So there is this (true) story about a preacher who gets super stressed every year about his Easter sermon. He’s super stressed not only because it’s his big day, this is this one time of the year when his church is completely full, but also because he has this kind of annoying parishioner who only shows up on Easter Sunday and then he tells the preacher each time that he does not come more often because his sermons always speak about the same thing anyway. In the end, the preacher sends a mass email to his congregation asking everybody to pray for him so he can come up with something new to say! One of you reminded me of that story this week, maybe curious if I would also send a mass email asking for prayers. Well, I didn’t do that. In the preacher’s defense, and in my own defense I guess, we all have to talk about the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, so yes, you cannot really expect to be suprised. Yet I think it’s interesting to notice this anticipation we all have on Easter Sunday, whether it’s in the pews or even behind the pulpit. We have this desire that something different is going to happen on this day at church, we have this expectation that today we will say something or hear something or see something we usually don’t, we have this expectation that this Sunday is going to be different from all other Sundays. And maybe that’s the reason why, like the one parishioner in our story, even those who generally never go to church, come to church on Easter Sunday.
So what is going to happen? Is something extraordinary going to happen today?
Well you know as I was thinking about this, I remembered this quotation attributed to Einstein who said once, because everybody thought he was a genius, “Genius is 1% talent and 99% hard work“. And I thought about our Christian life and I guess we could say the same thing too: Faith is 1% miracle but it’s 99% hard work. There would be no faith without the Risen Christ, we certainly need the miracle, but in the meantime faith is not so much about great signs and earth shattering revelations on a special day. Faith is about the day to day following of Christ. When we open the Gospel today, I think it would be dishonest to not acknowledge that it can be a big underwhelming, or as they say on Netflix “understated” when you have those intimate, sort of “atmosphere” kind of movies. Far from having a revelation about the risen Christ in all his glory, it reads that the women cannot find the body, and they are perplexed. And when they see the angels, rather than being ravished by superseding joy, they are terrified. But then they are reminded of Jesus’s words and that’s how they come to believe, they come to believe that the disappearance of his body means that he has risen from the dead. They don’t come to believe because all of the sudden they receive a revelation from heavens, although they do, rather they can make sense of the message of the angels because they have been following Jesus, they have been listening, they have trusted, they have been doing the hard work of faith and so when the miracle take place, they can receive it, they can understand it.
Now sometimes we don’t like to say that faith is hard work. It feels a bit self righteous like those people, the Pharisees at Jesus’s time, who worked very hard to be holy and to be close to God and actually the more they did it, the more they thought well about themselves and so they started to feel superior and end up not being good people at all, and not being close to God at all. It’s not just about the Pharisees of course. We all know those holier than thou kind of Christians who work very hard to know better than anyone else. No, when we talk about the hard work of following Jesus, I think we rather need to look at the example of these women in our story. We don’t know a lot about them, but this is what we know: Mary Magdalene was a sinner, and she threw herself at Jesus’s feet to ask for forgiveness. It took a lot of strength to do that. Joanna was the wife of Chuza, the first steward of King Herod. She supported financially Jesus’s ministry and I bet it took a lot of courage for her to be involved with these people Herod considered as his own enemies. Mary, the mother of James, is often identified as Mary’s sister. Well, I don’t know what you think but I would have a hard time accepting that my own sister has been chosen by God for a special mission! It probably took a lot of humility for Mary’s sister to accept that. But all of these women have one distinct character and it is that they literally do the hard work of faith, which is not so much about receiving revelations, or trying very hard, rather it’s about being trustful and faithful. And we see that in our passage today, because Luke shows us that as they have started following Jesus, they don’t let go when things turn out the way they do. They have been on the road when Jesus did the teaching and the miracles, and they have also been there when Jesus was handed over to be crucified, and they have stayed at the foot of the cross and watched him die, and now they are getting ready to give Jesus a proper burial, embalming his body with spices. It is amazing if you think about it that they still follow Jesus when, at this point, his ministry seems to have completely failed, he has been forsaken by men and seems to have been forsaken by God too. He has died like a criminal, and there is no hope left for those who had been with him. And yet the three women and some others are still there, and only the love they have for Jesus can explain their behavior. And that’s when they get their miracle.
So what about us?
I think this passage touches the heart of our expectations on Easter Sunday. I guess we all have these longings that the clouds of our doubts will be dissipated, that the heaviness of our own lives will be lifted, that the darkness of our grief will be illuminated, and we wish we could just bask in the divine presence and if we don’t, then we’re disappointed like this man who wouldn’t go back to church for a whole year. We can get frustrated because we keep hoping for this day when everything will be clear and we will be plenty reassured and fulfilled, and then it does not happen the way we want to. Some Christians express this longing well when they say we need to find Jesus. And yet, have the women in the story found Jesus? The story does not say they did, they have only found an empty tomb. Sometimes the way God is present to us starts in his absence. A lot of scientists today think that there should be a God because we don’t have any other way to explain the beginning of the universe. We cannot see God anywhere, but it’s like everything points to say that there should be a creator. In the same way, we cannot see with our eyes God at work in the world, but we can believe it’s worth it to act with goodness. Even when we are surrounded by evil, we wish with all our hearts that the world will be one day what we think it is supposed to be: Without hate, without wars, without death.
And this my friends, this is hard work, and even more: This is the hard work of faith, this is what it means to be God’s seekers and to be God’s witnesses. The book of Acts calls us to be witnesses. The witnesses are the ones who don’t only see the empty tomb, who don’t only see the emptiness, the void, the lack of meaning, the indifference, the brokenness of the world, but by living the life of faith, of courageous, strong and yet humble love, they are the first ones to experience the Risen Christ. That is actually the miracle, that Christ is alive today among all those who work for peace, justice, reconciliation, even in the humble settings of their own households. The ones who first see the miracle aren’t the disciples who have fled the execution scene, the ones who have deserted Jesus when he has been arrested. The ones who can witness the miracle are the one who have kept following, kept believing, kept loving. This strange thing happens is that when we don’t turn our back on suffering, that we don’t just see more suffering but we see new life taking place. I had many conversations with some of you about how you believe in the Resurrection because you have been staying with dying relatives and see what happens when they are at the brink of death. But even without going that far, we all have experienced how incredible grace can be been found in things like teaching a child with learning difficulties, visiting people in jail, adopting the disabled dog….We know Christ’s love is real, we know he’s alive when we put his words in practice, when we love as he taught us to.
So what will happen today? Well, we have the sign of an empty tomb, but it’s on us to make a choice. We can choose not to believe at all or we can choose to use the name of Christ to serve our ideologies, our nationalism, our religious fundamentalism or to make us feel better about ourselves. But to see Christ, to experience the Risen Christ, we have to learn to do the hard work of loving in the brokenness of this world, through our own brokenness, we have to learn to love for the sake of loving, like the women at the tomb, being faithful even when it’s hard to find hope, hold on to goodness with no reward in sight. But the Gospel tells us that’s here that lays the good news, that’s when the miracle happens, because when we love for the sake of loving, we will find out that’s exactly where Christ lives, that’s where his throne is, when we enter this sacred space of pure love, he is right there waiting for us.
Great great teaching as usual. Rev Fanny I love your sermons.