As you well know, Easter, unlike Christmas, is a moveable holy day. This year it is on April 20, but next year it will be on April 5. If you have ever perused the back of the Book of Common Prayer during a boring sermon you will find a complex table and formula that is used to determine when Easter will be (I personally cheat and google it). Basically, Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. This is because the first followers of Jesus remembered that Jesus died on or around the Passover and Passover is always celebrated on the first full moon following the equinox. This means for those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere, Easter coincides with the greening of the earth. Well, in Maine the slight greening of the earth. Christ is risen and the whole world comes to life. For those of us living in northern climes spring and Easter go hand in hand. It just makes sense to us.
However, spring and resurrection are not an exact analogy. Spring after all is natural and what happens each spring is not exactly resurrection. We know that the dormant trees and plants are not dead, they are just resting and when the ground gets warm enough and there is enough sunlight they wake up and sprout again. If a tree or a plant is dead, it won’t sprout in the spring. A dead plant will never sprout again. This isn’t modern scientific knowledge that the ancients did not possess. They knew this too.
Resurrection, however, is entirely unnatural. Dead bodies naturally stay dead. They don’t get up, leave their last place of rest and walk around, talking and eating with their friends. And Jesus was really and truly dead. The soldiers and the women saw him die on the cross. The soldiers even pierced his side with a spear. The women watched as his lifeless body was taken down from the cross and Joseph of Arimathea had his lifeless body placed in the tomb. His close friends and followers wept and grieved together, not knowing what to do with their lives now that the one in whom they had placed all their hope was gone. This is the mindset we need to hold within us as we approach the empty tomb with the women this morning. These women were not naïve. They may have lacked the scientific knowledge that we have today, but they knew that dead people stayed dead. They are in deep grief and despair. The one they loved is gone. He may have told him that he would rise again on the third day, but they no more understood what that meant than we would today. For resurrection is unnatural. It simply doesn’t happen in the world we inhabit, in the world as we understand it.
So, with that in mind, we are ready to approach the tomb with the women. They have come to offer to the one they loved the only thing they have left to give him, their care and respect for his dead body. They have waited in anguish and grief throughout the sabbath to perform their final act of love. Finally, they can see the first rays of sunlight. It is time. They set out. They are afraid. They are worried that there might be soldiers about waiting to arrest anyone who dares approach Jesus’ grave, but they encourage each other as they journey to the tomb. They wonder how they will roll back the stone, as none of the men have been willing to risk joining them in their pilgrimage to the tomb. But they trust that they will figure it out, as women always do.
As they approach the tomb, one of the woman notices something strange. The stone is already moved. What is this? Is someone here already? Is it friend or foe? They creep forward cautiously. They peer into the dark depths of the tomb. They walk slowly down the steps into the cool interior. It is empty. There are no intruders and there is no body. All that is there are the linens used by Joseph to wrap Jesus’ lifeless body. What on earth is going on? What are they to make of this? What are they to do? They are frozen in perplexity and astonishment.
And suddenly two men appear as of out of nowhere. They are wearing the most brilliantly, impossibly white clothing you could imagine. They must be from God. There is nothing this white in this world. And the women fall on their faces to the ground. They are terrified. And the first words from these two other worldly men don’t help. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” they say to the women. Why indeed? They weren’t looking for the living among the dead. They were looking for the dead among the dead. What on earth could these men mean?
“He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again” the Godly messengers go on to explain. And just like that the women remember. This is what Jesus told them. The unnatural must be true! Jesus is alive! The impossible has happened! They have to go and tell the others! They must know! God has acted! Hope has returned! Life has returned! Love has won!
What do you make of the empty tomb? Is it old news to you? Is it an idle tale, as the men believed it to be when the women came to them to share their experience? Is it the superstition of a pre-scientific people? The delusion of despairing followers? Metaphor? Is it easy for you to accept, challenging or impossible? Personally, I think that if you don’t find resurrection hard to believe you probably aren’t taking it seriously. For resurrection isn’t normal. It isn’t natural. It isn’t supposed to happen in the world as we know and understand it.
This is why there are no eyewitnesses to the resurrection. All four Gospels tell of the empty tomb, but they do not describe the resurrection. This is for a good reason. Resurrection is the inbreaking of God, that which exists before and outside of all that we know as natural and material, that which transcends all created matter. Resurrection is the inbreaking of God into our natural and material word to create an entirely new reality all together. And this transcendence cannot be seen, measured, captured or even described. It is something you have to enter, to experience, something you have to allow to grasp you. The only thing there is to describe about resurrection is what results from it—new life. Resurrection is not something to agree with in your head. It is not something you believe in your heart. It is something you know in your gut. Resurrection offers us a future bigger than our past. It is God’s invitation to enter a new normal, a better normal.
No wonder the men think the women are crazy when they share their experience with them. Resurrection just doesn’t happen, that is until it does. Maybe what we have accepted as normal was never meant to be normal. Maybe we need to get rid of normal. Maybe resurrection is exactly what we need.
Sonya Renee Taylor, a black poet and activist posted this on her Instagram account on April 1, 2020:
“We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was never normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate, and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.”
Resurrection is not normal, but perhaps normal is not what we need or what God is calling us to. Why do we look for life amongst war, torture, capital punishment, oppression of minorities, hoarding of wealth, destruction of the earth, deportation of immigrants? Why do we look for life in the midst of death? What would be possible if resurrection were true?
“[The women] remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.”
Amen.
