2nd
Quarter 2002
After nearly two thousand years, people still want to know what went on that first Easter morning. Almost every year at this time, magazines such as Newsweek and Time, which largely ignore religious belief the rest of the year, often put Jesus on the front cover. Inside of the magazines, lengthy essays offer various viewpoints from biblical scholars and others about what they think Easter means.
What does Easter mean? Some would contend that is a simple question to answer: just read the Bible. The problem, though, is that the four Gospels do not give us one simple, straightforward account of what transpired. In fact, there are some seemingly major discrepancies in the way that the different Gospels tell the Easter story. For example, who was it that first found the empty tomb? Was the it the two women that Matthew tells us about, or was it the three women that Mark refers to, or was it the unspecified group of women in Luke, or was it just Mary Magdalene all by herself as John tells the story?
Questions surround the puzzle of who it was that the women saw when they arrived at the tomb. Was it the one angel we read about in Matthew, or was it the young man that Mark mentions, or was it the two men referred to in Luke, or was there initially no one at all at the tomb as John suggests? Those are just some of discrepancies we find when we look at the four Gospels. Since the story of the resurrection is so central to our faith, we might walk away from the Bible wishing that the four evangelists had spent a little more time getting their stories straight before writing them down.
Certainly some people throughout history have come along and suggested that there never was a resurrection. Matthew's own Gospel provides evidence of that. Matthew goes out of his way to counter the ancient rumor that Jesus' body had merely been stolen during the night when the guards fell asleep. Even today there are people who look on the resurrection as being nothing more than wishful thinking, a bunch of superstitious nonsense that is out of place in today's modern, scientific world.
As Christians, if we can't know for sure how many women went to the tomb, and if we can't be certain about how many angels were there, what can we say with confidence about the Easter story? The answer is, that although the Gospels vary in many of the details, the Gospels are unified in declaring the central message of Easter: Jesus Christ was raised from the dead.
Resurrection, of course, is something far different from anything we have otherwise experienced here on earth. If we want to know what resurrection is, all we can really do is look at how the resurrected Jesus is described and draw some conclusions from that. For example, in some of the resurrection accounts, we are told that after Easter Jesus had a body that in some ways was like the body he had before Easter. We are told that it was possible for people to touch and feel him. We are also told that Jesus was able to take food and eat it.
In other ways, however, the resurrected body of Jesus was quite different. We are told on one occasion that Jesus apparently was able to enter a room even though all the doors and windows were locked. Or in another case, when Jesus was walking along with some of his followers on Easter afternoon, as soon as they recognized him, immediately Jesus disappeared from their sight. Therefore we can't draw a simple diagram to explain it. All we can really know is that in some ways it is the same as the body we have right now, but in some mysterious ways it is different.
Where does that leave us? Again, we are left to wonder: what does Easter really mean for us? So often it seems that life is governed by the principle that nice guys finish last. Isn't that what happened on Good Friday? Jesus, the nicest person who ever lived, ended up a loser.
So when the women went to the tomb early that Sunday morning, they were going to say their final goodbyes to Jesus. They were women who had had their share of disappointment and sorrow in life. They knew there would be a lot of disappointment and sorrow in the years ahead. Jesus had been so good and kind to them, and this made the loss a bit harder to take. Yet deep down inside, they knew that's the way the world is—nice guys finish last. And they knew that Jesus certainly had been a nice guy.
But their thinking completely changed when they arrived at the tomb. There were the guards, who were supposed to be keeping watch over the dead man's body, but those guards had fainted and become like dead men themselves. The dead man, who was supposed to be in the tomb, was not there. Instead, he was alive. In other words, as those women arrived at the tomb, everything was turned upside down.
So often we live our lives like those women probably did. We figure that we are born, we live, and then we die. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and that's all there is. After a while, after attending enough funerals, you end up figuring that sadness and death really do have the final say. But when we come to the empty tomb, we find that all of that kind of thinking gets turned on its head. Because there at the empty tomb we discover that sadness and death do not have the final word. Rather the final word belongs to God. A nice thought as we still remember the smoking empty ruins of the World Trade Center.
Several years ago in Romania there was a woman who fainted when she opened her front door and found her husband standing there. The reason for her surprise was that three days earlier her husband had choked on a fish bone, had stopped breathing, and had collapsed. When the family doctor arrived, he knew that the man had a weak heart, and so right away he assumed the man was dead. A couple days later, though, grave diggers at the cemetery heard the sound of someone knocking on wood. They rushed to open the man's coffin to find that he was still alive. That certainly was a case of resuscitation, but not resurrection.
It is in the area of music that John probably is best remembered, thanks to the two hymns millions of Christians sing at Eastertide. Both hymns take the Old Testament Passover celebration and interpret it through Christian eyes. In the first hymn Earth is urged to "tell out" the day of resurrection. In the world of Orthodox Christians people greet one another on the streets with phrases such as "Christ is risen" or "Christ is reborn." The Easter services are long and elaborate, including the custom of lighting a household candle from the Paschal candle and taking the light back to the people's homes. John calls Easter "The Passover of gladness, The Passover of God" because Christ has brought his followers "from death to life eternal." The believer is urged to have a pure heart so that "we may see aright" the Lord, who no longer is just a man, but now the resurrected one, to whom we "raise the victor strain." The circle of resurrection joy is spread from the believer to the heavens and the earth in the third verse. Everything, "seen and unseen," are invited to celebrate the "joy that hath no end."
In the second of John's hymns the writer invites believers to celebrate God's victory at Easter. Israel and "Jacob's sons and daughters" stand for the church, and "Pharaoh's bitter yoke" represents sin, death, and the devil, with "the Red Sea's waters" reminding us of baptism and rising from death to new life. John takes advantage of the natural season by calling Easter "the spring of souls today," Christ having burst the prison of the tomb, rising like the sun into resurrection life. Presbyterians, always wanting to be brief it seems, end the hymn with this second verse and its invitation to rejoice and welcome the news of Christ's resurrection. The Methodist and other hymnals include other verses in which Easter is called "the queen of seasons," affirming that neither the tomb nor the guards stationed there could hold Christ, and concluding with a triumphant note of praise to the Triune God.
Every morning when I wake, Dear Lord, a little prayer I make, O please to
keep Thy lovely eye on all poor creatures born to die.
And every evening at sun-down I ask a blessing on the town, for whether we
last the night or no I'm sure is always touch-and-go.
We are not wholly bad or good who live our lives under Milk Wood, and Thou,
I know, wilt be the first to see our best side, not our worst.
O let us see another day! Bless us all this night, I pray, and to the sun
we all will bow and say, good-bye - but just for now!
(From Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas)
Was it over? Best game ever, but He still lost in the bottom of the ninth? "But Sunday's Coming!" proclaimed God's signature across the life of Jesus Christ as He was resurrected! Fridays can come very close together. They can overwhelm us with their pain, tragedy, grief, and suffering.
They can kill us, but they cannot destroy us. They cannot have the last word. The last Word is His Word. "It is Finished!" What does it all mean? One must refuse to judge the goodness of God based upon the limited experiences of one lifetime. There is nothing one can do in the limits of one lifetime that will cause God to stop loving. Reach for Sunday! God's reaching for you!
Many people today live with the hope that good will win out over evil. This is a position that has evaporated many repositories of faith. Good is initially crushed beneath the heel of evil in almost every encounter. Evil is willing to strike first. Jesus' resurrection forever proclaimed to the world: God conquers evil. Good does not win out; God does. This is the answer to the suffering of innocence. Faced with evil a nation resolves to defend itself, but deep inside we know that the enemy is us. The evil in other hearts is also present in one's own heart. Who has the pure heart to overcome evil, the sinlessness to resist its allure, the power over death, if not Jesus Christ? God's final Word is Jesus Christ.
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