1When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” 4When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 6But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. 7But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” 8So 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.
The Second Easter Story: Mark 16: 8b-14
[[And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.]]
9[[Now after he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. 10She went out and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and weeping. 11But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.
12After this he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. 13And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.
14Later he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were sitting at the table; and he upbraided them for their lack of faith and stubbornness, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen….]]
The Third Easter Story: Matthew 28: 1-10
1After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. 4For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. 5But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. 6He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. 7Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” 8So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. 10Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
The Fourth Easter Story: Luke 24: 1-12
1But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. 2They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3but when they went in, they did not find the body. 4While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. 5The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. 6Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” 8Then they remembered his words, 9and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. 10Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. 11But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. 12But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.
The Fifth Easter Story: John 20: 1-18
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.
“What Must It Be Like to Grab for a Body…and Discover God?”
So, there you have it: the first five versions of the Easter story telling what they believed happened following Jesus’ burial. For over thirty years nothing was written down about the terrible events of that week. Mark, not Matthew, emerges as the oldest surviving written gospel – written at about the time of the Roman-Judean War (between 66-70 C.E.). The earliest evidence speaks only of these three women – Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome – who, on discovering that the tomb was empty, ran away and didn’t breathe a word of it to anyone, because they were terrified.
It’s at a time like this that I often turn to poetry. T. S. Eliot, in his gripping and massive poem, “The Waste Land,” imagines masses of men and women plodding through life with absolutely no purpose or any knowledge of God. Summing up their despair he wrote, “I had not thought death had undone so many.”1 In the wake of war and gripped by all manner of diseases, we have come to the terrible realization that death has “undone so many,” and threatens all of us still. These realities should prompt a powerful response to the images that fill our senses here at Easter. Darkness and light, slavery and freedom, chaos and order, death and life – all of these archetypal images should fill our being with hope and excite our desire for life in all of its fullness on a day like today. The biblical vision of life, though, like Eliot’s, defines life spiritually, not biologically. To live is to know the compassionate, life-giving acts of God that we experience in nature and that everyone came to experience in the life of Jesus. Anything less, is biblically speaking, death. These Easter stories proclaim the life-giving acts of God so that you and I might experience them ourselves.2
But getting back to these stories: How in the world do we get from “a young man dressed in a white robe,” to a tradition that changes him into an angel “descending from heaven,” to then “two men in dazzling clothes,” and finally to Jesus himself. Oddly enough even Mary, at first, thinks that he’s the gardener! It is a Mystery, some would say a Myth. To which I would respond by simply saying that there is profound truth that lies buried in every great myth; our task is to unearth it.
What must it be like to come to anoint a dead body…and discover God?3
This is the nature of every ecstatic or visionary religious experience, “a valid and ineffable apprehension of the Real.”4 And if you think that this story is simply unbelievable, come back next Sunday and you’ll hear the one about how the risen Jesus passes through walls!5
Speaking of ecstatic experiences, when I was a very young boy living on the island of Aruba in the Caribbean, I remember – very vividly – gazing up at the night sky on a moonless night into an explosion of stars. The only appropriate response to that astounding beauty and ineffable mystery was to murmur to myself, “My God!” That is what we do as human beings when we are overwhelmed by a deeply religious experience. It’s what stops us in our tracks whenever we see a sunrise or sunset filling the clouds with such dazzling colors that they remind us of other jewels of nature: lemon-yellow, honey-gold, tangerine-orange, peach-pink and the thrilling reds of an endless variety of roses splashed across the sapphire and turquoise-blue of an immense span of the sky. No wonder we say, again, “My God!” But what’s the very next thing that we do? We begin looking around for somebody to share it with. “Come here! You’ve got to see this!” we say.
Easter is simply, and yet profoundly, just that. It is the ultimate affirmation of life here on earth. If there is a meaning to all of these stories it’s that they say that to breathe air, eat food, have a body, yearn, hope, fear, dream, love and trust are important. If heaven cannot be tasted, smelled, heard, seen, touched and fully experienced here – in this life – then it can’t be experienced anywhere. But we can only bring that message to each other here. God knows what happens on the other side of the grave. The teaching and sharing of good news to those in need of it takes place in this life, or it doesn’t take place anywhere. Easter is the simple but radical affirmation of this life as the place where the next life becomes real.
The stories of Easter, then, are much more about what happened to Jesus’ friends and followers than with what actually happened to Jesus. In spite of the tradition that grew, changed, and expanded during those decades following his execution, Easter is not about the resuscitation of his dead body. After all, when Jesus died most of his followers ran away, abandoning him at one of the most decisive moment of his life. What gave these scattered people the power, months – even years – later, to come back together again and begin to say to one another, “I have seen the Lord!”? That question has been answered, at least for me, by saying that each of them came to have a profound experience of the sacred – maybe even revealed to them, initially, by Jesus in his lifetime – but one that only after his death they began to understand and to which they would come to respond, “My God!”
So that’s what he was about. Above all Easter is the story of human beings mysteriously empowered to find a way out of their cowardice and failure, their faithlessness and inclinations to betray what they loved the most, and to choose life again. So the journey continues. Easter is the story of us all – of every human being who discovers the need for healing, for forgiveness, for restoration to a fully human life. This is the mystery of Easter, for me – that the risen Spirit of the Christ makes us responsible for each other. If he is present in our world today, it’s only as his body is present through women, men, youth and children who make his spirit known in their lives. It’s as one theologian said: “Be careful of who you are. You may be the only gospel your neighbor ever reads.”6
Sometimes only music and poetry can describe this experience of the holy – from the “Alleluia” sung by our choir earlier, to lines like these:
It
was not as the flowers
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not
as his spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven
apostles.
It was his flesh: ours.7
We, now, have become the
Body of Christ. My God!
Now what do we do?
The answer to that question might come to us from the hand of yet another poet: E. E. Cummings, in this prayer:
i
thank You God for most this amazing
day:
for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of
sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which
is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the
sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:
and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how
should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from
the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable
You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes
are opened)8
The essence of Easter, then, is that resurrections are always taking place, never ceasing to raise life to new levels and possibilities. Trusting in such things is the challenge of our lives. So maybe the best way to approach Easter is to acknowledge that there is something pervasive and ongoing about rising to new life every single day. The purpose of today – or of any day that we might be able to celebrate in remembrance of Easter – is to challenge ourselves to start over again, to revive our exhausted spirits with the meaning that new life really expresses. The journey continues, and it deserves giving it our best and to bring out our finest bottle of wine to celebrate what it is!
And, yes, it’s all too easy for us to fail to pay attention to these appearances of the holy in our lives. But it may be that when we are at our lowest – lost and alone – the Spirit of God will reach out to us as we wander, disconsolate in an interior garden. That Presence of the Holy often startles us. We don’t recognize it at first. If it isn’t just because of our cynicism or blindness, often it’s doubt and even fear that cloud our seeing what’s right there in front of us. “Love bade me welcome,” sings the words of the poet, George Herbert, “yet my soul drew back.”9 Then love speaks our name, and fear drops away in the face of love’s perfection – as if rising out of death itself. Grief and doubt give way to compassion and trust. The very object of our soul’s deepest longing now appears right there in front of us, clearly in our sight, and we, too, may cry out with Mary, “Rabboni!” – my teacher, my partner, my lover, my friend. In reaching out to embrace the one who knows our name, though, we may also discover that this is a gift meant only for us – only we see him and hear his voice. That’s why the love and life of God then needs to be shared with everyone else. Our voices now, too, have to be steady enough to move out among both doubters and disciples and proclaim with quiet confidence, “I have seen the Lord.”
May it happen to you.
* * *
1 T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1934), p. 31.
2 Indeed, this is what’s behind Jesus’ saying, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10: 10).
3 The original quote is one I’ve borrowed from an Easter sermon given by John Chrysostom in the 4th century:
“Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again. … Death has been frustrated, for it grabbed a body and discovered God.”
Endeared as one of the greatest theologians of the early church, St. John Chrysostom was born in 347 in Antioch, Syria and his father, Secundus, was an officer of high rank in the Syrian army. John was prepared for a career in law under the renowned Libanius, who marveled at his pupil's eloquence and foresaw a brilliant career for him as a statesman and lawgiver. But John decided, after he had been baptized at the age of 23, to abandon the law in favor of service to Jesus, the Christ. He was ordained as a priest in 386 and his oratorical excellence from the pulpit gained him a reputation throughout the Christian world.
4 This is a quote from Evelyn Underhill in her book on religious ecstasy entitled, simply, Mysticism (1961). She goes on to say that this kind of experience:
…represents the greatest possible extension of the spiritual consciousness in the direction of Pure Being: the blind intent stretching here receives its reward in a profound experience of Eternal Life. In this experience, the consciousness of 'I-hood,' of space and time…all that belongs to the World of Becoming and our own place therein…are suspended. The vitality which we are accustomed to split amongst these various things, is gathered up to form a state of pure apprehension…a vivid intuition of the Transcendent.
Underhill explains that in the perfect unity of consciousness that comes in a state of such ecstasy, the mystic is so concentrated on the Absolute that his or her faculties are suspended and he or she ceases to think of himself or herself as separate from the "All That Is." The mystic becomes so immersed in the Absolute that, in her words:
…as the bird cannot see the air which supports it, nor the fish the ocean in which it swims, [the mystic] knows all, but thinks naught, perceives all, but conceives naught.
5 Michael Herzog, our certified Lay Speaker, will be preaching on this text about, so-called, “doubting Thomas” (John 20: 19-31) and has entitled his sermon, appropriately enough, “I’m from Missouri.”
6 This has been so often quoted that I’m uncertain as to who actually said it, originally. It’s been attributed to a Belgian clergyman, one Leon Joseph Suenens, who later became a Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, but I’ve had no confirmation of that. An alternate reading of the first line is, “Be conscious of who you are.”
7 This is from a poem by John Updike entitled “Seven Stanzas of Easter” in The Earth Is the Lord’s compiled by Helen Plotz (New York: The Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1965).
8 E. E. Cummings, 100 Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1959), p. 114.
9 The full text of this poem by Englishman, George Herbert, entitled “Love,” is this:
LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.
'A guest,' I answer'd, 'worthy to be here:'
Love said, 'You shall be he.'
'I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.'
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
'Who made the eyes but I?'
'Truth, Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.'
'And know you not,' says Love, 'Who bore the blame?'
'My dear, then I will serve.'
'You must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.'
So I did sit and eat.