Resurrecting Hope

Sermon from April 12, 2020 John 20:1-23

Every Easter hits me a little bit different. I remember Easter Sundays as a kid, we would get up early and go to the Sunrise Service, watching the sun come up over the cemetery as my dad would preach the morning’s message. We would huddle together for warmth as someone shared a song and we heard again the familiar story of Mary at the tomb, of Peter and the Beloved Disciple. Sometimes at 11:00 we would hear the story of the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus or maybe the disciples hiding out in a locked house. My dad would tell us that Easter reaches us all differently. But the Easter message is the message by which we are saved. Without the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, there is no forgiveness of sin. I think we forget sometimes that we Christians are Easter people. We are resurrection people. The message may hit us differently at different times, but we are a people who believe that our Savior rose from the dead. Jesus was no ghost, he was no angelic projection. He died a skin and bone death and rose to a skin and bone life. He bore the marks of his crucifixion, but he stood there before Mary and the disciples Sunday morning as alive as he had been on Thursday night. But everything had changed. Most years on Easter, I want to talk about Mary Magdalene, the first preacher of the Resurrection. I want to talk about how she went and told the disciples who had to go and see for themselves. She was by all accounts the first to see the risen Jesus. But this year I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about locked doors and the Savior who moves through them. I want to talk about the birth of Easter people. I want to talk about the resurrection of hope. In the Easter story, the first actions of the disciples are motivated by grieving love. We have to remember that Mary, Peter, and John have lost a friend. Mary comes to the tomb first, in the dark of the morning, as early as she can get to the tomb. There’s work to do, you see. She needs to check on the Lord’s body. She needs to make sure that it’s there to be perfumed and prepared for permanent burial. Jesus had made the mistake of dying on a Friday and they couldn’t prepare the bodies on the Sabbath, so Sunday morning was as early as they could get to him. Crucifixion is a terrible way to die. I’m sure Mary wanted to do her best to make her friend and teacher presentable. It’s not as though she could call Finch’s Funeral Home to do the job for her. And so she goes, as so many have gone, to see a friend whom she loves, to prepare to say goodbye. Naturally, when she sees that the stone is gone, she runs away. Whatever is in that tomb she doesn’t want to be the first to see it. It can’t be good. So she runs to Peter and the Beloved Disciple, whom we believe to be John. “Something’s happened! The tomb is opened! They’ve taken him away!” Now this is news to us in the story. Mary hasn’t shared that bit of information until she gets to the disciples. She tells them what she’s believed so far: there’s been a grave robbery. Perhaps those who wanted Jesus killed hadn’t quite had their wrath satisfied by his brutal death, and they wanted to subject his body to some vile defilement. Someone needed to stop them and that would be Peter’s job. Now Peter and John need to go and see for themselves. Running to the scene, Peter rushes into the tomb to find Jesus’s grave clothes lying right where they were, and the cloth that had been on his head rolled up neatly by itself. That must have given him pause. What grave robber would do that? So, the Scripture says, they believed. They believed the first part of the Easter Message: the tomb is empty! Something strange has happened, but it will take a few hours for things to get sorted out. Here John writes something interesting: “as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” See, we like to treat all this Easter stuff as self-evident. Some scholars even argue that the Resurrection was not literal, it was just a “projection” of the hope of the disciples, a mass hysteria based on what they expected to happen. But the stories we have are the disciples’ stories, and they don’t gild the lily: they all jumped to every conclusion except that Jesus is risen. “Why didn’t they just read the Bible?” we might ask… Well, if you read the Old Testament without knowing how the story ends, I suspect you wouldn’t come up with Resurrection either! The clear teaching of the Bible is often only clear once the thing has come to pass. So that’s where the disciples are at 11:00 on Easter Sunday morning. They only have the first half of a message that they still can’t make sense of: The Tomb is Empty. It’s the second half of the message that changes everything. Mary gets to find out for herself a little later. She has a very unsatisfying conversation with some angels. A word of advice: don’t ask someone grieving in a graveyard “Why are you weeping?” But then Jesus asks her the same thing! Now, I imagine that Jesus is waiting to be recognized. With his hands out, saying, “hey! Why are you crying? I’m here!” But Mary can’t recognize him. It’s too impossible. It’s not until he calls her by name that she is able to see through her tears. This one who she has followed and called Teacher, this one she watched die. And he’s here! Alive! After her conversation with Jesus, she runs to tell the disciples she has seen Jesus alive. She becomes the first preacher of the Resurrection. We don’t know the other disciples’ response to Mary, but the next time we see them, most of them are huddled in fear in a locked house. I think we all understand this a little bit better these days. We know what it is to be locked in a house, whether it’s out of fear, or caution, or solidarity with our neighbors in the face of a threat we can’t see— we know the loneliness of needing to shut our doors to keep the world out. We know what it is to not know when this uncertainty is going to end. Jesus finds them with the doors locked and the lights turned out. Some of them probably think Mary is delusional. “We’ve got to hide here because these people have killed Jesus, and now they’ve taken his body, and Mary is spouting nonsense. They won’t stop until they’ve killed us all, and no one will ever find our bodies!” As they mutter among themselves, as somebody asks, “hey ain’t it time for dinner yet?” Jesus comes walking into the house, which is quite a sight since the doors are locked. And Jesus says the most sensible thing: “Peace.” I imagine that startled them pretty good! Jesus shows them his scars so they know it’s really and truly him and he says “Peace” again. It’s at this moment that the disciples get the second piece of the Easter Message: “He is Risen.” “The Tomb is Empty” “He is Risen.” With Jesus, their hope is resurrected. Because he lives, all fear is gone. And their fear turns into rejoicing in an instant.

This is how Easter is hitting me this year. It’s not what I expected when Lent began on February 26. We are in our homes most of the time now, waiting for news. We aren’t afraid, exactly, but we are uncertain. What will happen next? When will this all be over? There is a tradition surrounding Holy Saturday where Christians will take turns sitting in church, waiting for Easter. Most years, this vigil helps Christians practice waiting for joy. The mood is solemn, but not sad. They know how the story ends and that Easter comes with the sunrise. This year we don’t need to pretend. We are waiting, full of uncertainty and sometimes sadness. But today is Easter and we remember Jesus’s Resurrection. We look forward this year to our own resurrection. First, a resuming of everyday life, of opening our locked doors and gathering without fear. We don’t know when, but the day we get to worship back in that sanctuary I know we will be happy. We will be shouting and singing and praising God! But we also look forward to the greater Resurrection, when Christ comes to make all things new. We are Easter people, looking forward to a great day of Resurrection. We Easter people also look for resurrection in our earthly lives today and place our hope in a risen Savior who is making and will make all things new. May Christ enter our locked doors today, and resurrect our hope.