As religious holidays go, Easter is a bit of a challenge. People often compare it to Christmas, and—let’s
face it—Christmas wins. Because
Christmas is easy to understand. It is
about the birth of a child, and that needs no explanation. All of us remember what it was like to be a
child, and we know what it is like to hold a child. You can make a picture of a baby, and put a
mother and father in the picture, with a donkey and cow, and maybe a star or an
angel, and you can write “Merry Christmas!” on it and send it to a friend. And even if that friend is not a Christian,
they can admire the pretty picture, and understand what it is about, and why it
makes you happy.
But Easter is different.
The story of Easter begins at a tomb, and who wants to think about a
tomb? Who wants to draw that on a card
and send it to a friend? And that tomb
is empty, because the man who was dead in the tomb came out, and now he is
alive. So you could send a picture of
the man, but while the baby in the manger is sweet and lovable, the living man
of Easter is controversial. He always
was—that’s why he ended up in tomb in the first place.
And I think that even for us who are attracted to that man, who
try to believe in the things he died for, and are glad to hear he is alive, it
is still hard to know exactly how to talk about it. Easter is about finding that the house of
death, that we thought was full, is actually empty, and how do you talk about emptiness?
It’s about a man whose life is not closed off, but open and infinite. And how do you make a picture of infinite openness?
If he is alive he has a future, and how
do you celebrate what you don’t yet know?
One way to talk about it is in terms of freedom. Easter comes from Passover, the ancient
Jewish festival of Spring, but also of freedom; and the Jewish story of freedom
begins with a voice that speaks to Moses out of a bush that burns but is not
consumed. And the voice tells Moses its
name, a name you can’t pronounce, a name that means “I will be who I will be.” The body of Jesus that rose from the tomb is like
that bush and that voice. It lives and
lives and is never used up. Its future
is open and free.
Or you can think about Easter as transformation, like that ancient
image of the egg. The egg, that is so perfect
and complete. It is closed, and contains
within itself everything that is needed, so it is hard to imagine it ever
changing at all. So it is only when
something stirs unexpectedly inside the egg, and suddenly a tiny beak starts
pecking through, that we realize that the egg is not all there is to the egg. It
only exists for the sake of the new thing that breaks the shell and bursts out,
fluffy and yellow and peeping, and totally alive.
Yesterday I thought of another image for Easter, of freedom and
transformation, which is the universe.
People used to think that the physical universe was closed, like an
egg. But in recent times we have learned
that the universe is actually expanding in all directions. Some of the scientists who study these things
say that it will keep expanding and expanding forever, and some say that, as it
does, the fires of the universe will get colder and colder until they go out, one
by one. To them the universe is a tomb. But no one really knows, and I prefer to think
the expansion is a sign that the universe is open. It is free.
And maybe it really is an egg, hatching something unexpected, entirely
new.
But none of these images of Easter can really take the place
of the stories of Jesus’ resurrection.
They are stories of freedom, because the thing that was supposed to be
closed forever is open. Even Death can’t
hold Jesus captive, thanks to the freedom of God. And
they are stories of transformation. Mary
Magdalene doesn’t know that it’s Jesus at first. She thinks it’s the gardener, because even
though it’s definitely him, he’s not the same.
And when she recognizes him, she tries to hold him, but she can’t,
because he is still on his way.
And that’s really the whole point, isn’t it?--that Jesus is
not a character in a story that once was written in a book and now is over. We don’t close the book and say, “okay, that
was a nice story—now what?” We keep the
book open because Jesus is the “now
what?” And this resurrection story tells
us what that means. Because the climax
of the story, the moment when Mary sees the risen Lord, comes after Jesus calls
her by her name. The freedom and
transformation of the resurrection is not just something that happened to Jesus—it’s
something that happened for us. It is
not the story of someone else’s past—it is the story of our future, the future
we all have together in God.
We Christians sometimes talk about this future as if it will
come from outside of us, as if Jesus is some kind of superweapon who will come
down from heaven and blow everything way.
But the Jesus of the Easter Gospel is a future that opens out from
within and among us. He hatches out of our
human story like a chick out of an egg. We
don’t recognize him, because we keep looking for the corpse that should be in
the tomb. But all the while he is alive
and calling us by name.
When Mary hears her name and sees that it is Jesus, she cries
out “Teacher!” And that is what he is. It is his voice speaking in our hearts that
tells us we are not captive to the mistakes we have made, or our bad habits, or
our worn out old images of ourselves, but in every moment our life is open and
we are free. Our teacher is calling us
to follow his path of transformation, a journey that embraces our gifts and our weaknesses, our struggles and
our victories, our doubts and our faith, our sorrows as well as our joys. It even embraces death, the one aspect of our
future we think we know with certainty.
But his life swallows death, and clothes our mortal bodies with the
glory of God.
And because it is the same Christ who is calling each and every
one, what is coming into being in us is not just a new person. It is a new world—a world from which the
curse of destruction and the fear of death have been lifted; a world of unity,
compassion, and justice, of deep and abiding peace; a world in which the
fullness of God’s glory dwells for everyone to see, in all beings, in every
cell and molecule, every drop of water and grain of sand. This
inconceivable future comes into the world in a single person, but through his
death and resurrection it comes to all of us.
And so this celebration itself is a living symbol of what it celebrates. If you want to see Christ’s resurrection,
look around you. We act it out in public
every Sunday, the eighth day of the week, the first day of a new creation.
Called by Christ we gather here, each one called by name, and
we blend our voices into one song, the song of resurrection. We open the book, the book that no hate or fear
or prejudice can ever close, the book of resurrection. We hear the living words of Christ, and keep them
in our hearts; we proclaim again that these are our words, for our generation,
our world, our future. We bless the
bread and wine, the gifts our teacher gave the night before his death, to be the
ever-present signs of his coming. We
break and share one imperishable food, we pass one ever-flowing cup. We take them into our bodies, to become our
bodies, the many bodies of the risen Christ.
And in those bodies we go out, as witnesses of
resurrection, emissaries, sent to be the freedom and the transformation of the
world.
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