Easter Sunday, April 17, 2022

Luke 24:1-12

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women who had come with Jesus from Galilee came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? 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." Then they 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.

Alleluia, the Lord is Risen! (The Lord is Risen indeed- alleluia!) Those Alleluias are so good to bring back. One of my favorite things about Easter Sunday morning is that buzz that puts an exclamation point on all of the Alleluias. 

After six weeks without them, we get the confident Alleluia, the loud and uncompromising proclamation of a risen Christ.

And in Luke’s Gospel, the one we’re reading this morning, the first people to hear and proclaim the resurrection are women. Specifically, women from Jesus’s home area, who had brought spices to keep the dead body of Jesus fresh. And as we just heard in our Gospel reading, they get to the tomb to find it empty, and then two men in dazzling clothes appear beside them and tell them that Jesus is alive and risen.

These women go and who do they decide to tell what they’ve seen? Jesus’s friends, of course! They’ll be so excited!

Except that the disciples aren’t excited. They’re incredulous. This is one of those places where our Bible translations, made for prim and proper church people, don’t really do the language justice. 

The NRSV, the translation we use for our lectionary, tells us that Peter and the disciples thought that the women were telling them “an idle tale.”

But the Greek word there, “leros,” is a little less… polite. It essentially means something I’m not really allowed to say in a church service with little old ladies and small children present. Bull… um… manure.

We laugh, of course, but let’s take off our nice Easter shoes for a moment (Metaphorically! Not literally! Please!) and try to step into the disciples’ sandals.

The followers of Jesus have just watched the Roman imperial state and the religious authorities — two groups that had historically been at odds with one another — put aside their pretty massive differences and work together bound by their mutual hatred of Jesus.

They’d also seen the people of Jerusalem — the same people who, just a week earlier, had been hailing Jesus by waving palms and throwing their cloaks on the ground ahead of him as he rode into Jerusalem triumphantly on a donkey — turn suddenly from a cheering crowd into a lynch mob.

And finally, they’d watched Jesus — their rabbi and leader, who had taught them so much and performed wondrous miracles in their sight, someone they thought had the power and authority over all earthly empires and was about to use them in glory — meekly submit to arrest, stand trial in a kangaroo court, be tortured and mocked by ordinary Roman solders, and be executed in a painful and humiliating way.

They’d seen him feed thousands from a few loaves and fishes, heal lepers, give sight to the blind, even raise the dead! And then, when the Roman soldiers tortured and humiliated him, when they whipped him bloody and pressed the crown of thorns on his head, even when they nailed him to the cross and hung him up there to die, he just… took it? Didn’t fight, didn’t call down an army of angels, didn’t try to stage an escape, didn’t even resist?

What the heck?

So now, only two days after all that trauma, the followers of Jesus are reeling. They’re scared. The religious authorities and imperial soldiers had taken down their leader, so the natural next step is to go after his followers too. Sure, Jesus had talked about something like this happening and hinted that everything would work out in the end, but they didn’t really think he was serious about it. So in addition to the despair and the grief, there’s another thought running through their heads: are we next?

So when these women — women they know, women they trust, women who have been with the Jesus movement since the beginning, women who would have absolutely no reason to lie to them — burst into the room telling them that the tomb is empty and two angels told them that Jesus is risen, I like to think it was their fear and trauma talking when they respond with… um… “bull manure.”

I mean, really… wouldn’t we all? Think about someone you love who has died, and only a few days later someone tells you “no, I checked their tomb and it’s empty, and two men in dazzling clothes told me he was alive.” You’d be asking them “are those men in dazzling clothes in the room with us right now?” and surreptitiously looking around to make sure they couldn’t get their hands on any sharp objects.

So let’s review where we are. The disciples are beaten. They’re broken. They’re scared for their lives. They’re jumping at every knock on the door and every creak in the floor. 

And even worse, they’re wondering if this rabbi they have spent the last few years following around Judea, the movement that they left everything behind for, this savior they risked their lives to follow, was himself full of… um… “bull manure.” 

And in come these women they otherwise knew as level-headed and every bit as devoted to Jesus as they had been, telling them that he’s alive.

Given all that, it’s almost a miracle of sorts that Peter responds differently than the other disciples. When it would be so much easier to just give up, to collapse into despair and hopelessness, to think that with everything else that has gone so terribly wrong over the past few days, now even some of his closest friends are starting to crack under the pressure, Peter makes a different choice.

He lets himself hope.

The very same Peter who denied Jesus three times only a few days before, out of fear for his life, gets up and bolts out of the room. He decides that hope is worth the risk of being caught by Roman patrols, or synagogue leaders, or the lynch mob that had only a few days earlier been calling for Jesus to be crucified, and he runs to the empty tomb.

I’m probably not the only one right now who thinks that things over the past 6-7 years, and particularly more recently, have been looking pretty bleak. Oppression at home and abroad. People finding it harder and harder to get by. Staggering tales of human monstrosity. A war in Europe killing hundreds of thousands. Nationalism and white supremacy. Growing political movements being built not around love or the common good, but around hatred and fear of those whose opinions or lifestyles don’t perfectly fit a narrow vision. And, of course, every year the global temperature inches up another tenth of a degree.

Hatred seems to be on the offensive, and love is fighting to hold on to the scraps of territory that even a few years ago seemed like they were unassailable.

With all that, my prayer for us this morning is that we will follow Peter’s example. In a world that is trying to beat us down, to tell us that there is no reason for hope, that things will only get worse, that our best years are behind us, I pray that we, like Peter, will dare to let ourselves hope. 

Maybe it will get worse before it gets better. Maybe evil will look like it has triumphed for a day, or a week, or a year, or even a decade. But we believe in a God of freedom, a God of love, a God of hope. We follow a Jesus who, when it looked like he was beaten and done for, burst out of the tomb to proclaim a new Kingdom.

It’s tempting to think of Easter as the end of the story. After all, that’s where all of our Gospels end. Jesus is crucified and dies, and then is resurrected and spends some time with his friends. But Easter isn’t the end. It’s not a day frozen in time, it’s not happily-ever-after. 

No, Easter is a beginning. It’s the start of the next chapter of the story, a moment when something new and wonderful and incredible comes into the world. And it’s a story we’re all invited to relive, to be part of, every single year.

There’s a wonderful Jewish prayer that is sometimes used on the Sabbath. It begins, “Days pass and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.”

We walk sightless among miracles. And we pray that God will open our eyes to the miracles around us, to the miracle that is every single person, every single living thing, every single new moment in the story God is writing in the world.

What a gift!

We get to walk around our communities seeing the potential of resurrection everywhere around us.

We get to see the poor and oppressed, the ones who are mourning and hopeless, and bring them God’s love and comfort.

We get to tell the cynical and jaded, the discouraged and despondent, that God isn’t finished with the world yet… in fact, God is only getting started.

I pray that we will dare to hope and follow where God leads.

Amen.