Speaker: Stephen “Tig” Intagliata
Bible Passage: Luke 24:1-12
Summary: Women were the first witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection. Because he is alive today through the presence of his Holy Spirit, we can live in light of the resurrection–loving sacrificially, renouncing violence, and being witnesses for peace in the world. By living this way, we as a church can serve as an outpost of God’s future kingdom.
Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed!
These words that Jesus had risen from the dead were first proclaimed by women. No offense guys, but all four gospel accounts of the resurrection mention it was women who first went to Jesus’ tomb—Mary Magdalene, Salome, Joanna, and others.
While the male disciples of Jesus were hiding and huddling scared and bewildered in what’s known as the Upper Room, the women went to the tomb with spices they had prepared to give Jesus a proper burial.
But they were too late. The stone was rolled away and Jesus’ body wasn’t anywhere to be found. John’s gospel account tells us that Mary stood outside the tomb, crying, and when she peered into the tomb she saw two angels dressed in white, sitting where Jesus’ body had been.
When she turned around, she saw Jesus, but she mistook him for the gardener. But then he said her name, “Mary”, and immediately she knew it was her Lord.
It was the women who were the first witnesses and first evangelists of Jesus’ resurrection. And when we look at the time period from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, we see that these women were prototypes, models of a life devoted to Jesus.
The Anabaptist Mennonite preacher Jakob Denner said it so eloquently way back in the 18th century when he said:
“These women brought spices in order to anoint Jesus’ body, for they thought he was still dead. From this we can see their pure and substantial love for Jesus. For they loved him not only in life, but in death. They genuinely loved Jesus and remained true to him in life, in suffering, and in death.” –Jakob Denner
You know, I sometimes wonder how some Christians are so insistent that men must be the spiritual leaders in the home, when it was women who led the way in faith and devotion to Jesus at his cross and at his tomb.
And I hate to say it guys, but it doesn’t get any better for us in the next scene, when Mary Magdalene and the other women went to the Upper Room to tell the apostles, the male disciples, the good news. Luke records it this way:
“Their words struck the apostles as nonsense, and they didn’t believe the women.” –Luke 24:11
Jason Porterfield talks about this scene in Fight Like Jesus, which some of us have been reading over Lent. He says that there were two possibilities why the men thought the news was nonsense: He says it could have been the nature of the message or the messengers themselves.
You see in that patriarchal society, the testimony of women was not given as much weight as that of men. In court testimonies, women weren’t considered credible witnesses. So here, the disciples might not have seen the women as reliable messengers.
Also, the message itself was hard to believe, with all they’d be through. Jesus had been nailed to a cross, so they had given him up for dead. “Hey, it was a great ride with Jesus”, but it was over. Even Jesus’ said it himself on the cross: “it is finished.”
So the disciples must have felt incredibly discouraged, defeated, and disoriented. So they took the women’s news as nonsense.
Friends, those feelings the disciples must have had in the upper room are some of the same emotions that we all experience in life, right? During the past few months, we’ve expressed those same feelings during our sharing times in worship.
And no doubt outside this building as well, as we’ve considered our calling to be witnesses for God’s justice, compassion, and peace in response to the attitudes and actions in our country of political leaders and even some church leaders,
who seem to care more about a performative Christianity where Jesus is used as a mascot to gain worldly power, instead of following a Jesus who rejected the devil’s temptations in the wilderness and took up the cross of servanthood and sacrificial love for the poor and the powerless.
In light of the despair and resignation that can plague us in these times, I was drawn to some things that Jason Porterfield said in his chapter on Saturday and Sunday in Fight Like Jesus.
I’d never thought very much about the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday before. It has felt like a mixed bag of being suspended between death and despair on one hand, and new life and joy on the other, almost being in limbo, this unwanted holding pattern.
Porterfield says that we can glean an important peacemaking lesson from Holy Saturday. First, he says that when we are working for peace in places where it is painfully absent, that most days feel like Holy Saturday; silent, confusing, hopeless.
We can feel like the disciples on that first Holy Saturday, where Porterfield says it must have seemed like an eternity to them, hiding all day in a locked room, with nothing to do but sit with their feelings, emotions like guilt, despair, confusion, fear.
And then he talks about how in the early Church, there was a strong belief, based on some scriptures, that between Jesus’ death and resurrection, Jesus was at work literally beneath the surface, as he descended into hell—it’s in the apostle’s creed, right?
He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell. The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
Porterfield quotes one of the early Church Fathers, Bishop Melito of Sardis, who preached a sermon on Holy Saturday where he imagined Jesus descending into hell and saying to hell’s captives:
“I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise up from the dead, for I am the life of the dead…Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you.”
Another early Church Father, Cyril of Alexandria said “For if Jesus had not died for us, we should not have been saved, and if he had not gone down among the dead, death’s cruel empire would never have been shattered.”
Porterfield then talks about a fresco painted on the ceiling of the old 4th century Chora Church in Istanbul, Turkey, which is still there today. It’s known as the Anastasis, or the “Harrowing of Hades”.
I saw this fresco when I was in Istanbul about 20 years ago. It shows Jesus in hell, with Satan bound at his feet, and Jesus is grabbing Adam and Eve by the hand, pulling them out of their coffins, lifting them and everyone around them up out of hell and ascending into heaven with him.
This took place on what we know as Holy Saturday, as it was between Jesus’ death and his resurrection. So Porterfield makes the point that far from being a day of inactivity and limbo, it was a time when Jesus at work behind the scenes using his power to bring resurrection, life out of death He says:
Holy Saturday reminds us to press on. Press on, for Jesus is at work beneath the surface, defeating death and dismantling despair. Press on, for the days when Jesus seems most lifeless may actually be the days when he’s most actively working for peace. And above all, press on, for Sunday is coming.
–Jason Porterfield, Fight Like Jesus
In high school I was in the play Man of La Mancha. I played Don Quixote’s sidekick, Sancho Panza. The most iconic song from that musical is probably The Impossible Dream. It’s a song about standing up for what is right, no matter how dangerous it is, no matter what it costs you.
And there’s a classic line in that song that could describe that Anastasis fresco of the Harrowing of Hell. “To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause.”
That song captures what Jesus did during his life, during his death on the cross, and then when he descends into the darkest of places and breaks open death’s door to rescue those imprisoned there and lead them to a new life.
And then comes Easter Sunday, when Jesus collides with death head on and emerges victorious from the grave, offering new life and new hope to all of humanity.
I want to read a portion of Jesus’ resurrection appearance to the disciples from John’s gospel.
Jesus said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. When the disciples saw the Lord, they were filled with joy. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I am sending you.” 22 Then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven; if you don’t forgive them, they aren’t forgiven.” –John 20:19b-23
Jesus blessed his disciples with his presence and his peace, and also he blessed them by giving them the gift of his Holy Spirit. It was a gift given not just for themselves, but to empower them and send them out to continue his ministry by blessing others with Jesus’ peace, forgiveness, and love. Here’s what Porterfield said about it:
“For the disciples, who had just observed the wounds on Jesus’ hands and side, it was unmistakably clear how Jesus overcame the world. He did so not by military might, but through self-giving love. “This is how I make peace,” Jesus said in effect. “And now this peace is yours. Yours to experience personally and to extend proactively.”
Friends, because of Jesus’ resurrection and the gift of his Holy Spirit, we can truly be messengers of God’s peace in the world. It’s a peace, Jesus says, that surpasses all understanding, and a kind of peace that the world cannot give.
It’s a peace with God that we can experience deep in our hearts, and a peace that we can share generously with those around us, a peace that overcomes evil with good, that replaces revenge and resentment with grace and forgiveness.
Our early Anabaptist leader Menno Simons said this as he reflected on Jesus’ dying on the cross out of love for humanity:
“True Christians do not know vengeance, no matter how they are mistreated…And they do not break their peace, even if they should be tempted by bondage, torture, poverty, and besides, by the sword and fire. They do not cry “vengeance, vengeance, as does the world; but with Christ they supplicate and pray, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”
Or as Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador said in his nonviolent struggle for justice and solidarity with the poor who were being crushed by an oppressive dictatorship,
We have never preached violence, except the violence of love, which left Christ nailed to a cross, the violence that we must each do to ourselves to overcome our selfishness and such cruel inequalities among us. The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that will to beat weapons into sickles for work.
Jesus equipped us with his Spirit to give us the courage to confront evil, speak truth to power, and hold on to hope. And we have so many examples from church history to inspire us—people and communities who renounced the violence of the empire and waged war through the most powerful weapon of all, a sacrificial love that Jesus modeled for us in his life and ultimately on the cross.
We saw this kind of love in the early church, in our Anabaptist/Mennonite communities of the 16th century, and through modern day prophets and martyrs like Oscar Romero.
I want to close with another story of sacrificial love, a story from Fight Like Jesus, it’s actually what Porterfield leaves us with on the last page of his book.
During World War II, the Nazis invaded Bulgaria and planned to round up all Jews living in Bulgaria and deport them to concentration camps. Bishop Kiril of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church was deeply distressed by this news.
So on March 15, 1943–the day the first group of Jews were going to be deported–he led his congregation to the train station, where together, they laid down on the train tracks, which prevented the train from passing.
This act of civil disobedience stirred the conscience of a nation, an in part because of it, not a single Jew was deported from Bulgaria during World War II.
This story seems timely in light of what’s been in our news lately regarding deportations to what we could call a concentration camp in El Salvador.
Finally, I’ll leave us with one more quote from Jason Porterfield:
The early Christians believed that Jesus’ resurrection signified the inbreaking of God’s future plans into our present world order. And they taught that in the locked room on Easter Sunday, Jesus commissioned his followers to help make the future a present reality. Every day was to be lived in light of the resurrection. And the church was to serve in this world as an outpost of God’s future kingdom.
–Porterfield, Fight Like Jesus, p. 175
On this Easter Sunday, Resurrection Day, may we remember that life won out when Jesus collided with death on the cross. As the book of Revelation describes it, the Lamb who was slain has risen to be crowned upon the throne as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and his reign shall have no end.
Friends, with Jesus’ victory before us, may we go out in confidence and hope, and live in light of his resurrection in a world that is longing for peace, hope, and new life. AMEN.
