Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
How was it that Jesus came out of the tomb? A video crossed my feed this week of people enacting how they thought Jesus came out of the tomb. Some demonstrated a victorious walk looking to the heavens, a moon walk backwards, another with a backflip and somersaults, or gleefully skipping and dancing early that morning into the garden.
Alan Watts, a Zen Buddhist author, writes that Christians are too reticent in their proclamation, too restrained. He writes, “If I were a Christian and believed my savior had been raised from the dead, I would shout it from the rooftop, and I would not be silent on the subject.”
Easter turns the world upside down. Such a stunning reversal of the expected that it can be hard to grasp, challenging, or not believable. Jesus — wrongfully executed as an example of the empire’s power in the forces of political will and betrayed in public cruelty, is not in the tomb.
Easter offers the mystical possibility of transformation in every aspect of life. In this season, what is dying and what is being born? I was convinced that a twig of a tree branch in a pot in the courtyard of Gethsemane Lutheran Church was surely dead until this past week, when green buds and leaves appeared all over the branches.
What has now died and what is now alive for our lives and for the world? What is breaking open like a seed to die (John 12:24) so that new life might thrive? What has gone into the cocoon of slumber only to burst out into a beautiful, free-flying butterfly? What egg has cracked to hatch new life? Is the yeast not rising, and the small beacon of light glaring at the end of the tunnel?
For a personal indulgence, this Lent brought some prolonged hospitalizations, and it is Easter joy today to have here today Rob, Steve, Jim, and Lorna, given her wish of a new body. Resurrection is true and personal for each of us.
In an interview about the Passover, Rabbi Charles Klein of the Merrick Jewish Centre says we are often stuck in a binary culture of yes and no, liberal and conservative, black and white. There’s no ability to move, to think, or to be different. Might this be the end, or merely birth pains, is all lost, or might reconciliation be possible, are we forsaken, or is God not standing in solidarity alongside? The impossible is met with the possible.
The resurrection defies our expectations with hiddenness and bluntness: Mary does not recognize the resurrected Jesus. The good news is met by an earthquake and terrifying angels — brought to the women of the church first rather than the Twelve. The ground literally shifts under their feet with great power; the empty tomb is met with initially sheer terror. And Jesus keeps reassuring: “Do not be afraid.”
Perhaps you, too, can recall those moments when you have met the act of God working expectantly, perhaps in nature, and met that sheer force with fear and trembling: in the path of a tornado, witnessing an avalanche, or the powerful shaking of an earthquake. Yesterday, while running along the river, I came face to face with a running coyote; both the coyote and I stopped dead in our tracks, met with a sense of awe and fear.
“For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men” (Matthew 28:4). A radical reversal prophesied in scripture and proclaimed in Christ’s life and ministry is told in human flesh: Christ, through death, has triumphed over death. The women at the tomb come with both fear and great joy.
The message is shocking to grasp in the reading from Colossians: “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). In the season of Easter, we are invited to allow old husks to fall away so that Christ’s new life may emerge. This part of the resurrection story is strange, unsettling. Terrifying, but in the mystery of the Holy Spirit’s work in us, we receive it as hope (1 Peter 1:3).
On this Easter day, we are honest about how God is stirring us to transformation, and we may be called to faithfully lament the letting go. Almost simultaneously, as we embody Christ’s resurrection in the present, we celebrate it with great joy. In our desire to be hidden in Christ’s abundant life, we can even name seasons of suffering as Christ’s resurrection emerging.
Theologian James Cone calls Jesus death a first-century lynching at the hands of a Roman imperial power (The Cross and the Lynching Tree). The public spectacle of shame was designed to terrorize anyone posing a threat to the empire’s power. And God shows up in solidarity with all those oppressed, and God snatches life out of death and hope out of the despair, turning a tool of oppression into the shocking freedom of liberation.
Swiss theologian Karl Barth said that what brings people to church on Easter and every Sunday is the unspoken question on everyone’s hearts and minds. “Is it true?” That unspoken question: Is it true that God lives and gives us life? Is it true that something so extraordinary happened on that morning that we can only rebuild our lives on its promise? Is it true?
The story that reaches the deepest regions of our hearts and minds, where both doubt and faith are found. The word to rise is a very powerful word in every language: a braking free from liberation, overcoming adversity, gaining free. Without apology or hesitation that what we proclaim at Easter is powerful, mighty, and wonderful.
Insisting on love, for our desire for wholeness and healing, for justice to come, for the division and hurt to end, for the pain to stop, for the illness to heal, desiring forgiveness and love, the resurrection means that the worst news is not the last news, exposing the oppression and empire and falsehood with audacious hope.
On this Easter day, we are honest about how God is stirring us to transformation, and may we lament the letting go. In the Gospel, the disciples leave the empty tomb, filled with fear and great joy. What a mixture of emotions are there at the prospect of new life when an inmate is released from jail, a sick patient leaves the hospital, a retiree concludes their career, a refugee finds safety in a new land after years of bombs, sirens, war an death, the possibility of new feelings of love after a long period of grief, when we break free from the bondage of old chain, weighed down stress, when new life awaits us, is there not a mixture of some fear simultaneous with great joy?
Those first visitors to the empty tomb, the first Easter morning, from all accounts, are to leave by running, with great joy. Expecting the stench of death, one is suddenly met with great news to go and tell. Into this new life, how can we not do anything but with those first disciples to run, go quickly, and declare what we know and see.
Christ is risen!
