It’s Easter Sunday! During a pandemic! Unfortunately, due to the music streaming license expiring, I can’t include the video of the service here, but it was a fun video to put together with lots of clips from congregation members throughout the service proclaiming “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed.”
Inspiration for this year’s Easter sermon came from this column by Rolf Jacobson, and this column from Tish Warren was helpful as well. This week’s Gospel reading is Matthew 28:1-10.
Grace to you and peace from our risen Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen
For the last few weeks, one of the first things I do each morning is to check on death. Most mornings before I even get out of bed, I open the news app on my phone to see how many people died overnight. Then I open Facebook to see who of the people I know are infected. And that’s assuming I don’t have a phone call or text from my family, from my mom and my sister who both work in health care, or my grandparents who are obviously in vulnerable categories. It’s a strange way to start each morning, wondering what work death has done today.
And of course, it’s not just from COVID-19 – people are also still dying of all the usual causes. Perhaps you saw in our congregation that Clarence Brinkman died on Friday morning. Death is a very present reality in our world.
In Matthew’s account of that very first Easter Sunday, we read that, “After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.” (Matthew 28:1) They went to the place of the dead, to check on the work of death. Of course, they didn’t know it was the first Easter Sunday. All they knew was the reality that death had won.
Matthew doesn’t give us this detail, but Mark and Luke let us know the women were going to the tomb to prepare Jesus’ body, to anoint it with spices and perfume. They went to honor their Rabbi, their teacher, their leader, their friend who had died. They are doing their feeble best to cope with the reality that death had won, as it always does. This is the end of the story.
But when they get to the tomb, to the place of death, they discover that reality is not what they think it is. Instead of death, they find life. They find an angel telling them something so unbelievable it can only be true: Jesus who was crucified, died, and was buried is no longer in the tomb, because he’s been raised from the dead.
They find that death has not gotten the last word, because God is in the business of life, not death. Death did its worst to Jesus, but it could not win. The grave could not and cannot hold Jesus.
Matthew’s Gospel is the only one that mentions an earthquake when the women get to the tomb, so perhaps an earthquake happened and the other Gospel writers just didn’t consider it essential to the story, or perhaps Matthew means it as a metaphor, because this event will shake the world. This event of Jesus rising from the dead is the most important thing to happen in history.
And yet, at the time, it seemed pretty quiet. On that first Easter morning, like today, no crowds gathered to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. Many of the people of Jerusalem had moved on. I doubt Pontius Pilate was still thinking about the rabble-rousing so-called messiah he’d ordered to be crucified a few days earlier. The entire logic of the universe, the whole order of creation was changing, and the world almost completely overlooked it. Rather than being shouted from the rooftops, rather than bells ringing and trumpets blaring, the good news was first given to a couple of grieving women.
As we’ll hear in the next few weeks, the other disciples are in isolation, hiding in locked houses not for fear of a virus, but out of fear that the same deathly fate that came for Jesus could come for them too. They’re not looking for resurrection, or for a message from beyond. It hasn’t occurred to them that death is not the end, because everyone knows how the world works. Death always wins. Except this time. And this time changes everything.
As we heard in Jeremiah, there is hope. God’s faithfulness continues. There will come a day when again, the world will be as God intends it to be, full of abundant life, with death overcome and the power of the grave destroyed. “The one who has raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus.” (2 Corinthians 4:14)
Love triumphs over hate and violence. Goodness is stronger than evil. Sins are forgiven, wounds are healed, and beauty outlives ashes. Grief yields to hope. Death leads to resurrection. The proof is that Jesus is alive.
This Easter feels very strange to me. The reality of death is more obvious than usual, and we’re not doing the church things we usually do. We don’t have a bunch of visitors, or a big breakfast, or fancy hats. I haven’t had a single Cadbury cream egg or even a Peep.
But none of that is what Easter is about. Nothing of what’s missing this year changes the truth that the tomb is empty, that indeed, Christ is risen. Nothing that’s going on in our world right now alters the reality that ultimately, death’s dominion is over.
Certainly, death still has some power. Sin and brokenness and suffering and sickness and tragedy are still realities in this world. But because of Easter, we know they don’t get the last word. The end of the story is life, not death.
Beloved of God, hold on to the hope of Easter. Hold on to the words repeated by both the angel and Jesus: Do not be afraid. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!