April 4, 2021 Rev. Peter Hofstra
Jesus
is risen, Jesus is risen indeed. The
women came to prepare Jesus for his permanent entombment. Their expectation was that the leadership
won. This is not to be considered too
surprising considering how they watched their friend and rabbi die that Friday
before. They came expecting the stone to
be in place, their biggest concern was how they would have it removed so they
could do the work of preparation they’d come for.
People
are coming to church today for the celebration of Easter. They are stepping from a world where the
fourth rush of COVID is upon us, coming into this place to proclaim that Jesus
is risen, Jesus is risen indeed! What
expectations are we bringing with us?
Does the notion of ‘variant strains’ chill us to the bone? Do we look around at how many people we have
lost, how all our communities have been touched and wonder how the power of the
Risen Christ will stand against all of that?
When
they got to the place where Jesus was buried, their biggest concern had been
taken care of. The stone had been rolled
away. I wonder if there was a moment of
relief that this was not going to stop them from doing what they came to do
before the realization hit them of what this could mean. Who’d rolled the stone away? What had happened since the moment Jesus’
body had been put into the tomb? What
could it mean? I wonder if, at that
moment, they had an inkling of what this truly meant. Did the idea that Jesus was risen from the
dead, thus the tomb stone was rolled away, even enter their minds?
We
are coming to church today for the celebration of Easter. Beginning of this week, a new article came
out with the latest gallup poll results.
It seems that the numbers of people who claim affiliation to a
congregation has dropped below half in the United States-combined Christian and
Jewish-as their tribute to Holy Week and to Passover. It presently sits at 47%, something for a
nation that is obsessed with scores and an internal logic that whoever has the
most somehow wins, this is a deliberate attempt to poke people of faith in the
eye.
When
they got to the entrance of the tomb, from which the stone had been removed,
the tomb itself was not empty. Rather,
there was a young man inside, all dressed in white, what we can presume to be
an angel of the Lord. He was there to
let them know the truth, not that the body had been stolen, not that there was
a plot to desecrate the grave of their Rabbi, their Messiah, not that something
bad had happened, but something that was the most incredible good they would
ever know in the history of creation, the fulfillment of the Plan of God.
We
are coming to church today for the celebration of Easter. Our Scripture passage, drawn from the
lectionary, ends at the “shorter ending” of Mark, where the women went away
frightened, too frightened to say anything to anyone about what they had
seen. This shorter ending has been used
by some academics seeking to deny the truth of our faith as ‘proof’ that Jesus
never rose from the grave, because they did not talk about what they had
seen. The idea is for us to accept Jesus
was a “Good Man” or a “Moral Leader”, one whose life can provide us life
lessons for a better way of living, but with a flat denial that there is
anything supernatural about what happened to him.
Once
inside, the angel engaged the women in conversation. He clarified that Jesus was not there because
he was risen from the dead, showing them the now empty place where his body had
been placed. He had a task for them, to
pass the word on to the disciples and to Peter, the de facto leader of the
disciples, with word that Jesus was coming to meet them and would go ahead of
them to Galilee. He also reminded them
that this was not new information. This
was happening exactly as Jesus himself had said it was to come about.
We
are coming to church today for the celebration of Easter. If, at Christmas, we can claim Jesus is the
reason for the season, at this moment, we can claim Jesus and his resurrection
as the reason for our faith. If he had
not risen from the dead, our faith, as Paul puts it in his letter to the
Corinthians, is in vain. We are nothing
without the Plan of God fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ.
These are moments in the gospel
story, these are moments in life around us.
Each of us has the moments of life that we are involved in, that we are
touched by, that we are looking to the future from, all of them, on this
particular Sunday, touching Easter, the celebration of the resurrection of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
Is it
at all surprising that there are people out there trying to undercut our belief
by chipping away at the truths of Easter?
Or people who are simply indifferent to the truth of the Christian
message? People frightened by the
circumstances of life? People attempting
to impose their own agendas on the world, ready to use Christianity as a means
to their ends if they thought if might help?
Because
of what Jesus did for us, because of what He accomplished on this day, we have
hope. And I found myself reflecting on
all the people who do not know what we know, who do not have what we have, on
their individual places and circumstances, and it weighs on me, this year more
than ever.
It
was in the span of this COVID year that I lost my mom. I know what they have told me, that her death
was not due to COVID, but it was certainly affected by COVID. My mom got sick before in the nursing home,
it is inevitable in that kind of environment, but they were quick to get her
out to hospital and stabilized. By the
nature of the health care system, I know they couldn’t do that this time
around. So COVID didn’t take her life,
but it certainly played a role in her death.
But
one of the promises of Easter is the resurrection from the dead and the life
everlasting. If you have heard me speak
at a funeral, you have heard me speak to that promise. Our loved ones are in a better place. We will be united with them again, someday. But the reality of grief is that, even if
those words make sense in our heads, not so much in our hearts, not at
once. But with time, working through our
pain and grief, the hope of eternal life in Jesus can become a powerful balm of
healing for us, something we celebrate on this Easter Sunday.
That’s
my moment in this Easter Sunday, hope and joy tinged with regret over what
might have been.
I
know each of you will have your own stories, your own moments. How does Jesus’ rising from the dead affect
them?
The
classic hope in Easter is the forgiveness of our sins. Jesus died in our place. His resurrection brought us into a covenant
of grace with God, one marked by mercy as the new justice, of forgiveness as
the new judgement. The outworking of
Easter is that we now do good things in the name of Jesus, in gratitude and in
imitation of the One who arose on this day.
It is not about earning God’s favor, rather that God’s favor is freely
given. Another way to put it, where Adam
and Eve did fail, Jesus does prevail.
As we
come to celebrate Jesus’ Resurrection on this Easter morning, we gather to
celebrate meaning restored to our lives.
Left unforgiven, left to pursue a life of evil and selfishness, we truly
answer “Yes” to the question “Is this all, is there nothing more?” The joy of Easter is that the New Life begins
now. We are certainly not going to live
perfectly, not by any stretch of the imagination, but we have, in Jesus, the
power to begin that journey, to push back on the darkness, on the evil, on the
sin, on the suffering, on the tears, on the grieving of a broken world. We have the ability, in Jesus, to press that
out to the edges of our own lives and, even more powerfully, we have the
ability to come alongside our fellow human beings that they might know the
strength and joy that we do-because of Jesus’ Resurrection.
The
lesson that we have to learn from Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and
Salome is that we can know everything we are supposed to be about Jesus. We can be raised on Him, know his words, know
his prophecies, know what he says is going to happen. Despite all that we know or we think we know,
we can still run into a situation that knocks us out of anything resembling a
comfort zone. For these women, it was
considering how they were going to remove the tomb stone, only to witness that
it had been removed. It can drive every
thought, every comfort, every anchor we rely on from our lives and leave us
hanging in the breeze.
But
then comes the final and true power of Easter.
Jesus died for us, Jesus rose for us.
We are called upon to accept that Free Gift of salvation through the
grace of what He has done. But when life
washes us away from Jesus, when things overwhelm us so we do not even feel His
loving embrace, even when we are so hurt and so angry and these raw emotions
are turned with their full fury upon God in heaven, the promise is we are not
left on our own. We are not left
behind. For once Jesus has embraced us
in His loving arms, by the power and promise of Easter, He will never let us
go.
Let
us rejoice. Christ is Risen. Christ is
Risen indeed.
Amen
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