Easter Sermon
John 20: 1-18
Early in the morning of the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. She ran to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they’ve put him.” Peter and the other disciple left to go to the tomb.
They were running together, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and was the first to arrive at the tomb. Bending down to take a look, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he didn’t go in. Following him, Simon Peter entered the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there. He also saw the face cloth that had been on Jesus’ head. It wasn’t with the other clothes but was folded up in its own place. Then the other disciple, the one who arrived at the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. They didn’t yet understand the scripture that Jesus must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to the place where they were staying.
Mary stood outside near the tomb, crying. As she cried, she bent down to look into the tomb. She saw two angels dressed in white, seated where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head and one at the foot. The angels asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”
She replied, “They have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they’ve put him.” As soon as she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she didn’t know it was Jesus.
Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who are you looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she replied, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him and I will get him.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabbouni” (which means Teacher).
Jesus said to her, “Don’t hold on to me, for I haven’t yet gone up to my Father. Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them, ‘I’m going up to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Mary Magdalene left and announced to the disciples, “I’ve seen the Lord.” Then she told them what he said to her.
WORD OF LORD
If you’re expecting that this is the part of the service where I’m supposed to explain what this all means or convince you one way or another about any of this… Then you’re out of your mind. Listen, I’ve been a practicing Christian for most of my life minus a small break in high school and the beginning part of college. I’ve studied our faith, theology, and the Bible academically for about 25 years. And to be completely 100% honest with you, I’m less certain about what this whole resurrection business is about today than I was when I started. There’s a joke that if you ask 12 Presbyterian Scholars about what scripture means, you’ll get 20 interpretations. So, if you’re sitting there thinking that maybe this pastor is going to clear it all up for you… Well welcome to Highland Park Presbyterian and buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
I’m not trying to make light of anything here; I’m really not. I take this stuff pretty seriously. In fact, sometimes I may take it a little too seriously. It’s just that, well, to be completely honest again, I think this Resurrection thing, this Easter thing, is just too big, too important, and too powerful to be reduced to just one meaning. I think that’s part of the problem when it comes to this story. The “why” question, the “what does it all mean” question is so big that people start focusing on the “if” question - as in if it really happened. But the IF question usually sounds like this: Did Jesus literally get up and start living again or is it a metaphor? Incidentally, if you ever want to watch my father and I argue over something for hours on end, get us in the same room and ask us that very question.And If you ever want to impress me, see if you can stay in the room longer than my mom and my wife can. And I find the if question fascinating, but not nearly as interesting as the whole why question. Because no matter how you answer the “if it happened” question, you have to at least acknowledge that SOMETHING happened. SOMETHING changed that day. SOMETHING incredible had to take place for people to be so changed and so struck by this story that they lived and died for it. But WHY it happened or what it all means isn’t for me to answer for you. I don’t know why. I don’t know what it all means. I know what it means to me, but I don’t know what it means to you. And I’m not sure it’s my place to tell you what it should mean to you. If you get anything useful out of this sermon at all, which could potentially be another Easter miracle, I hope it’s this: Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that they have the only answer to what this all means. But rest assured it all means something; I just can’t tell you what it should mean to you. But I can tell you what it’s come to mean to me…
And what its come to mean to me starts with two young men I hardly knew at all that I’ll never forget and who dramatically changed my perspective on easter. Their names were Harrison Davis and Eric Estill. Harrison was just a few years younger than me when I got a call on a Maundy Thursday that he’d suddenly died and his funeral was going to be on Easter afternoon. And Easter morning I had to stand up in front of a congregation I loved who loved him and talk about an empty grave as we prepared to fill one that afternoon. Eric was weeks away from a doctorate in Physical Therapy when I got a call from his mom Paula early Easter morning 8 years ago telling me he’d been hit by a car and killed. And for the second time in my career, I had to stand up in front of yet another sanctuary full of people I dearly loved and try to speak about life and Resurrection in the face of tragedy and death.
I learned something about Easter through these two men and their family and their churches. And that is to affirm life in the face of death - to insist on light when the world is covered in darkness is no easy task. It takes courage. It takes love - real, hard, painful love. And it takes honesty, true, open, vulnerable honesty to not just naively focus on the happy, fun excitement of easter and recognize that brokenness is a HUGE part of what makes this holiday so important to us.
It’s not the story we’ve made it out to be. It isn’t bow-ties and pretty dresses and cute bunnies and Easter Sunday best and pastel colors and pretty flowers. I mean, Easter - at least in the Gospel of John - is the story of a horribly broken, horribly wounded, horribly hurt and terrified woman who is at her lowest and darkest moment… And yet, that’s when it happens…
Let’s look at this closely. Mary comes to the tomb in the garden. It’s still dark. The birds are probably just beginning to chirp. Its that time in-between. Not yet light but not still dark. And imagine the shock and horror she must have felt seeing that the grave of someone she dearly loved had just been vandalized and the body stolen. She didn’t know yet. No one understood what was happening. She goes and gets Peter and another disciple. They don’t understand either and they just go home. They just leave.
They just leave her there. And Mary stood there alone weeping outside the tomb, John tells us. There isn’t any celebration here. There isn’t any joy here. She’s terrified and horrified. She’s crushed. Just when things couldn’t get any worse, they did. I imagine it’s about the worst thing possible Mary could have pictured happening, if she could have pictured it at all. Thursday a close friend betrayed this man she loved. Friday all the hope in the world had been beaten and tortured and brutally killed out of it. And Sunday she comes to mourn his loss and it appears someone had desecrated the tomb and stolen his body. Can you imagine it? Can you imagine trying to go to the grave of someone you love and it’s dug up and their body’s gone? And now she’s left alone with her tears. Weeping outside a tomb for a man she loved, who brought such beauty in the world. Who was taken before his time. John doesn’t tell us what she’s thinking here. We can only imagine. But I bet she’s wondering where God is in any this. I can see her asking Why over and over again to no apparent answer. And I imagine that the darkness of this moment overshadows just about anything else in the world around her. And its in this moment that it happens. She looks into the tomb one more time in disbelief of what has happened and it is then God chooses her.
These angels could have come to anyone. They could have come to Peter or the Beloved disciple when they were there. The angels could have talked to them on their way back home. The angels could have announced to the multitudes and the press. They could have rubbed it in the face of the pharisees. They could have shouted it from the mountain-tops for all the world to hear. But they don’t. God chooses the woman in mourning. The one who stayed behind. The one who perhaps was in the greatest amount of pain that Easter morning. The one who felt the most pain. The one who wept the hardest was the one to see Christ first. What a powerful, powerful statement that is about the God and Christ we serve and celebrate this morning!
John is telling us suffering AND joy. Sorrow AND celebration. Life then death AND life again. He sets us up for this from the very beginning of his Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
You see that? Light AND darkness. The darkness is still there. It isn’t that it goes away. But despite that darkness. Despite the suffering and the sorrow. Despite the hardship. Despite death. The light still shines. The light shines and the darkness, no matter what, cannot overcome it. John sets us up for this moment at the empty tomb from the very beginning. And it is right when it seems that the darkness may have won. Mary is at the tomb and its neither morning nor night. Neither light nor dark. And all bets are off. It could go either way. The world hangs in the balance. And it’s there, in that moment, that the light bursts forth again. It’s in that moment that what was dead is now suddenly alive. And so to deny or to hide the fact that there’s still this brokenness or this darkness or this disappointment and anxiety and even grief that’s in our world right now is to really miss the main and central claim of what Easter and resurrections are all about.
Because Easter isn’t ALL joy and ALL celebration. And that’s because especially these days, Easter is a reminder to us to meet those suffering at their tombs, whether they’re literal or figurative tombs. An we’re reminded to tell them yes. Yes, Suffering AND joy. Yes, Tears AND laughter. Yes, Sorrow AND hope. Yes, Darkness AND light. But always light, no matter what, light. And though it isn’t always easy to see, the great hope and promise of Easter is light. Light that shines through the darkness. Light that no darkness can overcome.
And I think that’s what it means to be an Easter People living in a Good Friday world right now. That we’ve got to look for and find the light that can be really hard to see. And we also have to go share that light with everybody else and remind them that it’s there. It’s not that the darkness is gone and that everything is ok. It’s not. But the light isn’t gone either and I think if we can work together through Christ, we can make that light even brighter.
So, I want to say to you this morning if you’re here in person or whenever and wherever you’re watching this online, if you’re sitting there and you’re worried about what comes next. If all of this is just too much to handle. If some mornings are just hard. And you sometimes struggle to get up and face another day. If life hasn’t worked out the way you would have ever hoped and imagined. If you’ve lost someone close to you and the pain is too much. Or the bills keep stacking up and you feel buried. Or maybe you thought that the bullies of this world stayed in the schoolyard but they don’t. Maybe the wells of love you once felt have run dry or you’re sitting there asking yourself why you’re here when it feels as though God has all but abandoned you.
If you are reeling with me with all the stress and uncertainty that is in our world right now. Or if you, like Mary, are asking where God could be in any of this. What you need to know this Easter morning, what God is trying to tell us this Easter morning is that you are EXACTLY who the resurrection is for. And you are exactly the reason why Easter happened in the first place. Because our God isn’t the God of perfect people. Our God is the God of broken people striving to be made whole, struggling to find the light in the darkness, weeping at the tomb of disappointment and grief and heartache to make sense of it all and see God. And it’s in just those moments where sometimes God’s presence become all the more clearer.
Because This is the God of the little people, of the lepers and tax collectors and prostitutes. This is the God of the doubters and the deniers and of the heartbroken and the hurting. This is the God that was broken with us and was broken for us. This is the God that meets us crying beside our tombs when it seems all is lost. This is the God that is there for us. Easter is Christ’s promise that He’ll never leave us alone. Easter is Christ’s promise that He’ll never leave us alone.
No one is forgotten. No one is left out. No one is denied access. Because life beats death. Because Light beats darkness. Because Love beats hate. Because Grace beats sin. This God that we worship here doesn’t leave you abandoned, but when all else seems lost, God suddenly shows up. And maybe we don’t always know it and maybe we don’t always recognize it, and maybe we don’t always see it. After all, Mary thought he was a gardener, having dirty hands instead of white robes but God shows up. Because it’s in the moment of Greatest suffering that the biggest miracle happens. It’s when all hope was lost that new life springs forth. It’s when everything seemed it’s worst, that God does something new.
Easter isn’t the denial of human suffering while we put on a fake smile. Easter is the celebration of hope despite all that we have lost, despite all that we’ve been through, and despite all of our pain. It’s Yes in the face of no. Yes, Suffering AND joy. Yes, Tears AND laughter. Yes, Sorrow AND hope. Yes, Darkness AND light. But always light, no matter what, light. Easter is God’s promise that this too shall pass. Easter is Christ broken with you, emerging whole for you. Easter encompasses all of the human experience and reminds us that life doesn’t end in death, darkness doesn’t beat light, hatred can’t kill love, apathy can’t murder hope because no matter what, no matter what God is with you.
So may you look to the breaking of a new day.
May you discover that the tomb is empty as you meet the gardener.
May you know that even in your greatest pain God is there.
And may you proclaim with all your heart Christ is Risen! He has risen indeed!
Amen.