Scripture Luke 24:1-12
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again.” Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.
Sermon
Alleluia! The Lord is Risen!
And now, you respond:
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Now, all together:
Alleluia! The Lord is Risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Amen!
This passage from the gospel according to Luke might be called “A Tale of Two Resurrections,” by which I mean, the Easter morning experience of the women versus the Easter morning experience of the men.
Of course, each of us has our own Easter morning experience, don’t we? Whether we are awakening early because of the riotous birdsong, or wrangling very excited children, or waiting for our carpool to pick us up, each of us comes to this day with our own experiences and sense of anticipation. So it was, with the women and men who were Jesus’s disciples.
The women who go to the tomb early on Sunday morning have had a traumatic weekend. On Friday they followed their Rabbi, Jesus, watching as the soldiers nailed him to the cross, and keeping vigil with him until he died. They then went home to prepare spices and ointments to anoint Jesus’ body, but they were not able to get to the tomb before the Sabbath came at sunset. With the Sabbath came time for prayer and quiet contemplation—which, perhaps, is when their grief arrived with full force. When we experience the death of someone close to us, we get very busy, preparing for the service, whether it’s at a church or funeral home or standing by a river. We keep our grief at bay while we run around choosing things and making calls. Not so in the Jewish tradition. There is normally a week of Shiva, sitting quietly at home while people come to sit with you, and share memories and food. In the case of the women disciples on the Sabbath, with prohibitions on every kind of work, even what we might call “busy work,” the women had nothing to do but to ponder the terrible events leading to the death of the Lord they loved.
Of course, the men have had a traumatic weekend too. They were present with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane when he was arrested. Peter fought back, injuring a servant of the high priest. But Luke’s gospel tells us, Jesus healed that man, and put a stop to the violence, and was taken away by the soldiers. After that, we don’t know where most of the men are. We do know that Peter follows Jesus to the house of the high priest, Jesus’ first stop for judgement on that long night. While there, Peter stuns himself by doing just exactly what Jesus had predicted he would do: Three times he is asked whether he was one of those with Jesus, and three times he replies, no. After that, we lose track of Peter, and all the male disciples.
Where were they? What were they doing? They had run away out of fear of being arrested themselves, but where did they go? Did they hunker down in that upper room, where they’d had that last supper with Jesus? Were they all sunken in a shocked silence that they’d not stayed with their Lord? Did they fight, throwing recriminations at one another like stones meant to kill? Were they sick with grief, with shame, with anger? We don’t know. All the gospels tell us, is where they were on Easter morning.
But, our passage begins, on the first day of the week, at early dawn, [the women] went to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They went to do a holy thing, to lovingly anoint Jesus’s battered body, restoring in death the dignity that was stripped of him in life. But the heavy stone had been rolled away from the entrance to the tomb, and the women found it empty. Jesus’ body was not there. Then, before they even had time to talk to one another about what all this might mean, the angels.
Our passage tells us two men suddenly appeared, dressed in dazzling white. There’s no doubt the gospel writer is describing angels—no one else’s clothes flash or gleam, not even a high priest. These are bona fide messengers from God.
Like everyone in the Bible who encounters an angel, the women are terrified. They throw themselves to the ground, hiding their faces from the supernatural beings.
The message of the angels is short and to the point.
“Why do you look for the living among the dead?
He is not here but has risen.
Remember how he told you…
that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners
and be crucified
and on the third day rise again.”
Remember? the angels say. Remember what he told you?
And they do remember. They remember, and they run to tell the men. He. Has. Risen!
It’s important at this point to note that the men have been living in a different world than the women for the last three days. The men have been frightened, in hiding, and most likely, deeply ashamed and disappointed in themselves. They are not, you might say, in a good place.
But it’s also important to note that the men react to the women’s information pretty much as any one of us would react to that same information. We would also roll our eyes, or even be angry to be told that someone we know to be dead, was alive again. Luke cleans up the men’s response, saying that the women are telling “an idle tale.” What the men said, in fact was, that’s garbage. And we would too, in the same situation.
But one man makes a different choice. Peter runs back to the tomb to see, with his own eyes, what has happened. Why, do you think? There’s something we call “complicated grief,” grief that can take a very long time to resolve, grief that, sometimes, does not resolve at all. This can happen when a death is accompanied by feelings of regret about the individual’s relationship with the deceased. Peter would certainly have been a candidate for complicated grief—having denied Jesus at the hour when Jesus needed a friend the most. Having broken his very specific promise to Jesus: I will lay down my life for you. Having been promoted to a leadership position among the disciples, but in the end, succumbing to the very human condition of fearing for his own life, and placing that above all other priorities. I think Peter is willing to grasp onto any tiny glimmer hope he is offered. And that is what the women’s story offers him: hope.
Peter finds the tomb empty. He even sees something no one else has mentioned: the bands of cloth that had been wound around Jesus before being entombed—the swaddling clothes of death. There they lay, unwound, unswaddled. And Peter is amazed, awestruck. He hasn’t seen Jesus—at this point, none of them have. But now that tiny glimmer of hope has been sparked into a flame.
Years ago I heard an Easter sermon that has remained with me more than any other. The preacher was allowing as to how very unlikely resurrection is, in the grand scheme of things, given the natural order as God created it. He was admitting that throughout his life he had wondered, and doubted, and at times, struggled mightily, with the question: Was it real? Could it be? Was Jesus really raised from the dead?
And his answer to that was: SOMETHING happened.
Something happened—something uncanny, and amazing, that brought the disciples, women and men, together, and started a movement that is still alive today.
Something happened, something that groups of people not only claimed, believed, and centered their worship around, but also suffered and died for.
Something happened, because a man who was far more likely to be just another one of the thousands upon thousands of nameless souls strung up on crosses by the Roman Empire, was, instead, very much alive in and among his followers two thousand years on.
Something happened. And we can define that, if we wish.. I know what I think happened. But we are not called to define it, and we don’t have to defend it; we can simply live in awe, astonishment, and gratitude that, against all odds, something amazing happened, and history and our lives have been changed because of it.
Writer Anne Lamott wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Past last November, in which she talked about aging. There were some complaints, mostly about aches and pains. But the piece was really about the gifts of aging. One of the things she wrote about was the gift of knowing what we don’t know, and the gift of being grateful that we don’t have to know everything. She writes that her husband, on their first date, said, “I don’t know” is the portal to the richness inside us. Knowing what we don’t know frees us. Sure, there are plenty of things we might be certain about. Maybe for you, the resurrection is one of them. But remember: there are not witnesses to the moment when Jesus rose from the dead. Raising Jesus was something God did in secret. And we, as human beings, have all kinds of responses to that, from soaring faith to quiet wondering.
Start with the things you do know. My list goes something like this:
God is love.
Love is stronger than death.
Jesus is with us, here, now.
The tomb could not hold him, and so we live in hope.
We are like Peter. He saw the empty tomb, and went away filled with amazement, filled with hope, despite the impossibility of what he was hoping for. Like Peter, we haven’t yet seen Jesus face to face. But also like him, we have the testimony of the witnesses whose clothes were just slightly glowing and contained a dusting of angel feathers.
We believe, Lord. Help our unbelief.
And also: Alleluia! The Lord is Risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
And thanks be to God. Amen.