SERMON 16 April 2017
Matthew 28:1-10 Sunday of the Resurrection, Year A
“He
has been raised; he is not here.” In the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.
Jesus Christ
is not a tulip bulb. If you came here this morning expecting to hear a safe
message about spring and rebirth and bunnies you may wish to leave now. The
resurrection of Jesus Christ is much more than that sequence of events we call
rebirth or springtime. It’s easy for us to get distracted by spring. All around
us new life is springing up. The squirrels in my backyard are busy at what squirrels
and all animals including human beings do in spring.
Those squirrels in my backyard
are busy trying to recreate themselves. And in the midst of all this rebirth of
the natural world, as the lawn greens up, and the squirrels chase one another
up the tree, and the tulips spring up from the dead leaves around them, it’s
safe to think about Jesus as just another sign of spring. Jesus as just another
moment in the natural history of the world: A sort of human yet divine tulip
bulb.
Ah, but the
resurrection is an event, better still, an ongoing happening, that cuts clean
across the natural history of our world. The resurrection is unexplainable by
science, unattainable by the natural world, and moves us far beyond that
sequence of events we name natural history.
The
resurrection is a continuing event that began one morning more than two
thousand years ago and continues into the future. Instead of a tulip bulb, safe
and brown and expectantly springing up green, we hear, “He has been raised; he
is not here.” There is nothing safe about “He has been raised; he is not here.”
These words instead bring drama and passion and a complete reversal of
everything we know. This is an event that cuts clean across natural history, as
we know it, and brings something totally new into the world.
The stone
was rolled back from the grave and the tomb was empty. “Jesus is loose in the
world.”[1]
We can no longer keep Jesus safe in his bulb as a dead thing in a tomb or a dim
memory of a nice guy who was kind to children and fed several thousand people
and healed the sick. Instead, we’re confronted with a dead man no longer dead.
And an empty tomb missing its occupant: an occupant who has gone before us into
a new life, a life of resurrection, a life of promise.
Even the
women who went to the tomb that morning long ago expected the natural history
of the world to go on. They went to visit the dead: to anoint a body in a tomb.
We do not visit tombs expecting to see the dead arise. We visit tombs to
grieve, to acknowledge that life has ended and the natural history of the world
continues in its course, the way it always has.
Instead, the
event of the resurrection completely changes the natural history of the world.
The resurrection sloughs away all the reasons the women went to visit the tomb.
Their visit replaces those reasons with the great emptiness of the yawningly
empty tomb. The natural history of the world is thrown out and resurrected life
begins.
In this surprising encounter at
the tomb where we hear, “He has been raised; he is not here,” more surprises
await us. More encounters with the Jesus let loose in the world follow and will
continue to follow for us.
In the
emptiness of the tomb lies our inability to capture Jesus, to make him into
merely a memory or a safe savior who will do what we want. The empty tomb
laughs at our efforts to find a “historical Jesus” or to make Jesus something
tame, something at our beck and call. In the act of having found the empty
tomb, the women who went let loose forever the safe Jesus we thought we knew.
Instead, our savior, let loose in the world, beckons us to follow him.
The Jesus
who left his tomb empty and went before the disciples and Peter to Galilee is a
Jesus who began a story rather than ended one. This is the Jesus who will not
fit into our ideas of the nice guy who loved children and fed a crowd of people
once, maybe twice, and healed some people no one else would touch.
We confine
Jesus to his tomb if we acknowledge him only in these ways. The resurrection
has nothing to do with the natural history of the world and the squirrels being
squirrels and the tulips coming back in springtime. Jesus Christ is not a tulip
bulb.
This morning we celebrate the
continuing event of the resurrection. Jesus goes before us always. The future
is no longer in our control because the natural history of the world was broken
on that morning long ago. The tomb was found empty and the body is not there.
Jesus is loose in the world and we are called to go and find him. Instead of an
ending, Jesus leads us into a new beginning. Death has been trampled down and
the grave is no longer. This is no dead end but a living one. Alleluia! Christ
is Risen! AMEN.
The Rev Nicolette Papanek
©2017
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