While They Were Perplexed: Luke 24:1-12
Easter Sunday
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they
came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. 2 They
found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but
when they went in, they did not find the body. 4 While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in
dazzling clothes stood beside them. 5 The
women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the
men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He
is not here, but has risen.[a] 6 Remember how he told you, while he was still in
Galilee, 7 that the Son of Man must be handed over
to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” 8 Then
they remembered his words, 9 and returning from the
tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. 10 Now
it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women
with them who told this to the apostles. 11 But
these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. 12 But
Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen
cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened. (NRSV)
Show of hands,
who here has been to an Easter service before?
Show of hands, who understands
what’s happening at Easter?
Great, y’all
can explain it to me after the service.
Online folks, feel free to leave me a comment or a message and I promise
I will read it this afternoon.
It’s not a trick question, or at
least it’s not meant to be. Easter is weird. We people who claim the Christian faith (and,
actually, quite a few people who don’t but get dragged along anyway for various
reasons) have gathered every year for thousands of years to say Christ is
risen, to say that Jesus is alive, to say that death has not won. Yet people are dying every day. Bishop David Bard penned an episcopal letter
for Good Friday that noted, "Another death also hangs over this day, the
death of Patrick Lyoya in Grand Rapids, shot by a police
officer during a confrontation following a traffic stop. Lyoya died on April 4.
Video of the shooting was released [April 13], almost a year to the day that a
police officer in Minnesota killed Daunte Wright during a traffic stop.
“This is heartbreaking, and our
hearts break most of all for the family and loved ones of Patrick Lyoya, who
was 26 and an immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo.” Wayne Butler, a witness to the shooting, told
reporters, “I knew when the tussle began…If you tussle with a White man with a
gun, and you're Black in America, you end up dead.”[1]
How can we proclaim the good news of
death being defeated because Jesus is alive when so many others are not? How can we gather for Easter when it seems
like the desperate waiting of Holy Saturday is all we can feasibly do? Yes, good, we come to the tomb with hands
full of spices and find the stone rolled away, but my goodness are there so
many other bodies there. What is the
good news of Easter in a world of Good Fridays?
“At early dawn, they found the stone
rolled away from the tomb, but they did not find the body. They were perplexed.” There is no immediate reason that a giant
burial rock would be anywhere but where it was put three days before, and there
is no sensible reason why the body that had been there was not now. The women gathered at the tomb had seen
resurrections before—Luke records both Lazarus and the young son of the widow
of Nain, and Matthew adds in the daughter of Jairus, all pulled back from
having been really most sincerely dead.
Each of those had been An Event, though, with plenty of witnesses; Jesus
spoke to someone, called upon the power of God, raised the person. When the women gathered in the dawn, the
earliest acceptable time they could have come to Jesus’ tomb, there had been no
event—at least, no event with human witnesses.
The body was simply…gone. The
women were perplexed, understandably; in the Greek, the word comes from aporeho,
to be in doubt, to be at a loss, to be without resources.[2]
This was more than being a little
off-kilter—these women were without their teacher and now without their
teacher’s body. Not only their morning
plans were thrown off; their whole understanding of the next step to honoring
the Man Whom they had loved was dashed.
How could they care for someone who wasn’t there? What was the next step? How could they go back to the other disciples
and break the news that there was more grief on top of their existing
grief, that the world of Good Fridays now had a theft in addition?
“While they were perplexed about
this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were
terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why
do you look for the living among the dead?’”
Excuse you, sirs, they are very much
looking for the dead among the dead.
Jesus died! They watched
Him! On the cross! Kind of hard to miss, what with the darkness
for three hours while He slowly suffocated.
The living are the ones left behind to figure out what next, to hold
together anything that looks like hope when people die every day, when death is
so incredibly powerful, when Good Friday and Holy Saturday repeat and repeat in
the lives of everyone who feels like the stone will never get rolled back.
Professor Arland J. Hultgren writes,
“Easter is perplexing, and to believe in the resurrection is not easy. The
women who come to the tomb are perplexed from the beginning, and the apostles,
when they hear the report of the women to them, consider it an ‘idle tale.’ It
is only later on that the apostles come to faith, and that is after Jesus
appears to them as the story unfolds.
“To believe in the resurrection of
Jesus takes a lot of faith and courage. But it is more than saying yes to the
claim made by the women and, eventually, the men in the Easter story. It is at
the same time saying ‘no’ to the power of death and destruction that surrounds
us.”[3]
We who have celebrated the rich joy
of Easter for thousands of years run the risk of forgetting how powerful and
deeply abnormal it is. We lose
how amazing it was that Jesus, unwatched by anyone, was raised from the dead
and walked away; that heavenly beings told human women that this was somehow
something they could have predicted; that it was something they could
have predicted. Jesus had told them,
after all; “‘Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the
Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third
day rise again’”.
Ah, Church, we sometimes get so
tangled up in trying to listen for God amidst the chaotic noise of the world that
we don’t actually hear Her. We
come to Easter year after year and think we know the story because we’ve read
it, heard it in all four gospels, sung the songs and affirmed that Christ is
risen, Christ is risen indeed, that we are not perplexed because there is a
pattern here of lilies and new outfits and family dinners in the security of a
living God. But God is always telling us
that He is doing a new thing. Behold,
there is grief but there is so much love; behold, there is death but it is not
the end of the story; behold, He is risen, He is not here. Professor Craig R. Koester slyly encourages
us, “Go ahead and tell God that you think it is outrageous to expect anyone to
believe that Jesus has risen. Go ahead and tell God that you believe that death
gets the final word. None of this is news to God. He has heard it all before.
He simply refuses to believe it. ‘Why do you seek the living among the dead?’
God wonders. ‘Through the living Jesus I give you the gift of life. Why would
you think that I would offer you anything less?’”[4]
See, here’s the glorious thing about
Easter: whether we understand it or not, it happened. God did not wait for us to be able to wrap
our heads around the infinite possibilities of life and life abundant; God went
ahead and gave it, gave it freely and without audience. God did not wait for the women at the tomb to
somehow get over the grief of Good Friday and the heavy weight of Holy Saturday
before introducing the impossible; God snuck out of the tomb in the small hours
of the morning because She had other work to do. Jesus did not wait by the empty tomb to
explain the metaphysics of death’s defeat; He left some messengers to say that’s
coming next, and then He kept appearing to people to say “see, I am here, hope
is not dead, there is more going on, cancer and bullets and crosses and car
wrecks do not have the last word in your story or in Mine.”
Rev. Joy Perkett writes, “I am
fascinated by the Easter story. It is so
different from the story of Christmas, which is accompanied by a choir of
angels, a star, and a gaggle of strangers visiting.
“In contrast, in the Easter story,
there are no trumpets, no flocks of angels singing, no fanfare or crowds of
strangers. Easter begins with a
whisper…The miracle of Easter is that Jesus abides, always, even in the moments
that we have given up on resurrection.”[5]
There is no moment in which we are
asked to think that everything is fine in the Easter story; as Koester writes, “death
is real, but it is not final.”[6] Hultgren adds, “The church at its best
continues to be the community of the new creation in a world that is too often
headed for dissolution by violence, abuse, death, and destruction. Being people
of the resurrected Lord Jesus, the church is in the business of praying for the
renewal of the world and seeking to renew it.”[7]
We, too, are often perplexed by a
world that seems not to have a whole lot of life or God in it, but that’s
exactly where we come in. The women didn’t
stick around to ask the messengers clarification questions about the how and
the what—and my curious little soul despairs because I definitely would have—but
they went running back to their friends to say, “Guess what, He was not there,
He has risen!” We, too, are invited to
live into a world of death by proclaiming life, over and over not because we
totally understand it but because we are the very proof of it.
Have you seen resurrection in your
life, perplexed one? Maybe you haven’t
seen Lazarus come forth, but have you seen relationships slowly mend their
broken bones, friends coming together to truly say “I’m sorry, let’s try again”? Have you seen the way the world rallied
against Russia to say that destroying the Ukrainian people was unacceptable and
that violence would be turned back on itself?
Have you seen how people turned out in marches and protests to shout the
name of Patrick Lyoya as though the list of names is not punishingly long, as
though there is hope that this time there will be justice? Have you seen how people are demanding that
all kids, trans and cisgender, are of worth when bigoted laws assert otherwise? Have you seen how the dawn breaks every day
and you, you the perfectly imperfect creation of God you are, are still breathing
grace into the world?
Resurrection is perplexing, and the
way God works is perplexing, and we are both allowed and encouraged to name
that reality. Death is still here, and
it sucks, and God knows intimately how shattering grief can be.
But we gather here on this two
thousand-odd celebration of Easter and say Christ is risen, Christ is risen
indeed because death is not the only player on the stage. Grief is not the only thing we bring to the
dawn with our hands full of spices. We
are not without resources—God is at work.
God invites us to the work. Let
us, then, be resurrection people, bringing life to a world where the stone is
so heavy. Amen.
[1]
Patrick
Lyoya: Family of unarmed Black man fatally shot during traffic stop in Michigan
calls for termination and prosecution of officer - CNN
[2]
Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon, s.v. aporew
[5]
Perkett, “Resurrection Patience,” Easter sermon 2022 delivered at First Baptist
Church in Essex, CT. Used with
permission.
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