Isaiah 25:6-9
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take way from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. It will be said on that day, “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”
Psalm 23
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil’ my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
Mark 16:1-8
When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back - it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
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Easter is an interruption. So is death. At least we are familiar with the interruptions of death, though. When the car breaks down on the highway. When the pink slip comes from higher up and suddenly you’re out of a job. When the doctor calls. When funeral arrangements have to be made, and the estate taken care of. Death makes a terrible mess of things, shakes up our schedule and disrupts our routine.
But then… but then resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus was foretold, he talked of it as openly as he talked of his upcoming crucifixion. But we didn’t want to hear him talk about suffering and death, so we missed completely the ‘after,’ the continuation of the story.
Unless you’re stuck in the middle of a death experience, this language of freedom from death may sound a bit metaphorical, so let me put it another way. Fairy tales tend to end ‘happily ever after,’ right? Think of the complete opposite of that. If Snow White’s prince never showed up. If the sorceress from the Emperor’s New Groove had gotten it right the first time and poisoned Kuzco instead of turning him into a llama. If Cinderella had choked to death on the ash heap without ever going to the ball. That kind of death. Or, rather, how about the language of ‘worst case scenario’? We tend to run and hide from those. Even allowing ourselves to sit with the possibility of a worst case scenario can be terrifying. We have gotten really good at covering up those options with distractions like food and shopping and sex and social time, but when it comes down to it, the things we spend our energy avoiding - the confrontations, the conflicts, the losses, the griefs - when we spend our energy running away from our fears, we give them power over how we spend our time and attention.
So when the confirmation students are talking about sin and death, by way of learning the ten commandments, remembering how impossible they are to keep, we’re talking about the real life fears and experiences of today: Telling a little white lie to cover up an insecurity; Getting something shiny and new on the cheap so we look good even though it keeps somebody else in poverty; Feeling left out of a relationship and finding other people and things to make us feel good about ourselves. “I wish that I could be like the cool kids, ‘cause all the cool kids, they seem to fit in,” goes the song on the radio.
But today all of the ‘cool’ goes out the window. Today we are fighting against the darkness, running away from our fear, expecting and hating the inevitability of every worst case scenario we can imagine, and it has caught up with us. All of it has come crashing down around us, and there is absolutely no escape from it. Death has found us.
Thanks be to God that Jesus has found Death. Jesus has found Death and carried it and gone through it, just like we do and just like we will, and Jesus has turned it on its head. Because, now that Christ has died, Christ IS risen, Christ will come again, lo, and behold, Death is not the end of the story any more or ever again. The final enemy. The last great terror. The absolute worst case scenario to end all scenarios. It’s not the end. It’s not the great terror we expect it to be. Death has lost its sting, because Jesus has been there, done that, and lives to tell the tale.
There is an article I read lately about Christians and Muslims being persecuted in Myanmar. The Christians are seeing their crosses, once displayed on clock towers, hillsides, and churches, being taken down and destroyed. Sacred symbols being attacked. But just what is so powerful about those crosses? In the States they’re decorated and turned into jewelry for just about anybody. We’ve made them pretty. To consider what they stand for, though, we might as well make jewelry out of AK-47s, lynching nooses, or the electric chair. The ugliness of mass oppression and fear, right there in our artwork and on our children’s foreheads marked at Baptism. What’s the power? The power is that, in hanging these crosses up as signs of faith and triumph we are effectively announcing to the world that we are not afraid of dying. We are not frightened by the threat of death. The last great enemy, the biggest threat anyone can hold over us, the thing that is the last straw when it comes to threats and punishments, is now empty. There is no symbol more evocative of that freedom than a Christian carrying their own cross. It’s as if we say to the powers ‘go ahead and try to disempower me, but even if you kill me, that is not the end.’
This is the symbol that emboldened millions of Christians to become martyrs for the faith, knowing that the kingdom of heaven is worth far more than we can measure, and that, if we die in service to God, we are not dead forever. Oscar Romero was shot while celebrating the Eucharist, because he preached liberation in a time of persecution. His faith led him in his work, and his death was not the end of that greater work, and he was not afraid to die. Martin Luther King, Jr., preached a freedom taught to him by faith, continuing the challenge to Christian community to be fully realized in this world, and that work continues, because his death was not the end.
Nor is our death our end, brothers and sisters. No matter when death comes and interrupts our lives, whatever sort of death it may be, we can sit with the pain, and the grief, and the fear, we can even be overwhelmed by doubt and despair, and it will not be the end of all things. For every death there is a resurrection. This is why we celebrate today. This is what we celebrate today. This is the truth of today, the truth that is bigger and deeper than all of our worst case scenarios.
And it’s bigger, and deeper, and more lasting than any ‘happily ever afters,’ too. It is so much more than comfort or the end of illness. Those things are passing. It’s more than happiness, that’s too fleeting. This resurrection which claims us is much more solid and real than any of our fears, because Jesus Christ himself has been to all of those darkest of dark places, and has emerged again alive. Jesus Christ himself has been through the worst case scenario, and has died, and has begun to decompose, and has been re-invigorated. Jesus Christ himself has seen death and hell, has walked those roads of weariness and has risen victorious - for your sake.
It can be downright annoying at best, terrifying at best, to have death interrupted by life. Over and over again, when we gather around the Word and the Sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, life interrupts death and we rehearse what vision we have been given, of the coming kingdom present among us. No wonder the women were amazed and fled from the tomb speechless - this sort of thing just didn’t happen. Just doesn’t happen. Does it? Can it? Did God really just carry death and life and all of our pain and anger and fear, and come forth with forgiveness and love and life eternal for the whole of the world?
Christ is risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!
Christ is risen, indeed. Alleluia! Alleluia!
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