Speaker: Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Bible Passages: Matthew 28:1-10
Summary: Easter and Christmas are the two indispensable Christian holidays, locked together like the chicken and the egg. But we shouldn’t dispel the mystery at the heart of Easter — fear and questions in the face of death can be matched by joy due to the resurrection. We can be afraid, and yet full of joy, as the Mary’s were, eager to go and spread the good news even as we don’t fully understand it.
He is risen! He is risen indeed!
Good morning everyone, so good to be with you this Easter! We’re already well into our celebrations; what is left to be said after singing and a breakfast potluck?
I must admit, it’s a bit daunting to preach an Easter sermon. Easter, of course, sits alongside the incarnation, or Christmas, and the crucifixion as one of three absolutely key events in Jesus’s life.
Now, of course, these three events remain central to all Christians, but we Anabaptists and Mennonites like to point out that this “three point” life – birth, death, resurrection, as listed in the Apostles creed – more or less ignores Jesus’s entire life and ministry! So, while we’re focused on the Resurrection today, let’s not forget that Jesus preached the good news of his coming kingdom even before Easter.
Jesus’ birth, ministry, death, and resurrection are the events which provide the rhythm to which we live our lives, and like a musical beat, these events build on and rely on one another – we cannot understand them alone.
Once, when I think I was around 12, I was pondering why we have a bigger celebration at Christmas rather than Easter. I asked my older brother, who would have been about 18 at the time. He responded, clearly thinking I had asked a stupid question, saying “well, Caleb, obviously it’s a chicken-or-the-egg scenario, but it’s one where the chicken of Jesus’s birth is much more important than the egg of the resurrection.” To clarify what I think he meant, I agree that the chicken of the incarnation – God’s choice to take on flesh and live as one of us, showing us how to live faithfully – will always be more important than the end of Jesus’s life, even if the passion and resurrection are the egg – also integral parts of the story.
Because, of course, the chicken and the egg are not complete without each other – we should not fully separate the resurrection from Jesus’s birth; we should not fully separate the resurrection from Jesus’s ministry; and most crucially, we should not separate the resurrection from the rest of Holy Week, and particularly the Passion: Jesus’ commitment to non-violently confronting the injustices of the world around him in word and deed, even to death on a cross.
So, knowing that we don’t approach the resurrection without all of this context from Jesus’s life, let’s dive a little deeper into Easter.
The resurrection is the culmination and fulfillment of the long-running biblical themes of resurrection and restoration – yet, as often happens, Jesus both fulfills and challenges expectations of what it means to be the Messiah, the Savior, the Christ. Jesus overcomes death by death, and in rising frees us all, mysteriously, from death’s grip. We should strive to be like the Marys, who are ‘afraid, yet filled with joy.’
The Marys model for us that even as we don’t fully understand everything about God or God’s works, it doesn’t mean that we don’t share about the resurrection – we can proclaim it, celebrate it, and live renewed, joyful lives because of it even while we remain afraid and amazed by the world around us.
Let’s start by talking about how Easter fulfills some Old Testament themes and prophecies.
The Old Testament is chalk full of stories of resurrection and restoration, including resurrection and restoration from the dead. Elijah and Elisha both raise the dead to life, as Jesus does during his ministry, and Jesus’s followers were intimately aware of and saw as one of their core Jewish doctrines the resurrection of the body — the idea of Jesus’s resurrection, in the first generations after Jesus lived, made much more sense to Jewish believers than it did to Greek believers. Jesus’s resurrection isn’t coming out of nowhere, even though the disciples seem to have never understood Jesus’s predictions about his coming death. Jesus predicts his resurrection over and over throughout the gospels as one of the scriptures that most needs to be fulfilled.
Themes of resurrection and restoration in the Old Testament, though, go far beyond only bodily resurrection. The prophets constantly play with this theme of joy and resurrection after suffering. We must remember that resurrection and death are partners in the divine dance – there is no restoration without exile, and there is no resurrection without death. The joy of Easter must go hand in hand with the sorrow and lament of Lent and the passion.
There is something else about resurrection, though, that the prophets understood which we can’t forget — resurrection and restoration are most often corporate, communal things, not just individual things.
While belief and celebration of the resurrection today is at the center of our personal faith in Jesus, we should not forget that the restoration tradition that Jesus preached and modeled was a tradition of communal restoration to faithfulness to the way of Yahweh and freedom to live and worship together as peaceful communities. We should not cheapen the resurrection and make it solely about individual salvation to the hereafter – Jesus died and rose for all of us, that our communities and communal life might be restored to shalom — peace, balance, justice, and faithfulness. The joy found in the resurrection should spark us to share, as it sparked the Marys to share, with all our friends and kin, so that we may live together in real, shalom peace in our lives.
As stated earlier, Jesus clearly fulfills expectations about the Messiah throughout his life, and also via his death and resurrection – but he also challenges the religious and political elite of his day. To put this another way, we should also understand that Jesus was a major disappointment to many of the people of his day – just as the kingship of a sacrificial, loving God is rejected by many today. The messiah could have been a king who conquered with armies and an iron fist – instead, he conquered with love, defeating death through death, not relying on death, violence, or coercion to rule.
Many in Jesus’s day, and our own, interpret this predicted restoration as a literal, physical, political restoration, a Messiah who would ‘restore the kingdom to Israel’ as the disciples ask at the beginning of Acts – even after the resurrection! Jesus challenges the expectations of the Messiah precisely as he fulfills them – he doesn’t overthrow the Romans and re-establish a Jewish kingdom; instead, Jesus establishes a new kingdom of peace open to all who believe in him – where even death cannot separate us from God and from one another, where we are free to worship God wherever on earth he may lead us.
Because of the resurrection, we can live in joy even as we face the realities of life — we know that resurrection is the end of our story, but Jesus’ call to follow him doesn’t only contain Easter; it also contains the way of the cross. To get to the resurrection, we too are called to face the powers of evil, and take up our own crosses, as we follow Jesus. This is the fearful and wonderful good news.
This brings us to our main point – the two Mary’s model for us being “Afraid, yet filled with joy” – going to spread the good news even as the good news remains awe-inspiring — and life confusing and difficult.
Matthew describes the Marys, after seeing the empty tomb, as being “afraid, but filled with joy” — this can read as a bit of a contradiction to us – worldly logic would place fear and joy as opposite emotions.
Let’s think on the fear of the Marys by placing ourselves in their shoes for a minute – think of the deep soul pain and confusion they saw during the week leading up to this event:
They saw one of their closest allies and friends, Judas, betray Jesus and the whole movement
They saw the disciples scatter in fear, denying they had anything to do with Jesus and one another
They saw the leaders of their people reject and condemn their teacher,
They watched Jesus tortured and executed by their foreign overlords as a revolutionary,
And then they spent two probably totally sleepless nights wondering where their lives went wrong.
And after all this, in their faithfulness they still want to bring their ‘two small coins’ to offer to Jesus the day after the sabbath – they came to anoint the dead body of the man they thought would one day be king over them, of the man they thought was God.
It is no wonder, then, that finding the empty tomb and a conversation with an angel sparked both joy and fear – hope for the first time since Jesus’s betrayal and imprisonment on Thursday; joy that God still seems to be at work, and fear that some new humiliation had yet to come their way.
But the point I most want to emphasize is that they were joyful even before they met the resurrected Jesus – they hear the news of the resurrection and believe far before they have time to process or fully understand the good news they’ve just heard.
I think their quick action to spread the good news should remind us that our first goal as Christians is not to dispel the mystery of God – it is to be transformed by it.
In today’s modern society of course we want everything to have a perfectly logical, scientific explanation. Just as joy and fear seem to be opposite emotions with worldly logic, the idea of a joyful mystery seems like an oxymoron – we are conditioned by modernity to fear things we don’t understand. This is part of why some denominations today focus on nailing down perfect, doctrinal understanding of scripture and philosophy to understand the resurrection, and the exact mechanism of atonement.
Eastern Orthodox Christianity reminds us that the fundamental way we can understand God is as a divine mystery – God cannot be mastered or fully understood by us, his creations, as the scriptures often remind us. While we of course should share what we know of God through scripture and experience, we should not neglect that Jesus has transformed us even as the mystery has not been fully revealed. We can be ‘afraid, yet filled with joy’ as we follow Jesus’s example in loving our neighbors and our enemies.
To me, it’s a relief that we can be both afraid and filled with joy – afraid of the challenges of life, afraid of the barrier of death that temporarily separates us from our loved ones – yet filled with joy that eternal truth took on flesh, dwelt among us, was rejected by the world, but was restored and resurrected and cannot be defeated.
Jesus’s resurrection enables us to both live and die with freedom – knowing that the God of life has defeated the permanence of death. This is a mystery worth writing on our hearts and lives. This is a mystery to live by, as Christians throughout the ages have.
Anabaptist digression:
Last year, I read through some writings by early Anabaptists, with some of the prayers and letters written days or even hours before their executions at the hands of “Christian” governments.
Let me tell you: these men and women were ‘Afraid – yet filled with joy.’
So sure were they in their faiths in Jesus and his way of peace that they went head to head with the religious authorities of their day, calling them to live up to their stated goals, calling for them to repent and return to the simple way of life-giving faith that Jesus taught us – but they were much more often met with a sword than a willingness to be transformed by God’s love.
What does it mean for us to inherit this legacy – to be afraid, yet filled with joy, as the earliest disciples of Jesus were, as our Anabaptist spiritual ancestors were? How do we carry on their legacy of praying conversion on other Jesus followers who claim to worship the God of life, but deal death in so many ways?
I find deep reassurance knowing that we do not need to give up our fear to be considered good followers – even Jesus carried, I believe, deep fear to the cross, or he would not have prayed in the garden as he did.
What we do need to do is not let fear master us – can we hold divine joy, and trust in the divine reassurance of resurrection, each time we approach death, failure, and disappointment? Can we walk boldly into confrontation preaching life and justice for all in the name of God, even when that preaching may end in our bodily deaths?
This brings us to our final point – news of the resurrection should fill us with joy in the good news, that death has been defeated, and should lead us to live new lives, focused on the God of life.
So – we understand Jesus is the Messiah, having simultaneously fulfilled and challenged Old Testament prophecy and our understanding of holiness and power. We revel in the resurrection and in its mysteries, now oriented towards new lives in Jesus.
But what does it mean to live in joy in the midst of our fear and brokenness? What does the resurrection mean today, as we live in a world still beset with poverty and economic inequality, on the brink of environmental cataclysm, and in communities, even Christian communities, still riven with division and anger? How do we hold the good news of the resurrection today, in tension with the horrors of the world around us — ongoing war in Ukraine, and more than a million people facing starvation today in Gaza?
Philip Yancey, the well-known Christian author, uses an analogy about chess to explain the presence of evil after the resurrection. Yancey says that if the cosmos is like a great chess match between God and the forces of evil, the crucifixion and resurrection are the winning sacrifice of a piece, guaranteeing a victory for God — but often times a chess player in a completely losing position keeps playing for a few more moves, even when a loss is guaranteed. This is where we find ourselves now: the ultimate victory of the forces of life is guaranteed, but the forces of Evil haven’t quite accepted it yet.
This doesn’t mean we throw up our hands in the face of evil, knowing our God of life will triumph — far from it — rather, this truth should push us to confront any and all evil even at personal cost, knowing that, in the end, we are assured of God’s victory and of life with him.
The Mary’s have another lesson for us here — we’ve dwelled significantly on how the Mary’s were ‘afraid, but filled with joy,’ but if we back up just slightly in the scripture we heard, we also see that they are hurrying away from the tomb. In that mold, I believe we are not called to linger by the tombs in our lives, where the dead were buried; instead, we are called to move towards the future, looking forward, not back. Because of the resurrection, we are forgiven — and we can forgive. Believing in the resurrection, as part of the chicken-or-the-egg of Jesus’s fully human and fully divine life, enables us to focus on the heavenly themes of justice, wholeness, and peace, rather than earthly pursuits of fame, fortune, or revenge. We can focus on the health and wellbeing of everyone, created in the image of the God of life.
And this is something we do not do alone – the Marys run to tell the disciples, to share the good news and joy with their fellow Jesus followers. Like the prophets predicted, we are now free to live in new communities, communities of resurrection seeking to share the good news that death has been defeated. We speak and model this good news together.
The resurrection, as the final chapter of Jesus life on Earth with us, reminds us most fully of this – Jesus came to give life, and life to the fullest. And now, through the mystery of faith, we, through word and deed, share this message of healing and hope, this message of new life.
So, as we go and continue celebrating Easter today, may we not fear our fear, but know that we can be joyful even as we are afraid — we can celebrate the resurrection, even as we stand in witness to the tragedies in the world around us. As a sermon response, we’re going to listen to a version of the old familiar Easter hymn, ‘Were you there’ — but in this version, this text of joy is juxtaposed with the lament psalm, Psalm 13; this, I believe, is what it means to be afraid, but filled with joy. Amen.
