An Easter Message by the Rev. Dr. Michael VanHorn, pastor of Trinity Church in Livonia, Michigan, a friend of Pastor Tom Eggebeen.
Matthew 28: 1-10
People of God, Woody Allen was once asked the question, “Do you believe in the afterlife?” “Yes,” he said, in his typically paranoid manner, “but I’m afraid no one will tell me where it’s being held.”
Early on the first day of the week, the two Marys make their way to the cemetery. They are not thinking about life after death; They are simply thinking about death. Jesus has been killed, and this is their first chance to properly complete what had been a hasty burial process before sunset on Friday, the start of the Jewish Sabbath.
So far in the passion story of Matthew, these women have been on the sidelines – passively watching as Jesus slowly dies on the cross; then loyally sitting opposite the tomb as Jesus is laid to rest; and finally dutifully waiting out the Sabbath until they could come to pay respects.
The quiet faithfulness of these women is finally rewarded on Sunday morning. They have come, out of custom and devotion, to perform a funeral ritual for the dead, and are thrust center stage into a new world.
As I mentioned last week, Matthew punctuates the important moments in his Gospel with seismic activity – both political and geological. When Jesus was born, and Herod learned of this potential rival King, Matthew says that “all Jerusalem shook seismically.” As Jesus rides into Jerusalem and is hailed as Messiah King, the city once again trembles at the prospect.
Then Matthew records, at the very moment Jesus dies on the cross, the temple veil is torn in two, the earth began to quake, rocks split open, and – as a prelude to the last days – the bodies of many saints walk out of their graves! This event shakes up the whole cosmos, prompting the Roman soldier to exclaim, “Truly this was the Son of God!”
What is interesting to me is that these symbolic and physical earthquakes all seem to be for the benefit of outsiders – for Herod and his courts, for the crowds in the street on Palm Sunday, for the Roman soldiers at the cross – as if to say, “Listen up! In this man Jesus, the world is being undone and remade! Power is being turned upside down. This is a world where the dead do not stay dead!”
The same is true on Easter morning. Matthew records that there is a sudden earthquake, because an angel of the Lord has descended from heaven, and has rolled away the tombstone. His face shone like lightening, and his clothing a dazzling white. The effect being that the hardened Roman soldiers left to guard the tomb tremble with fear and fall into a dead faint.
One of my favorite verses in the whole Bible is found in the previous chapter of Matthew – where Jesus, already dead, still worries the Religious leaders. So they come to Pontius Pilate, asking for a band of Roman soldiers to guard the grave – to prohibit any foul play or theft of the body. Listen to the unintentional irony in Pilate’s response: “Take the guards and make it as secure as you can.”
Here you have the government and religious authorities conspiring together to keep Jesus “nailed down,” so to speak, where he belongs: in the tomb, where he is no longer any trouble. Another ironic element of this account is that the religious leaders, who had condemned Jesus for working on the Sabbath, are now spending a frenzied Sabbath trying to keep the lid on the coffin!
But despite the official seal, the gigantic stone, and the armed forces, their efforts are infantile and even laughable “against the power God is about to release.” (Brown, 27)
Raymond Brown points out a hint of sarcasm in Matthew’s account. The militia posted for the sole purpose of keeping the story of Jesus buried, fall down like dead men when the tomb is torn open by the angel. “This is truly ironical: Jesus lives and those set to prevent that are as dead.” (Brown, 27)
One of the real difficulties about Easter for us contemporary Christians is, similar to the problem of Christmas, how to separate the sentimentality of the holiday from the real theological point. We surround ourselves with symbols of fertility – spring flowers, baby chicks and bunnies, pastel-colored eggs – partly, I suppose, because we’re sick of winter and long for warmer days.
The trouble comes when we simply throw the resurrection of Jesus into the same category, and start to think about it simply as a symbol of springtime optimism, a metaphor for the natural occurrences that we long to see happening outside. But, let’s be clear: Easter is not simply an emotional fix for seasonal affective disorder!
One preacher writes that Easter is far more than a “cheery Good Morning” on a warm Spring day! Here you have earth tremors, and “an angel with bit of an attitude” sitting on the stone that sealed the tomb – “the very messenger of God reclining on death’s door as the whole world recovers from its shaking.” (Davis, 80,81)
David Davis says that this is God “taking on the powers of sin and death, [and] the angel sitting on that stone… [is] God talking smack… Divine trash talk [against the forces of darkness]… Resurrection with an attitude.” To paraphrase Annie Dillard, this day calls for more than frilly Easter bonnets and a new Easter ensemble, we should all be wearing crash-helmets and life preservers!
But the lightening-flash angel is not in the cemetery only to put the fear of God into the solders – it is also there to proclaim the fearful good news to the faithful Marys. Like most angelic visitations, and unlike our Precious Moments images, the angel first has to defuse the terror of the situation, “Don’t be afraid,” it says, as angels are wont to do.
“You have come looking for something that isn’t here – the crucified and dead corpse of Jesus. I’m here to tell you that He isn’t in the grave. Just as He promised, He has been raised up. Look for yourself at the slab where you saw His body stretched out.”
Not only is Jesus alive, but He is on the move: “Go quickly and give His disciples the news, He has been raised from the dead. In fact, He is going ahead of you to Galilee. You will see Him there. Remember what I have told you.”
This is no time to hang around graveyards, Jesus has work to do, and so do you! This is how the Gospel works. You wake up in the morning prepared to go about the business of death, ready to accept the painful reality, and get on with life, and before lunch, the whole world has changed. Not by anything we do – it’s all the work of God.
Notice the language in the text. We usually talk about the resurrection as if it is something Jesus did for himself, as if he set the alarm clock on Thursday night and it went off on Sunday morning – but that would render the resurrection to be something of a parlor trick; like the magician who is chained up into a box and dropped into a tank of water. The audience wonders if he’ll get out, but the magician KNOWS he will!
But Matthew’s angel repeats it twice, “He has been raised.” The New Testament reiterates the phrase multiple times, “God raised Him from the dead.” Jesus went to the cross knowing that His death was a real death, not simply a three-day game of hide-and-seek. If anything would happen, if Jesus was to be vindicated, it would have to be the work of God on His behalf.
This is why we must never forget that the Easter message is about God, not about the inevitable coming of Spring, or the optimistic power of the human spirit, or even about the possibility of going to heaven when we die.
Easter is the improbable message of the death of death, the conquest of the last enemy, and the good news of the dawn of a New Creation “where there will be no more mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away.”
The ancient Church fathers liked to refer to Easter “the first day of the New Creation.” Easter is an earthquake that undoes the story of humanity so filled with wickedness and sin and destruction and mortality. Today is the beginning of a new world, the first day of New Creation.
As much as the angel announces to the women, “Do not be afraid,” the world that you know – a world of disappointment and shame and fear of death is a thing of the past, the angel essentially says to the Roman guard, and Pontius Pilate, and the authorities, “Be very much afraid,” because your only power – torture, intimidation, and the threat of execution – no longer has supremacy.
Life has overthrown death. As if to drive the point home, the women no sooner leave the cemetery than they are stopped dead in their tracks by the living, breathing Jesus. One word of greeting, and the women fall down, grasping His feet, to worship their risen Lord. Matthew wants to make it perfectly clear that this is not a shared hallucination, nor is it the apparition of a spirit.
Jesus is flesh and blood. They can touch Him. They can cling to His feet, which, according to John, still bear the marks of crucifixion. This is the Gospel’s answer to the question raised again and again: Does it really matter if Jesus was really, bodily, raised from the dead? Matthew says that it does.
The challenge comes from two directions today. First, there are a group of scholars from the misguided Jesus seminar who argue that the stories of the resurrection happened this way: The disciples sat around, after Jesus was executed, reminiscing:
“Hey Andrew, do you remember the good old days when we used to hang out with Jesus?” “Yeah, those were good times. I can still remember his sermons, how meaningful they were. It’s almost like I can hear him now – almost like he’s right here with us.”
“Wait a minute, Andrew, maybe you’ve got something there! Maybe Jesus is still alive in His teachings – maybe if we just close our eyes and believe hard enough He will still be here with us!”
The idea of these scholars is that what really matters is not that Jesus actually walked out of the tomb, what really matters is that he lives in our memory, in our hearts. But things don’t really work that way. People don’t just rush off to face the lions or the firing squad based merely on a warm reminiscence of someone’s philosophy. It requires something more.
The second challenge to the physical resurrection comes, not from liberal scholars, but from well-meaning Christians. Some years ago a survey was done among Church-going Christians about some of the basics of the Christian faith. More than 60% of those polled said that the phrase from the creed “the resurrection of the body” was simply another way to say “the immortality of the soul.”
In other words, many Christians are convinced that the Christian hope is simply for an immaterial soul or spirit to ascend into non-physical heaven for eternity. That is what many religions teach. That is what many ancient philosophers believed. But that is decidedly not what Christianity teaches.
The Christian faith teaches that bodies really matter. God created us as physical creatures, and, through the bodily resurrection of Jesus, God promises to also physically raise us from the dead. Someone might ask, “what difference does it make – so long as we live forever?”
The difference is whether God redeems only part of His creation or whether He redeems all of it. Why do we grieve when another Christian dies? Isn’t it enough to know that their soul is in heaven with God? No, it isn’t! Because death is an intruder – an enemy – that has stolen away someone we love.
I don’t know if you remember the aftermath of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. His granddaughter was interviewed, and through her tears she lamented that she would never “feel the touch of his warm hands again.” Bodies actually matter.
Southern preacher Fleming Rutledge once commented, “Virginians think they love Robert E. Lee. They don’t love Robert E. Lee. They love their image of Robert E. Lee. In order to love someone, you have to have them right there.”
The fact that these women can cling to Jesus’ feet, and the fact that all the disciples will actually touch Jesus, and share a meal with Him, is God’s message to us that the resurrection promises to undo all the work of evil and death in the world, not just part of it.
This is a matter of justice and not simply sentiment. It will not be enough to say to parents in Africa, “Yes, your child has died of AIDS, but her soul is in heaven.” It will not be enough to argue that the victims of genocide and war will live on in disembodied bliss, much less in the memories of those who loved them.
Ten years ago, Matthew Shepard was cruelly beaten and crucified on a fencepost, only to die of exposure three days later. After he died, Shepard’s parents started the Matthew Shepard Foundation to address the problem of hate crimes. Many would argue that something good came out of this murder – but ask his parents:“would you rather have the Foundation or have your son back?”
I think you know the answer. Deep down, when we consider the gravity and depth of evil in the world, we all know that nothing less than full restoration will do. Something has to happen of cosmic proportions, something that can work backward into the human history of evil and untie the Gordian knot of suffering and death entirely. This is why Peter Gomes calls Easter “confrontation of the highest order.”
This is the only solution that can satisfy the demands of perfect justice: God Himself entered into the human condition, to share it, to suffer within it and die for it, so as confront the evil head on. He does this in Jesus in order to restore children to parents, wives to husbands, grandparents to grandchildren – so completely as to restore even the touch of warm hands again.
That Easter Sunday morning, it would have been insufficient to simply remind the two women at the tomb that “the teaching of their master would live on” or even that “the soul of Jesus had gone to heaven.” The only thing that could undo the horror of the crucifixion was the full resurrection of Jesus.
The living Jesus said to the two Marys trembling at his feet, “Do not be afraid; go and take word to my brothers to leave for Galilee; there they will see me.” This is not the end of the story, by no means.
Jesus and His followers now have work to do: proclaiming the coming day when the word “cancer” is no longer in our vocabulary, when schools and malls are no longer war zones, when parents no longer struggle to feed starving children.
Easter is the dawn of that new world, the opening day of a New Creation; where fear and death have lost power over us, because Jesus is alive and is on the move, going ahead of us with the promise of resurrection to new life – not only His body, but ours, as well!
This is Easter with teeth; Easter with an attitude.
+ Amen.
