The question about what happened to
the body of Jesus in the early dawn of that Sunday morning is not the essential
Easter question. The most important
thing about the resurrection isn’t that something happened to Jesus. It is that something happened to us.
Strictly speaking, we can’t really know what that something is, because the
resurrection is a process that is still ongoing. The Letter to the Colossians is very clear on
that point, when it says, “your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ
who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in
glory.”
This is what Mary Magdalene and the
other Mary found out when they went to the tomb that morning. They went there full of grief, still reeling
from the shock, trying to make sense of what had happened to Jesus. They went to mourn and to cherish the memory
of what had been lost, and they found something, something new, that now
belonged to them. They went to the tomb
to say goodbye to the past and they came away as bearers of a message about the
present and the future--a present and a future with Jesus.
Still, there is no getting around
the fact that this message came to them at the tomb. Resurrection gives new life and meaning to
the story of Jesus, but it is still the same story that came to a head at the
cross. Easter does not reverse Good
Friday. But Good Friday and Easter
together confirm what the story of Jesus is all about. You could boil it down to a couple of points,
and they were exactly the points that Jesus kept trying to make, and they were
what got him into all that trouble. The
first one got him into trouble with his disciples, and I suppose it still does,
and that was the point that his mission really wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about his charisma, or his
remarkable abilities, or his chances for success. Jesus lived and died for us, for our repentance, our instruction and empowerment, our
forgiveness, and healing, and liberation.
The second point got Jesus into
trouble with the religious leaders and political authorities, and it also still
gives a lot of people problems. And it
was that the author of his life, the power behind his deeds, the source of his
wisdom, and the driver of his mission was God.
It was God who sent Jesus on the road that led him to the cross, though
it was not God who killed him. And it
was God who raised him from the dead—so there could be no doubt who was
responsible for the sending, and who did the killing.
The church, then and now, is the
community that gathers to experience the death and resurrection of Jesus as a
present spiritual reality. This Spirit
tells us that Jesus did what he did by the anointing of God, and he did it to
show us how to live together in peace and forgiveness and love. And the very first Christian communities came
up with a shorthand, a phrase that encapsulates all of this, which is simply, “Jesus
is Lord.” The essential question about
the resurrection is not, what happened to the body in the tomb? It is, “do you accept that Jesus is Lord?”
Now before you go rushing to answer
that question one way or another, let me state very clearly, just so nobody
gets the wrong idea about me, or about this church, that any answer to that
question is permitted here. Seriously—I
mean that. And let me also say that I
think that the acceptance that this question asks about is like the
resurrection itself. It’s not a box you
check, and then move on to the line about your address and credit card
number. It’s a process. We’ve only begun to glimpse what it would mean to fully accept
the Lordship of Jesus, which is to say, the total transformation of the world
into the paradise of God.
But back to the story: the
resurrection proves that Jesus was telling the truth about himself, even though
nobody believed him. Well, almost nobody. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary believed,
at least enough to risk sticking around to watch his crucifixion. They believed enough to want to go to his
tomb and pay their final respects. I
guess that is what made it possible for them to witness his resurrection, and
to receive the message that the work that God is doing through Jesus is just
getting started.
But the male disciples, according
to Mark and Matthew, aren’t ready yet.
Their hearts are still too clouded with guilt and fear; their heads are
still too full of the splintered wreckage of the grandiose dreams that they
brought with them to Jerusalem. They will see Jesus. They will experience his resurrection. But not until they follow him back to
Galilee. They have to go back, back to
the beginning, back to the place where he first came upon them, casting their
nets into the lake. Not to try to
recapture the past. Not to go on some
kind of nostalgia trip, but to hear again in the present the voice of Jesus
saying “follow me.” They have to go
back, carrying with them the memory of his death, and their part in it, and begin
again to learn how to be his disciples.
26 years ago I spent a couple of
months in Nicaragua, building houses and seeing for myself what the
counterrevolutionary war was doing to that country. A lot of wonderful things happened to me
there, and most of all I fell in love with the people. And while I was there I met a young American,
a mechanical engineer, who was machining parts and fixing up old 1930s
windmills around the country to help the farmers pump water. And maybe it was he who gave me this mild
case of the romance of revolution, and I started to imagine learning about
organic agriculture and going back to Nicaragua or some other down-trodden tropical
country to help the people.
But on my way back to the States I
came through customs in the Houston airport.
And as I stood in line in the cavernous, dreary, understaffed, customs station,
and I looked around at my own people—stressed-out, short-tempered, homesick
Americans--it struck me as clear as a bell that the only difference between this
place and Nicaragua was a few dollars, and they wouldn’t last forever. In fact, that wave had already crested. And I realized that if I wanted to help
people, and develop and strengthen communities, and build the foundations of a
just and sustainable society, the most important place in the world for me to do
that work was right here in the good, old US of A.
In the 10th Chapter of
Acts, Peter tells Cornelius, the Roman Centurion, that Jesus is Lord of All, by
which he means Lord of all peoples. But
he might as well have meant Lord of all times, all circumstances and
situations. As the exalted Son of God,
Jesus is Lord of the Universe; and as the man who died on the cross, he is the servant
of every particular thing in it. He is
Lord of Nicaragua and Lord of Petaluma.
He is Lord of your house, and your office, and your spouse and children. He is Lord of your bank account, of your car,
and the highway you drive on. He is Lord
of your bedroom, and bathroom, and the dishes in your kitchen sink. He is Lord of your dreams and of your fears,
of your proudest achievements, and your devastating losses. And as many times as you forget him, or
discount him, or betray him, he calls you back to begin again, a little
humbler, maybe, a little wiser, to find his place in your life, and yours in
his.
When you leave here today, maybe humming one
of those catchy Easter hymn tunes, and the flowers are blooming, and the hills
are still green, and the color and the fragrance of spring are everywhere, everything
you see will be a sign of his resurrection.
Everyone you meet will be his glorious image. Nothing that happens to you, now or in the future,
will be able to put him back in his grave, or remove his name from your lips or
his word from your heart. Or so I’ve
been told. And today I could almost
believe it.
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