Sermon: Easter Underground
In today’s story (Matthew 28:7-10, 16), Jesus says, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers — and so, sisters, and all kin: Go back to Galilee; there they will see me.” That led me to ponder today’s Question of the Day: “What is the Risen Jesus telling us to go back to?”
What kind of place was Galilee for Jesus – what special meaning did it have for him?
And what kind of meaning could it hold for his disciples, and for us?
In the Gospel story about Jesus, Galilee becomes important when Jesus hears about how John the Baptist was arrested. Jesus’ reaction to the news, in the face of John’s imprisonment, is that he withdraws to Galilee.
(Matthew 4:12 "When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he withdrew to Galilee.”)
Galilee, where people have known suffering. That’s what people of that time knew. Withdrawing to Galilee was like withdrawing to Northern Ireland in the 1980’s – people suffered under Imperial rule, and sometimes they fought back, which brought more suffering.
At the heart of Galilee are Nazareth and Naphtali, the peoples who in history fought for their own place and endured deportation to foreign nations. These people are living in the darkness of rule by the Roman government, under Pontius Pilate.
In Galilee, Jesus’ next move after the news of John the Baptist’s arrest, was to begin calling his disciples. In a place of broken communities, under the dark wing of Empire, Jesus planned the next steps of his ministry on Earth.
It is very interesting that after Jesus was resurrected, on the first Easter day, his first message was to gather his disciples back to Galilee—the place where he first called them, the place where he withdrew after hearing the news of John the Baptist’s arrest, a sign of the times marked by injustice and cruelty. Go back to that place—the birthplace of everything—the Easter Underground. Therefore, we understand that just as the Risen Jesus issued an invitation from the empty tomb, our next move as Easter people is also to go back to Galilee—the underground, the place where people experience the deepest grief of our time.
Every Easter is coloured by the deep shadows and darkness just before dawn. The first Easter was announced only at the moment dawn broke, but it had already begun underground, when darkness still muffled all light and colour on the earth. And, just as life keeps moving in the night and under the ground, Easter is perpetually alive in the underground of people who have known suffering, especially in times of injustice and cruelty.
So, the hometown of Easter is Galilee, and Easter’s hour and date of birth are when nighttime is at its deepest. In our story — in our definition, discovery, and connection — we must continue to find Galilee, even in the 21st century, today, here, and in the world.
Our young people, I mean, our own BVU young adults, say they are wounded by an overwhelmingly bureaucratic system. They feel like they’re talking to a wall. The lack of a social care system, of mental health, disability, social protection, the way those resources are distributed - it doesn’t really touch their lives. They feel defeated by the system.
To boost national wealth and keep the economy running, foreign workers and international students were invited in at full capacity for many years. But then, with the excuse of a housing shortage, they’re being blamed. Politicians campaign with promises to “cap immigration,”; immigration policy keeps shifting like a rubber band. It expands and contracts, with a shifting definition of who are welcome and who are refused. How many newcomers’ lives and futures are now marked by lines they can’t cross—because of an inconsistent immigration policy? This is colonially-inspired manipulation of the future of those we love – those we need.
Beyond 2025, there’s still so much shadow and darkness, division and diaspora, disappointment and disruption. Even today in Gaza, food and aid are rotting while waiting just outside the wall — and inside, 85% of children are suffering from acute malnutrition, becoming living sacrifices of genocide.
Being Easter people isn’t about grand balloon-light celebrations or kids’ magical plastic eggs. Easter people means going back to Galilee. Find the Galilee of our time. Listen to each one’s Galilee stories.
Like Jesus, we should withdraw to the lands that are still in shadow, in darkness, and there, we gather ourselves, find our kin.
But don’t misunderstand. The shadow, the darkness we see are not devoid of God’s newness, power and presence. (Dying and rising to newness of life…) They are simply the unannounced part of Easter.
To human eyes, this darkness might look like some black screen pulled across, like a disabling veil of nothing. But in truth, this darkness is alive. It is filled with living people and beings, and their hearts’ strong rhythms, like the trunk of a tree drawing up water from hidden springs under the ground, bringing nourishment even to the smallest, furled leaves that await the sun’s warming touch.
As Buddhists say, when we see with the Buddha nature-wisdom (bodhi-chitta), every being is a fully awakened being, and this world is already sacred. That radically affirming nature of God’s world is what Easter calls us to go back to again and again, the Easter pearl in awe-filled darkness.
When Jesus told us, we Easter people, to go back, it was to the lands of such darkness. The hometown and birthplace of Easter. The dangerous, fighting, alive place. The places that might make our hearts race with fear and trembling, but are filled with God.
That’s where we must go to find our brothers and sisters and kin.
Easter is the place where we might find ourselves in a minority, advocating for unpopular movements. It might be the place where we ask disquieting questions. Where we object to the abuse of others. Where we stand in the way of the bombastic and proud.
Easter is not a pastel, sweet-scented, glory-filled, light-soaked, pain-free wonderland.
Easter smells like earth. It has fresh grass pushing up from graves, not withering.
Robins return. People walk over it. Children play. Stones are rolled away.
Easter’s day and night are painted in multicolours: sunrise, sunset, twilight, and starlight.
It’s the thing you and I are still learning today…The quiet miracle we are still managing to live out, even in small ways, when we put someone else before ourselves, because we love.
Not when we are better, or the “best”, but when we are able to be together.
With our 12 new members, with Donna and Lucy, and with young adults, newcomers, immigrants, people with differing abilities, First Peoples, Prairie people, West Coast and East Coast people, queer, trans, the unhoused, and people struggling with addictions — if all of us, each carrying our own Spring and the deep grief of Galilee, are ready to search together for the Galilee of our time, and ready to listen to one another’s Galilee…
Then that connection is already fulfilling Jesus’ invitation to us, here, here at BVU, going back to Galilee.
BVU: a new Galilee.
Easter People: Underground, with plans and plants and hope springing up all around us.
That’s my dream, and I hope it becomes your dream too.
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