Two Days After…
Jeremiah 31:1-6; Col. 3:1-4; John 20:1-18
Rev. Tiare L. Mathison, Pastor & Soul-Tender
Christ is risen, He is risen indeed!
This simple exclamation runs on past the borders of our imaginations. There is risk and there is promise in this small sentence. As Fred Craddock, a delightful preaching prof says, quote: “It’s a small headline, below the fold, right hand corner of the front page of the newspaper. It’s reported in Jerusalem today, Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.” Unquote.
What? What? We shake our heads, pull back a little, screw up our faces in thought. Resurrected, alive? I don’t have a category for this within the intellectual structures of my thinking. Alive?
Whispered witness, He’s alive. Mary Magdalene told us. She has seen the Lord!
O she sure has. Double M has been round the block more than once with Jesus. Part of His traveling entourage for 3 years, she provides out of her means for His well-being, along with some other women, also named Mary, and Joanna and Susanna. Double M had been possessed of demons and experienced her own kind of resurrection at Jesus’ touch. Later, she is labeled a prostitute, a symbol of faith in her repentance, Christian history says. Women can be virgins or prostitutes or nuns, they can’t be witnesses. But the Bible doesn’t say it quite like this. Double M is our exemplar for she was last at the cross and first at the tomb. “I have seen the Lord!” The first Christian sermon ever preached. By a woman no less. Two Days Later
There is a question that rises up: it is a simple statement, as well. ‘Is it true?’ Is it true that God so loves the entire world, He sent His only Son to bring the entire world back to His own heart? After the enmity of Eden, first humans claim their own ungodly power, their garden destroyed, their fall into sin, their hubris, our own, as if we can make it on our own. No need of God nor community. I think, therefore I am, existence defined only by the power of the mind. Prove it. Prove it! Prove that Christ is risen from the dead. Where’s your evidence? I will decide what is truth.
This is the thing.
There is no science that offers proof, no data points, no algorithms, nothing like that. There is only powerful, strong, historical witness - Christ is risen, He is risen indeed - repeated person to person, neighbor to neighbor, friend to friend, communities gathered each week to tell the stories, sing the songs, pray the prayers, break the bread, all over the world. It all begins with this Easter event, everyone running to the tomb and then running back to say the same thing: He is risen.
What can be discovered by a deep glance at Jesus’ life, death and now risen, is this: Who He is, What He says, and What He does, is absolutely coherent, top to bottom, inside out. It is extraordinary for it is singular, unknown, no where else found. He gathers in the ones left out - tax collectors, lowly fishermen, shepherds, women, both adulterers and prostitutes and devil possessed, demonic’s, foreigners, illegal immigrants, the unlovelies as they are known. He sits at table, eats and drinks and laughs with them. He enjoys their company. He respects their personhood. He listens carefully. His table only more crowded every day. Everyone is welcomed, truly welcomed!
He brings heaven to earth in His body. Remember He was born a baby, down a birth canal like the rest of us. He was a toddler, a child, a teenager, a young adult, as we categorize today. His humanity is deeply connected to His Divinity. He is the completion of God’s salvation history. From the very beginning representative Eve & Adam, are thrust out, broken, ashamed for their sin, naked. God’s lovely gift after their betrayal? To sew them clothes.
But God was not about to turn His back on humanity forever. She has a plan, it started with the covenant of Sarah & Abraham, through slavery in Egypt, freedom, yet in the wilderness for a very long time, prophets yelling at them ‘come back, give up your idols, you idiots!’ And then a sweet word to a young woman, ‘Mary, you’ve been chosen. Will you carry this baby?’ Her yes engages the cosmos with a backwater village in Galilee.
Jesus confronts personal sin, structural sin, all the injustices imagined, all the evil violence, hatred, everything, everywhere, all the time. He claims redemption through His shed blood, forgiveness a permanent gift, always available, simply one step back.
And this is what gets Him killed. For the narrowed viewpoint of religious leaders in cahoots with the power broker political oppressors of Cesar. They don’t want redemption for everybody. They want to maintain their grip on power and to make sure everyone stays in line, to conserve the institutions, keep them just the way they are.
Two Days Later…
And it is theologically true, that Jesus had to die as part of the whole plan of redemption. He bore the sin of many, He was wounded for our transgressions, the weight shattering His life. All of us have gone astray, we turn to our own way over and over again. God laid all of this on Him, His Beloved; Jesus becomes slave, humbled, obedient, all the way to death, even death on a cross. We claim great is the mystery of our faith - Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again -in our communion liturgies. And it is true, we do not have capacity to fully understand what shed blood, last scapegoat, final sacrifice, actually means. This is the risk and the promise of faith, that we lay down our arrogance and pick up our humility. We lay claim to believe. Christ is risen, He is risen indeed! Amen