Easter 2010 Sermon

"Easter Sermon"

John 20:1-18
Easter Sunday 2010

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the
tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to
Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They
have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”
Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were
running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He
bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then
Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings
lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen
wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the
tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the
scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the
tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying,
one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you
weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where
they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus
standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why
are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she
said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will
take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew,
“Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because
I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am
ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene
went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he
had said these things to her.

On this most holiest of days, I want to direct you to a picture on the cover your bulletin,
which is a shot of apse of St. Vitale Church in Italy, the large semicircular vault in
ancient churches where the choir was often located, but here at this church is the place
where the communion table was located. If were in that church, you would look up and
see this stunning mural. The scholars Rita Nakishima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker
explain what they saw in this picture, images they began to notice and document in
their book, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World For
Crucixion And Empire The image at the center of the golden apse was especially
intriguing. Christ sat on an enormous blue globe. His boyish face gazed out benignly.
He wore a purple robe of nobility and simple sandals. We had seen his youthful
countenance just a few minutes before in the Galla Placidia mausoleum, located across
the yard and built about a century before St. Vitale. There he had been the good
shepherd holding a staff and tending his sheep lovingly in a craggy Mediterranean
landscape. Here he had been promoted to preside over all Creation. Sitting on his
enormous orb, he held a golden crown studded with emeralds in his right hand and
extended it to St. Vitalis, a martyr who stood nearby. In his left hand, Christ held a
scroll with seven seals, which rested on his knee. A bishop stood on this side,
presenting him with a model of St. Vitale Church.

A meadow on a small green hill cradled the bottom of the blue orb that formed Christ’s
seat. From the cliffs on the hill, the four rivers of paradise poured down, two on each
side. The rivers flowed out right and left into lush meadows, broken by small green
bluffs and dotted with white lilies and red carnations. Christ on the globe linked the
heavens with the earth, and the meadows of paradise surrounded the living
worshippers celebrating the feast, [found just below our picture today]. Blue globes,
like the one Christ sat on, appeared frequently in Roman imperial art, usually as a
small orb held in the hand of the emperor. The globelike orb symbolized Roman
control of the known world. Roman imperial art also used rich landscapes of trees,
fields, animals, and rivers to symbolize the breadth of Rome’s dominance. But in St.
Vitale, the earth belonged to a boyish, non-imperial Christ; the empire had been
displaced. (111)

Now, the reason why this scene is so interesting to Brock and Parker is because of
what they saw missing in their travels across the Mediterranean, they noticed
something amazing, something best described in the book jacket of their book: When
Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker began traveling the Mediterranean world in search of
art depicting the dead, crucified Jesus, they discovered something that traditional
histories of Christianity and Christian art had underplayed or sought to explain away: it
took Jesus Christ a thousand years to die.

During their first millennium, Christians filled their sanctuaries with images of Christ as a
living presence in a vibrant world. He appears as a shepherd, a teacher, a healer, an
enthroned god; he is an infant, a youth, and a bearded elder. But he is never dead.
When he appears with the cross, he stands in front of it, serene, resurrected. The
world around him is ablaze with beauty. These are images of paradise—paradise in this
world, permeated and blessed by the presence of God.

But once Jesus perished, dying was virtually all he seemed able to do.

The story of what happened next in the tenth century, when you begin to see the
images of the cross with Christ crucified on it, arise and overtake Western Christianity,
in contrast to earlier pictures of Christ being alive, like the mural we see on our bulletin
today, all of that history of why that happened is for another day and is too complicated
to explain here. But something profound did happen, and it changed the way we
Christians saw our Christ for the next thousand years. For roughly the first thousands
years of the church one sees only depictions of Christ being alive in this world, of being
a shepherd, or enthroned, or as a young man, perched within paradise, and one rarely
ever saw pictures of Christ on the cross, being crucified, eternally crucified. The first
thousand years of Christians seemed more joy-filled, and less gruesome than the
depictions one would later, ones of the crucified Christ in Christianity’s second
thousand years, where the suffering of our Lord became more and more explicitly
pronounced in Christian art. No, in the first thousand years, the Christ was
resurrected, and was as alive now as Mary Magdalene experienced him, on the day of
his resurrection, the story of which we heard today.

And the reality is that those images do matter, it matters whether or not we see the
Christ presented as always suffering, as always on the cross in agony, tortured, and in
wrenching pain, or whether we see him as a shepherd, the good Shepherd, or the
healer, or a young boyish man, or bearded elder, or even as an enthroned god, whom
even imperial Rome must bow down to. Both images are true images, but if one image,
the one of the suffering and tortured Christ, comes to dominant our emotional and
spiritual landscape, we forget that the story of Christianity, the story of Christ’s life, is
not ultimately the story of torture and violence, and what was unjustly done to him by
the forces of imperial Rome and a religious hierarchy gone amuck. We forget that the
story of our faith is really a story of resurrection, of hope when all hope seems lost, and
how even the forces of death cannot contain him or contain us, in our own lives.

When Mary goes to the tomb on that day, she goes in deep pain because those very
forces, the forces of death, destruction, and power gone crazy, they have seemingly
won, they have killed her Master, her friend, the one who healed and made her whole.
Her Lord had been crucified, and indeed it seemed as if she, along with so many others
who had followed Jesus and believed in him, it seemed as if they were in the midst of
their own personal crucifixions. Of course, we all know what it means to lose someone,
to grieve deeply for someone who has died, but for Mary, for the others, this was even
more devastating, because it was also the end of their dreams about what the future
might hold for them, and the people of Israel.

But Jesus is there at that tomb, but out of the grave, unrecognized, but resurrected,
real and yet different, alive and present, in this world, with Mary and eventually with the
other disciples. When Jesus says her name, the old familiar way that he had always
said it, it triggered something in Mary, a memory of him that had been lost amidst the
grief she was feeling in that moment. And she saw him, she saw her Christ, her savior,
standing next to her, someone she could touch and feel, even though he doesn’t want
her to hold onto too tightly, because, of course, he cannot be with her like that always—
she will have to learn to hold onto others, other friends who will become like the Christ
for her, supporting her, strengthening her, holding her, and celebrating her.

The whole point of this day, this Easter Sunday, is for us to celebrate the end of the
story, the end of every story that God writes in this world, and that is that life, and hope
and goodness are here, in this world that Christ chose to live and die and come back
to, on that day thousands of years ago. In the Christian tradition, every Sunday is
considered an Easter, a small Easter, a day of resurrection, played over and over
again 52 times a year, a constant reminder that the Lord of life is indeed with us, that
he is alive and with us, and that there is more joy in this life than sadness, though, of
course, there is much sadness as well. That very truth is something we acknowledge
on Good Friday, where the church focuses itself on the crucifixion, on the cross, and
yet that focus is for only one day, and one day only. The rest of the year, those mini-
Easters that come every Sunday, is meant to focus us on the good gifts God has given
to us, as seen in the resurrection of Christ, and to focus us on the goodness of this
world, even in its profound imperfection, even with its deep shadows and sinfulness. If
Christ thought this world was worth coming back to and saving, as he did in his
resurrection, and if he struggled with letting go of his life, and his friends, and the world
he knew, as he did in Gethsemane, then we ought to affirm the good world and the
good life God has given to us in this place and on this earth. Yes, surely there is more
to the story when we pass onto be with God, and onto our own mysterious
resurrections, surely that is true as well, but for the first thousand years of the church’s
history, the focus was on this life and the connections between the paradise beyond
our eyes to the paradises found before our eyes, a focus on this life, this family and
these friends, and communities of faith like our own, imperfect as they all are, of
course.

Christ has risen, Christ is alive, and, like with Mary here, he keeps pointing us back to
the world we live in, to the imperfect paradise in this world, and to not hold on too tightly
to the past, or what should have been, or could have been, again, like Mary does in
this moment in our text—Christ wants us to look around at the paradise in this life that
he lived for and died for, and was resurrected back into, the imperfect and yet beautiful
paradise of this world. The church has gotten off base a bit this last thousands years,
with its obsession with Christ’s death, his crucifixion, his torture at the hands of imperial
power, though those things are important, but only in context of the heart of the story,
which is resurrection. What we the church have forgotten is what struck the earliest
Christians and what should probably strike us as well right now: that Christ loved this
world so much that he came to live amongst us, and to die amongst us, and to live
again for us, telling us over and over again that the kingdom of God begins right here
and right now, that paradise was as much in this world as it is in the next world.
Friends, the Lord is risen, and he rises to give us new life, new life in this world and in
the next, but first and foremost, always, he gives to us paradise in this world, love in this
world, and joy in this world. The Lord is good and the Lord is love and the Lord is
risen, risen indeed. Amen.