Sermon April 26, 2009

Easter 3

I know what I'm about to say is an 'old saw' but it's true never the less: Easter is not a day, it's a season! Yes, we seem to save our biggest celebrations for The Day - in this case, last Saturday night/Sunday morning - but we celebrate resurrection and reflect on its meaning for 50 days.

Actually, what I just said is not accurate! What's wrong with it? One word: Triduum. Remember what that means? The Great Three Days: Cross AND Resurrection, Resurrection AND Cross. Without the Cross the celebration of resurrection becomes trite and disconnected with our lives; without the resurrection Good Friday becomes a destructive and depressing focal point which evacuates meaning from living, because without Easter there would have been no Good Friday If Jesus' story had ended with the crucifixion there would have been no abiding community to remember it.

Without Good Friday and Easter we wouldn't know about Jesus.

But what do we know about Easter? What do we know about resurrection? What do we know beyond the liturgical formulae such as the one we opened this service with...."Alleluia, Christ is risen; He is risen indeed! Alleluia!"?

Well, where would you go to find out? How about the four gospels? Grand! And St. Paul? Okay. What do they say?

Mark - the earliest of the four gospels is the briefest: only 8 verses, compared to Matthew's 20, Luke's 53, and John's 56 verses. Mark doesn't report any resurrection appearance by the risen Jesus, and he ends abruptly.

The other three canonical gospels do contain stories of encounters with the risen Jesus - Luke has 2: the Emmaus Road, and our gospel today. Matthew has 2: a brief one to the women returning from the tomb, and another in the Galilee on a mountain; John has 4: to Mary Magdalene at the tomb, that evening and a week later in the upper room in Jerusalem (the second of those two we heard last week about Thomas) and lastly in Galilee on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.

Do you notice anything about them? They're all different! There's no agreement. What it suggests is that each community for whom each gospel was written had been told a different story, had a different tradition about the appearances of Jesus.

But - and it's a big "but" - while the stories are all different they all contain two clear themes that underpin the identity of the emerging Christian community. I'll bet you'd like me to tell you what they are!

Mark's the clearest, but all the gospels contain these points, made in different ways:

• "The stone.....had already been rolled back" = the tomb could not hold him
• "he is not here" = "you won't find him in the land of the dead"
• "the one who was crucified has been raised" = he lives!
• And, lastly, "you will see him".

So the first theme can be summed up in two words: Jesus lives! Jesus continues to be experienced as a living reality after his death, though in a radically new way. He's no longer confined to time and space, the stories tell us, no longer the sort of flesh and bone that can be confined to locked rooms - or locked tombs. He can journey with disciples and not be recognized, be experienced both in Galilee and Jerusalem, vanish in the moment of recognition, and be with his follows always - as Matthew says, "to the end of the age".

And they all make the same point about the angel's promise: you will see him. Jesus is not simply a figure of the past, he is a figure of the present.

And that's a phrase that's not confined to the gospels. When we say "Jesus lives" he lives for us, and for every Christian down the centuries. In the language of resurrection there is only the present continuous tense.

The second theme is the other part of the Triduum - it has to do with the cross. Mark's account specifically mentions it - "you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised." None of the gospels speak of Jesus' resurrection without also speaking about his crucifixion. So this second theme connects the two, and it can be summed up in four words: God has vindicated Jesus. "God has said "yes" to Jesus and "no" to the powers who executed him.

Remember Palm Sunday? Counter processions, one the Prince of Peace riding a donkey, the other the Prince of War, riding a war-horse. Palm Sunday tells us about the clash of paradigms we are about to witness in Holy Week, and asks us to wonder "which one will win?" will it be the Powers,? Or will it be the crucified God?

Notice this, then, about Easter: The Easter story is not about a happy ending. It's not about afterlife, it's about God's "yes" to Jesus against the powers - the Imperial Power - which killed him.

Lastly, there's St. Paul. What does Paul say about resurrection? "Jesus Lives"; and "I have seen him". Remember the promise: "you will see him"? And remember, too, that Paul wrote before the gospels were written.

So where does that leave us? Easter may not be about an afterlife, but it is about the end times - eschatology, to use technical, theological language. One theologian has described the end times like this: it is that fervently hoped-for time when God's great clean-up of an unjust and violent world will begin.

Jesus, Paul, and the earliest Christianity's stories about Jesus as seen in the gospels all claimed the same thing: God's transfiguration of this earth had already started.

And the latter two - Paul and the Gospels - both make a further claim: the general resurrection at the end of time began with Jesus.

So what do those two themes mean to us? "Jesus Lives", and "God has vindicated Jesus over against the powers"? They mean that God's transfiguration of this earth is both personal and political - political in its broadest sense of human intercourse and culture.

• Resurrection is about our personal transformation from that place of 'dis-ease', that place of separation, that place of self-centered ego, that place of sin.
• Resurrection is also about the transformation of our world - The political meaning of Good Friday/Easter sees the human problem as injustice, and the solution as God's justice"

Which is where we started - connecting Good Friday and Easter, death and resurrection. In the end, we are being invited on a journey - a journey that "involves dying to an old way of being and being reborn into a new way of being" (Borg and Crossan). To enter fully into the meaning of the Good Friday-Easter Event is, in Paul's words, like this: that we are buried with Christ so that we may be raised with Christ. May it be so for us all.

"You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised." "You will see him".