The Rev’d Stephen C. Holton
Christ Church, New Haven, Conn.
Easter Day
April 4, 2021
He has been raised; he is not here!
In the name of God: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit. Amen.
Have you ever been wrong—and been happy about it? [1]
Sure, we’re wrong all the time—even when we don’t know it! As Benjamin Franklin once wrote in a letter, nothing is certain except death and taxes. Well, we know that’s not true—Leona Helmsley, Donald Trump, Nike and Federal Express have all managed to erode any certainty I have in the tax code!
Being wrong for me is usually frustrating, or embarrassing, or just inconvenient. But have you ever been glad to be wrong?
A few weeks ago I had, like many of you probably have done during COVID, a really terrible dream. Thankfully I can’t remember much of it, but in this dream I had a terrible fight with someone—a really awful, knockdown, drag-out fight, and hurtful things were said! I was sure we’d never be friends again after this horrible altercation, and I woke up with a pit in my stomach, feeling sad and anxious and wanting to call my friend and apologize.
It all felt so real, but as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and got out of bed and began to actually wake up, to come to my senses, I had the most incredible sense of relief as I realized the entire thing had been a dream! There was no disagreement at all, no fight at all, nothing hateful had been said by anyone. Everything was just fine!
I had the lightest morning after that. It was such a joy to be awake, alive, in relationship with my friend. It was all just a COVID stress dream! That morning I had a little extra spring in my step and a bit more good humor about the stresses of the pandemic on our sleep patterns and even our dream lives.
I was so glad to be wrong about what had happened. My life was better for learning that I was wrong.
In today’s gospel we hear that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome have gone to the tomb to anoint Jesus’s dead body. You know the story. You know how it ends. But they didn’t.
They expected that Jesus was dead. After all, they’d been there through his ministry. They had fed him, paid for his ministry, and accompanied him and the other disciples all over Galilee and now had gone to Jerusalem with him. They’d seen him heal the sick, raise the dead, feed the hungry. They knew his teachings, knew his mother and family, knew how much he loved them—and how much they loved him.
They knew he was in danger coming into Jerusalem. They’d heard how the religious authorities and governmental officials were getting nervous since he’d raised Lazarus from the dead; they believed he was the one God had chosen to save God’s people. They knew coming to Jerusalem for the Passover was dangerous, and yet they went there with him. They saw him taken by the soldiers. They saw him beaten, stripped, and nailed to the cross. They watched as he suffered. They heard his cries to God as he died. They were there when his lifeless body was put into his mother’s arms. They saw him laid in the tomb and saw it sealed with a stone.
They knew what they had seen. They had seen death.
They wanted to anoint him but there wasn’t enough time before nightfall, before Sabbath, and so they came on Sunday to care for his dead body. And they worried about how they’d roll the stone away.
They knew what they’d seen. They knew what to expect. And they were completely wrong.
As they arrive to see something unexpected. The stone is rolled away, and the man in the tomb is not Jesus—and is very much alive! The strange young man tells them to go and tell Peter and the others and go to Galilee to meet Jesus. It’s just as he told you it would be, the man says.[2] He has been raised; he is not in the tomb!
Now, we might expect the Marys and Salome to rejoice at this point. After all, this is good news, right? Jesus is alive! But they do not. Instead “…they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” (Mk 16:8)
Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, and Salome are wrong. And thanks be to God! Their friend, their teacher, their Lord and Savior is alive! But they are afraid, because it’s not what they expected. They are still seeing things through the lens of death. They are still looking for—expecting—death.
And why not? They’d seen death. They know what death looks like. And so do we.
We know that our bodies die. At best we get a calm and peaceful death—a good death. At worst death can be painful, suffering, violent. We’ve seen death. We’ve seen COVID-19 take the lives of those whom we love. We’ve seen George Floyd murdered under a police officer’s knee. We’ve seen black men and women hang from trees, lynched, just like Jesus was lynched.
We know death, don’t we? We expect death.
But what do we know about life?
Mary Magdalene and her friends run from the tomb in fear. But they don’t stay afraid. As the reality of what they’ve heard settles in, they understand Jesus is alive. They do go and tell the others. They do go to Galilee and meet him there! They were so wrong, and now they are full of joy and wonder as they contemplate the risen body of their friend! They are full of joy and wonder about what this means for their relationships with him. They are full of joy and wonder at what this means about the world.
They came to the tomb seeking death. They left in fear. But they didn’t stay there. They found life.
Friends, I want to say something provocative here, so bear with me.
What if God did not need Jesus to die in order to save Creation? To save you and me?
What if Jesus’s death is the result of our disordered understanding of God? Of one another? Of all Creation?
What if we are the ones who believe in death?
Because Jesus’s resurrection makes it perfectly clear that, for God, death is not a thing. Death does not exist.[3]
Jesus dies because we deal in death. We believe in death. We have established systems of death dealing, of white supremacy, of oppression. We have created income inequality and racism. Creation breaks down and our bodies fail. Not because God wills it—exactly the opposite!—but because we—you and I, our societies, and even the biology that surrounds us—believe in death.
In showing us God’s will for love, for life—in raising Jesus from the dead—God is forgiving us. God is forgiving all Creation. God is forgiving even death itself.[4]
Now, let me be clear, that death is real for us. George Floyd really did suffer and die. An Asian woman punched on the subway really feels pain. You and I really will at some point fall apart and our bodies will stop. We get lonely. We despair.
And God has felt those feelings too, in the flesh. Jesus has felt all those things. He has despaired. He has suffered and felt pain. He has been murdered.
But he is not here, he is risen, just like he said.
God has raised Jesus’s body up because for God, death is no thing.
And that’s what the women at the tomb learn.
What would that mean for us if we really understood—believed—lived within God’s reality?
As the theologian James Alison writes, “If God can raise someone from the dead in the middle of human history, the very fact reveals that death, which up till this point had marked human history as simply something inevitable, part of what it is to be a human being, is not inevitable. That is, that death is itself not a simply biological reality, but a human cultural reality marking all perception, and a human cultural reality that is capable of being altered... This nature of sin as related to death is simultaneously revealed as something which need not be… the shape of [God’s] forgiveness stretches into what we are: we are humans tied into the human reality of death. We need no longer be.”
“The doctrine of original sin,” Alison says, “is the doctrine of the un-necessity of death.”
We are wrong about God and about death, Alison says, and not just wrong as in mistaken—but as in actively wrong. Actively death dealing. We are the ones causing death!
And yet God’s forgiveness, God’s plain showing us that we are wrong, is an opportunity. For if we are wrong, then we can learn from Jesus what is true. Because God forgives, because God wills love and life, because Jesus rises, we can change. Death no longer has dominion over us.
All those systems of death dealing can be different. We can live differently.
Racism and white supremacy is no thing to God. To be sure, it breaks God’s heart and God feels that suffering. But it’s not the reality of truth, of the will of God. It does not have to exist! It can be swept away!
Income inequality, disparity in healthcare outcomes, lack of access to education or food or clean drinking water is no thing. It does not have to exist! It can be swept away.
Mass incarceration, the divisions that separate us from one another and cause loneliness and despair, the anxiety and fear and hurt that we inflict upon one another is no thing. It does not have to exist! It can be swept away.
Even the decay of our mortal bodies, which seems so final to us through our lens of death, is no thing. There is another reality, a greater truth, in which we live with God in everlasting life.
Death means nothing to God. The only thing that interests God is love, is life. And God desires to love and to live with you.
Friends, what if this Easter we gave up on death and started to live for life? What if we totally re-oriented our lives to live within the reality of the kingdom of God?
That is what the resurrection is teaching us! That’s what the women found at the empty tomb.
And here’s how we know they understood: they went and told Peter and the others. And then the told more people and more people and more and more and more over two thousand years of history—and then someone told you.
And you’ve come here today to see that empty tomb. And to hear the words of life, “He has been raised; he is not here!”
We have nothing to fear from death. But we are called to live life. Will you look into the empty tomb? Will you go and tell? Will you live in the knowledge of the resurrection?
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
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[1] The title and ultimately the argument about the nature of reality—the nature of creation and original sin—are drawn from James Alison’s book on resurrection by a similar, more apt title. I am indebted to Fr Alison for his teaching on the crucifixion and resurrection. James Alison, The Joy of Begin Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes. New York: Crossroad, 1998, pp 115-119. Last accessed online 4/3/21 at http://girardianlectionary.net/res/jbw_ch4a_jbw.htm.
[2] If there were ever a doubt about the importance of women as disciples in Jesus’s community and their constant presence there, this verse should settle it; Jesus told his disciples just after the last supper, when they had gone up to the Mount of Olives to pray, that in Mk 14:28 that he would go to Galilee after his resurrection (Mt 14:28). The young man in white asserts that the two Marys and Salome have heard this. They were there.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.