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|
 An
Interpretation
Past Sermons from Pastor Tim...
-
When focused on the empty tomb, don't
forget to speak to the gardener.
- John 20:1-18
- April
8, 2007, Easter Sunday
- There is a
part about Easter that we don’t understand.
- Mary, the
first to arrive at the tomb, was puzzled, and indeed when Peter was
summoned, he too went home to ponder these strange events at an empty
grave.
- There is
nothing wrong about being puzzled. It is essential for a rich faith.
But we must be certain that our puzzlements are about the right
things, the important things in life.
- Thus, it’s
healthy to be puzzled about Easter, about the resurrection, because
it’s the center of our faith, and the essence of our religion.
- If we were
clear about resurrection, given our human limitations and frail minds,
our conviction would probably not be adequate to the deep mysteries of
life and death.
- This
resurrection is a radical puzzle. This is no mere resuscitation, no
mere flowering of spring, or the cyclical blooming of bulbs. This is
something new and astounding. The Sabbath has turned into Sunday….the
Lord’s day….the resurrection day. The old things are passed away, and
all things are made new. All that holds us back is defeated in the New
Thing.
- When I was
a boy, I spent a lot of time in the woods behind my house down by the
creek and near the Santa Fe railroad tracks outside Turner, Kansas -
which were full of treasures for me. The coolest find of all, in 1964,
was cicada shells – those brown, dry bug bodies you find on tree
trunks when the 17-year locusts come out of the ground.
- I liked
them because they were horrible looking, with their huge empty eye
sockets and their six sharp little claws.
- I liked
them because they were evidence that a miracle had occurred. They
looked dead, but they weren’t. They were just shells. Every one of
them had a neat slit down its back, where the living creature inside
of it had escaped, pulling new legs, new eyes, new wings out of that
dry brown body and taking flight. At night I could hear them singing
their high song in the trees. If you had asked them, if they could
talk, I’ll bet none of them could have told you where they left their
old clothes !
- That is all
the disciples saw when they got to the tomb on that first morning –
two piles of old clothes. Mary didn’t even see that much. She was too
distraught. The moment she saw the door to the tomb standing wide
open, she ran to tell Simon Peter and the other disciple that Jesus’
body had been stolen. They beat her back to the tomb and found that
she was right, at least about his body being gone.
- Only why
would grave robbers have bothered to undress him first? Without even
going inside, the beloved disciple could see the linen wrappings all
lying in a heap. When Peter went inside, he saw more. The cloth that
had been on Jesus’ head was rolled up in a place by itself. Odd, that
someone should go to all the trouble of rolling it up. None of it was
making any sense to them, John says, because no one who was there that
morning understood the scripture, that Jesus must rise from the dead.
Still, when the beloved disciple followed Peter inside the tomb and
saw the clothes lying there, he believed.
- Believed
what? John does not say. He simply believed, and without another word
to each other - he and Peter returned to their homes.
- Most of
life is puzzling. Ironically, death is probably the least puzzling of
all, if we are overcome by its commonplaceness and inevitability. It’s
the thing that we fear the most and get most anxious over, but life
and love are far more puzzling. The future, full of life, is
impossible to understand – it has to do with hope and promise and is
much like the “unseen” we talk of when we speak of faith. Nothing is
certain or predictable – nothing, that is, except more life, because
of the amazing thing that happened to Jesus that first Easter.
- Death is
predictable in that it is fixed and inevitable – it is definite. In
death we are handled, classified, and measured by the funeral
director, and we are still. Death is one of the unchangeable, fixed
things in the world. It is the opposite of life.
- Back to
Mary. She is the one who saw the angels. She is the one who saw the
risen Lord, who had gotten himself some new clothes, incidentally.
Peter and the beloved disciple saw none of this. They saw nothing but
a vacant tomb with two piles of clothes in it. They saw nothing but
emptiness and absence, and on that basis at least one of them
believed, although neither of them understood.
- Any way you
look at it, that is a mighty fragile beginning for a religion that has
lasted over 2000 years ! And yet, that is where so many of us continue
to focus our energy… on that tomb, on that morning, on what did or
what did not happen there and how to explain it to anyone who does not
happen to believe it too. Resurrection does not square with anything
else we know about physical human life on earth. No one has ever seen
it happen, which is why it helps to remember that no one saw it happen
on Easter morning either.
- The
resurrection is the one and only event in Jesus’ life that was
entirely between him and God. There were no witnesses whatsoever. No
one on earth can say what happened inside that tomb, because no one
was there. They all arrived after the fact. Two of them saw clothes.
One of them saw angels. Most of them saw nothing at all because they
were still in bed that morning, but as it turned out that did not
matter because the empty tomb was not the point.
- The tomb
was just the cicada shell with the neat slit down its back.
- The living
being that had once been inside of it was gone. The singing was going
on somewhere else, which may be why Peter and the other disciple did
not stay very long.
- Clearly,
Jesus was not there. He could have stayed put, I guess, sitting there
all pink and healthy between the two piles of clothes so that everyone
could come in from miles around and see him, but that is not what he
did.
- He had
outgrown his tomb, which was too small a focus for the resurrection.
The Risen One had people to see and things to do. The Living One’s
business was among the living, to whom he appeared not once but four
more times in the Gospel of John. Every time he came to his friends
they became stronger, wiser, kinder, more daring. Every time he came
to them, they became more like him.
- Those
appearances cinch the resurrection for me, not just what happened in
the tomb. What happened in the tomb was entirely between Jesus and
God. For the rest of us, Easter began the moment the gardener said,
“Mary!” and she knew who he was. That is where the miracle happened
and goes on happening – not in the tomb, but in the encounter with the
risen, Living Lord.
- Part of our
sin is that we don’t like mystery, We want to know more, some of us
more than anybody else. Gossip is rooted in the need to know more than
anybody else knows and then to spread it.
- There is
really only one certainty, and that is that the crucifixion and the
resurrection run straight through the center of our lives, and each
moment of each day we need to see our lives in terms of death and a
resurrection which comes out of it because we believe in a living God.
- To know
about our own absurdity, the fact that we don’t make much sense, and
that the world doesn’t make much sense apart from God, that is the
beginning of wisdom and salvation. We come to understand and put our
trust in God who does make sense, but who is beyond us and calls forth
our faith and trust.
- In the end,
that is the only evidence we have to offer those who ask us how we can
possibly believe what we believe. Because we live, that is why.
Because we have found, to our surprise and puzzlement, that we are not
alone. Because we never know where Jesus will turn up next.
- Monica
Furlong, a British writer, said years ago that she is attracted to the
Christian faith not by its answers, but by its great questions. The
certainties are easy to come by. For salvation and victory over death
we need a great and grand mystery.
- That’s what
Easter is all about. If we understand it, with our frail minds, we
probably haven’t grasped by faith the breadth and height and depth and
the magnitude of that event.
- To be
puzzled like Mary and Peter is a good Easter mood.
- Here is one
thing that helps…..
- Never
get so focused on the empty tomb that you forget to speak to the
gardener !
-
- Sources:
- Barbara
Brown Taylor, Escape From the Tomb, The Christian Century,
April 1, 1998, p.339.
- Norman
DePuy, The Mysterious Meaning of Easter, Baptist Leader,
February, 1984.
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