concern for us in the interrelated and yet complex problem of global hunger, poverty, disease and armed conflict? How are we going about developing communities that teach respect and care for each person rather than inciting each other around a common enemy? What’s our contribution toward seeing that the systemic causes of violence are eliminated?
Who are we; the Body of Christ, or simply a motley collection of human beings who are haunted by a lurking suspicion of meaninglessness? Are we people of faith or a people who are lost and confused, hungering for something that we can’t seem to believe in anymore? Who are we on this Easter Sunday?
Of course, in any church and on any Sunday, we are all of these things. Some of us come with a joy bordering upon ecstasy, confident that we will experience what we’ve known before: the wonder of resurrection, of limitless possibilities and of a hope that has overcome the world. Some of us come doubting our memories, doubting the former enthusiasms that don’t seem to come over us much anymore. We come because we’ve always come – this is simply what one does on Easter Sunday – but we don’t hope for very much.
Others of us come with more modest memories and expectations; the sight of these banks of lilies and the sounds of resurrection music have given us comfort in the past and, after all, going to church is a good thing – now and again. But then there are those of us, heartsick and afraid, who are haunted by a sense of despair and a fear of death that’s like a great hole in our hearts.
But who among us will be, this Easter day, filled with hope and who will be caught in despair? We don’t know because the climate of our every day changes. On one day I believe and you are filled with doubt; on the very next I’m deeply troubled and you are filled with hope. Faith and doubt, joy and despair, are the spiritual weather of the soul, changing just when we think we know what the season of our lives is. Never is this uncertainty clearer than when this full congregation – this Easter congregation – gathers for worship. Here, surely, are all the degrees of consolation and distress, aspiration and hopelessness, gathered together to sing, yet again, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.”
Resurrection can and does happen every single day when you and I are moved by a sacred hope first embodied by one Jesus of Nazareth. Resurrection can and does happen every single day when you and I become convinced of the profound significance that every human being is a person of sacred worth, when we can first imagine a better world and then begin to plan and implement the kind of positive changes that will make it happen – even while dealing with the reality of our own imperfections and their impact on ourselves, others, and creation itself.
Tomorrow, as these lilies begin to turn brown, may well be our day to reach out to another and embrace him, hold her close, in the arms of our faith. That’s the way of this Easter pilgrimage, this Easter memory of a few good women who were witnesses, and the poor men who would not or could not believe them.
Like spring, the breakthrough of newness is almost ferocious in its intensity. We’re usually sentimental about spring. We think of fluffy little birds, the chubby pinkness of apple-blossoms, the reassuring soft green of new grass. But spring is not gentle or cozy. It’s an eruption of life so strong it can push bricks apart and make houses fall down. It thrusts through, and even because of, the layers of rotted past life. Even in the sheer perfection of every single growing thing there’s an integrity which is painful in its accuracy. At such a time these are not soft things; their tenderness is a focused, finely tuned, and yet essential longing for life. This is the intensity of absolute love, which takes the world by storm in a silence of total concentration on the one thing necessary.
If and when we, too, can embrace this vision and can reaffirm our commitment to its values – along with that “resurrection” invitation to live life deeply, and be embraced by it, not frightened of it – then we, too, will be able to live a resurrected life in all of its particularity and power. Because life can’t be lived with the desperate hope that somehow, sometime, God will intervene and make it all right again. If there is to be a resurrection, we’ve got to be the ones who live it. It has to be concretely practiced. It must become a way of life.
Today, more than any other, may it be so for us.
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1 The original story of what happened that first Easter morning is recorded in the Gospel According to Mark. It ends with Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome the only three who first discovered the empty tomb; and they all promptly run away – as Mark’s account says, “for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” This is John’s version of those moments, and in the first ten verses you can hear just how unsatisfying that first account came to be. So, here in John – some two generations after the actual event – a new and very different ending has been added. Verses 11 through 18 represent that new ending.
Did it actually happen this way? Probably not. I think that it says more about that early Christian community’s determination to not let their memory of Jesus die, than it does any actual historical event. So, once again, it probably didn’t happen this way, and yet it always does when anyone encounters the living Jesus of his or her fondest memories and most hope-filled dreams.
2 Most biblical scholars place the date of Mark between 65 to 70 C.E. and John’s version some twenty-five years after that.
3 This and much of what follows as a reconstruction of that first Easter, comes from The Resurrection of Jesus: A Sourcebook that is part of the “Jesus Seminar Guides” ed. by Bernard Brandon Scott (Polebridge Press, Santa Rosa, CA, 2008), pp. 109ff.
4 The former terms of B.C. (“Before Christ”) and A.D. (the Latin “Anno Domini” – meaning “in the year of our Lord”) are slowly being replaced by B.C.E. (“Before the Common Era”) and C.E. (the “Common Era”) out of deference to dialogue with the rest of the world that does not mark history as ending or beginning with the birth of Jesus.