E-a-s-t-e-r
Without Easter, we wouldn’t know about Jesus. If his story had ended with his crucifixion, if we only had Good Friday and not the Easter morning that followed, Jesus most likely would have been forgotten - - one Jew among many crucified by the Roman Empire.
What kind of stories are the Easter stories?
In Mark, as Mary Magdalene and two other women make their way to the tomb, they wonder, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they arrive, their question becomes irrelevant. “They saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.”
Easter stories - - disbelief, surprise, wonder...
“So the women went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Easter stories - - both terror and amazement...
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke change the ending of the story: women did tell the disciples. They left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell other disciples.
Easter stories - - telling others, sharing, in fear and great joy..
These are the Easter stories we shared this morning.
We hear in the story of Jesus’ birth that God gives and explains his name, Emmanuel. Emmanuel means “God is with us.” The final words of the risen Jesus echo his name: ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age.” The truth of the affirmation, “Jesus lives” has resounded and grounded the experience of Christians throughout the centuries. The Risen Jesus is Emmanuel, God’s abiding presence to the end of the age. Many of us to the present day have experienced Jesus as the living Christ, a living reality that has become alive in our own lives. Indeed, in the Easter stories in the Bible and in history, people have witnessed the risen Jesus as the Holy One who continues to bear the wounds of the empire that executed him.
The Holy Week teaches us to ask how we reconcile our experience and faith…: “What ails us?” We are invited to feel the force of this question - - What ails us? Something is not right. The Holy Week invites us to think together, pray together, act together on the discrepancy between experience and faith: What ails us? What is not right in the world, and in us? Bad things happen to good people. People still bear the wounds of the empire, oppression, greed, hatred. We grieve, we mourn. We are shocked at the situations and news. It puts us in the deep chasm of Holy Saturday, this limbo time in between Good Friday and Easter.
Saturday, the day after Jesus was crucified, Holy Saturday was the place and time of an impasse in which the silence was heavy and the weight of fear drove the disciples to hide, to deny, and to be scattered. Holy Saturday was the time when people lost sight of God’s promise that God would justify, vindicate and raise up the thousands of righteous Jewish martyrs who, for their faith in God, had been tortured, killed and buried without a tomb, their names unwritten.
Without Easter, the cross is simply pain, agony, and horror. Without God’s reversal at Easter, Good Friday would end up as a cynical, political message: this is the way the world is, the powers that be will always be in control, and those who think it can be otherwise are utopian dreamers. However, the good news is that Good Friday was not the end of the story; WE HAVE EASTER. Christians have experienced, witnessed, embraced and lived this powerful experience of resurrection - bodily, spiritual, and political resurrection - and have given a name to this power of God’s abiding presence to the end of the age… e-a-s-t-e-r or r-e-s-s-u-r-r-e-c-t-i-o-n. Easter is the proclamation that the horror of Good Friday and the silence and brokenness of Holy Saturday will have an end, and there is no moment that God has ceased to exist. Some Gospels have written and the others haven’t written about Holy Saturday: Holy Saturday as the day when the tears have not yet been wiped away, as the day when the terror and fear have not yet turned to amazement and great joy, as the day when the mourning and wailing songs of sorrow were only sung to the heart of the faithful in hidden places, fearing all others. On this Saturday of fear and waiting, Jesus “descended into hell” or “harrowed hell” (and hell is not the later Christian place of eternal punishment, but the Jewish Sheol or the Greek Hades, the afterlife place of nonexistence.). In this in-between time, on the surface, nothing seems to be on activity. However, God is on the move, under the ground.The work of the divine transfiguration of God’s earth has already begun on Saturday. Jesus, like Persephone in the Greek myth, is taken to the depths of the earth, ready to rise as a beautiful green shoot on a spring day as the sign of unending life and hope. Then, Jesus’ resurrection on Easter Sunday would be a rising alongside those other righteous Jewish people who had died unjustly before him. In this vision of the communal resurrection of Jesus, Jesus never rises alone. Jesus never rises without us. The truth about the past must be told and come before/go together with the work of reconciliation. We are never trapped in the past; we rise with the future of a new reconciliation.
Easter does not force us to reconcile our experience and faith. Easter comes gradually and gently, but it also comes radically, with our own personal, spiritual and political experience of liberation. And in this experience of Easter, no part of ourselves is left behind; we resurrect as the whole self (or as the whole package of who we are), when Easter becomes the living reality for us. Holy Week safely leads us into the path of the cross, to hell, to the empty tomb, and to the early morning of our new self.
So, what are your Easter stories? What is faith? On this Easter Sunday, how do you reconcile your experience and faith, your Friday, Saturday and Easter?
I read books for my children every night, and a week ago, while I was thinking about how I could explain Easter or resurrection to my own children, suddenly I remembered the story of Helen Keller and her teacher and life companion Anne Sullivan whom I read and learned about when I myself was a child. I quickly watched a short video clip from The Miracle Worker (the 2000 film version) with my children and had a discussion with them. Keller contracted an unknown illness when she was 19 months old, and the illness left her both deaf and blind. She lived, as she recalled in her autobiography, “at sea in a dense fog.” When Sullivan arrived at Keller’s house, a day Keller would forever remember as “my soul’s birthday.” Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen how to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with “d-o-l-l” for the doll that she brought Keller as a present. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it. In fact, when Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for “mug”, Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug. Keller’s breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of “water”. (Show the picture on the screen.) Keller recalled the moment: “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten - a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me: I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free.”
Some might say Easter exists because the Bible says so and the Easter stories in the Bible are true because all things that are written there are factual. Some would say Easter stories are like parables, communicating the truth of God’s love in the form of stories full of symbols, metaphors and memorable narratives. As I celebrate and embrace Easter with you, with Immanuel, I would like to say that Easter is the “name” for what Christians and the faithful have experienced through centuries and millennia. Everything under heaven has its name, (in its diversity), and we have “Easter” because what this name refers to has been experienced, lived, transformed the lives of countless righteous, faithful, humbled ones, and ordinary saints like us in many different forms, actions, places: on the street, in protests, in daily service of love, in preserving nature. We have E-a-s-t-e-r because the thing that this name refers to truly exists like water, the wonderful cool something that flows in the river, flows over our self and changes us to be a new self, a transformed self, beyond the wounds of injustice and the world’s emperors.
We may be at sea in the fog, in certain stages in our lives, on certain shores of our lives. However, on our Life’s holy Saturdays, God has never left us alone. God helps us understand that each experience has its unique name, and helps us name it, and in the spiral journey of distance and intimacy, God moves her fingers on our palm, patiently writing E-a-s-t-e-r, letting us re-live and be born again with the baptism of this wonderful, wet, cool thing – God’s self as flowing water, water from the fountain that powerfully hits the palm of our open hands to awaken our minds. The consciousness of a new, transformed self emerges.
Let us continue the hard work of the heart and vigorously move our arms to pump the new water for our lives and for the world, with Jesus being our teacher. And may we pray that faith moves us to the courage to truly believe in the mystery of Easter, (And we say it aloud: “Jesus lives!”) the most wonderful and coolest thing ever.
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