Easter Sunday Sermon
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April 4, 2010

“As Yet They Did Not Understand”
John 20:1-18

Mary comes to the tomb while it is still dark. She comes in the night. In her darkness. In grief. It is the first day of the work week. They do not yet know that Sunday is the Lord’s Day. They do not yet understand that this is the day that God begins to create anew. They do not yet call it “the eighth day of creation”. They only know that the Sabbath is over and the work week has begun. Mary cannot sleep. She is awake in the night. She goes to the tomb to grieve. But she finds it open and empty. And she is sure that she understands what has happened. Vandals have already been here. They have come looking for jewellery or money or anything of value that has been buried with the body. Finding nothing, they have taken the body instead.

Mary runs to Peter and the disciple closest to Jesus - the one he loved. She tells them what has happened. They race to see for themselves. The beloved disciple arrives first, then defers to Peter who is first to see the evidence. Only the linen wrappings remain along with the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. Then the other disciple investigates the scene. What kind of robbers are these? Why would they unwrap the corpse and then carefully roll them up and leave them behind? John says that, then and there, the disciple who Jesus loved comes to belief. It is a mystery. What happened in the tomb is a mystery. And coming to believe that it is the handiwork of God, not the work of grave robbers, that is a mystery, too.

For, you see, “as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” Sometimes the church makes it sound like it is easy to understand the Resurrection. Sometimes we preachers sound as if we’re know-it-alls when it comes to Jesus rising from the dead. But we don’t know it all. More often than not we are like Peter who arrives at the scene, sees the evidence, but does not have a clue what has happened. In fact, this is the place where our celebration of Easter rightly begins. Easter rightly begins with a lack of understanding. It begins at the beginning - with a mystery that is not easily understood. We begin by telling the truth that the Resurrection is a confounding event.

So it is very good that today marks the beginning of seven weeks of Easter festivities. Seven Sundays of singing and praying and preaching in celebration of the Resurrection. It is not an accident that the season of Christmas is only twelve days long. For if we were to lose Christmas we would only have to give up a couple of chapters at the beginning of the gospels of Matthew and Luke. But if the church were to drop Easter we would lose the New Testament in its entirety. The Resurrection is the transforming event that gives birth to the church which, like the beloved disciple, finds itself coming to believe that God has raised Jesus Christ to life.

 

 

 

 

 

This belief - this deep intuitive trust - is not so much an act of the mind as it is a drama of the heart. It begins in a moment of recognition. Mary weeps, sobs, breaks down. Through her tears she sees angelic messengers who ask her why she is crying. She tells them that her grief has been compounded by thieves who have robbed her of even his dead body. Suddenly behind her there stands a gardener. He asks her why she is weeping and who she is looking for. Mary wonders if he knows something, if he took the body. She asks him. He answers her question by saying her name: “Mary”. He recognizes her, he knows her, he calls her by name. And in that moment of recognition Mary recognizes that he is her teacher, her Rabbi. No longer dead. Alive.

This is the drama of coming to Christian faith. It begins in a moment of recognition when Jesus Christ is seen through tears, through grief, through heart-ache and heart-break. He comes incognito and is not recognizable at first. But then he speaks your name. He addresses your heart. He knows you, he loves you. Jesus knows trouble, sorrow, suffering. He has risen from it, through it, beyond it. Now he comes to you - in your trouble, your sorrow, your suffering to carry you through it, beyond it. And not you alone. For the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead intends life - life beyond suffering and sorrow, life beyond heart-ache and heart-break - for each aching soul and for all of earth’s peoples. It is the gospel truth. Thank God.

- Edwin Searcy

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