Easter Day
Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Acts 10:34-43; Luke 24:1-12
I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown”.
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way”.
(Minnie Louise Haskins)
This is a hard year to get to Easter. The last few months have felt a bit like a perpetual Good Friday: uncertainty rules the day; anxiety is all around; and there seems to be a pervasive sense that what is coming into being is likely to be more difficult than what is fading away. The prophet Isaiah promises a new heaven and a new earth — a time of gentleness and belonging, of planting and of harvesting and of living in peace — but those words sound like a haunting melody of perfect beauty which we cannot quite hold in our minds.
In times like these, it’s important to remember that Christ’s death and resurrection were for a broken world, not for a good-enough one. The women came to the tomb in darkness, expecting death, not life. And indeed, the world they lived in was not so different than the world so many know in our own time. Powerful men did what they wished, unbound by ethics or faithfulness. They made alliances and unmade them, invaded their neighbors when they needed money or resources, twisted the law into a pretense which allowed them to destroy their enemies, stripped life and food from the innocent, and left them to die in unmarked graves. That is what Christ vanquished on Easter: not just the death of our mortal bodies, but the power of death to order a world by violence and by fear.
The Resurrection of Christ is not a fairy tale; not some pink and blue fable to help us pretend that the world is just and peaceful and good. The Resurrection is God’s ultimate response to evil: not to deny that evil is real and pervasive; not even to deny that it breaks God’s beloved children; but to refuse to allow evil to have the final word. Into all our struggles and into all our grief, Christ bursts from the tomb, proclaiming: Alleluia, anyway!
Alleluia to you who are grief, for death will not have the final word.
Alleluia to you who live in fear, for you are not beyond the love of God.
Alleluia to you who are far from the ones you love this day, for God is with you and with them.
Alleluia to you who have no one to love, for in God’s eyes, you are beloved.
Alleluia to you who live with disease, who scrape for wages, who do not know how to go on, for low on the horizon God’s new light dawns, and the darkness has not overcome it.
But that new light of God God not simply restore what used to be. What used to be was mortal, cracked, and flawed — even the most beautiful bits, the bits we loved. In the resurrection, all is transformed. Hilary of Poitiers writes, “God will repair what has been shattered, but not by mending it with something else… Out of the old and very same material…, God will” bring about holy and divine beauty to gladden God’s own heart.1
That transformation, that longed-for renewal of what is good and beautiful and true, is what we celebrate this day, not as a distant hope, but as a reality that is unfolding around us. As the tight, brown bud on the branch of tree appears to be old and dead, and yet, on the first warm day, begins to unfold in bright green beauty, so the new world is already present among us, barely visible to the eyes, but beginning to unfurl into beauty wherever people like us are gathered — messed up, imperfect people who nevertheless are willing to throw the weight of our lives onto the side of love. People who look at the world with clear eyes and breaking hearts and cry out, Alleluia, anyway!
Amy Frykolm suggests that perhaps, instead of “the resurrection,” we should speak of “the resurrecting” — the uncoiling of new and holy joy from the empty tomb of Jesus into our world, into lives being freed day by day from the power of death and sin and fear and into the transcendent power of life. It is all around us, if we are willing to see. What is needed is our refusal — our Refus Global to all the power of death— to those who would teach us passivity and despair. Against those who claim that we are small, that we are helpless, that forces are in play which we cannot control, we claim that God loves the small, that God works through people who seem to be insignificant, that no sparrow falls unseen, that no power in the universe is beyond God’s control. That out of one man’s life, all have life; that by one man’s death, all have been reborn. Dust has become man again (Gregory of Nyssa), and we are reborn as human beings.
And if holding hope is hard right now, we must remember not to look for the living among the dead. It is natural, in times of uncertainty, to yearn for the return of what was familiar and comfortable, but nostalgia is not hope. We are not called to live life facing backward, yearning for people and places and ways of life which made us feel secure and cherished and loved, even if honoring that love is a form of faithfulness.
Christ walks always before us, and those hallowed groves of memory, which once gave us life, are so many empty tombs — places where he once lay. If you are looking for a blessing, do not look into them, but into the world which is around us now, in all its fragile wonder. Look into the faces of the men, women, and children around you — those for whom Christ rose from the dead. Look into the sky, the trees, the ocean; look at the hope in the heart of the child in poverty, at the love in the face of the man who dwells in the bombed-out ruins of his city. Look at the refugees seeking a new life, at the sick who enter a holy death, at the child drawing his first breath even as we gather here today.
For in the resurrection, Christ’s Incarnation is made complete. God’s life came down from heaven into a frail body, but now it rises, imperishable, to make all things in its image again. Margeret Renkl reminds us, “We are creatures built for joy. At the very saddest funerals, we can hear a funny story about our lost beloved, and, God help us, we laugh. We can stagger out of an appointment where a person in a white coat has given us the news we think we cannot bear to hear, and still we smile at the baby in the checkout line clapping her chubby hands …or kicking her feet in pleasure at the sight of a stranger’s smile. This is who we are. This is the best of who we are.”
“Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them into the roundness of the world… The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of ashes.” (The Comfort of Crows)
Alleluia, anyway! And alleluia, always. For in Christ, my friends, we live.
1. Second half of sentence is paraphrase.