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An Easter Message: a Sermon preached on Easter 2002 by The Rev. Hartshorn Murphy
Text: Matthew 28:1-10
If you're hearing this story for the first time, a few words need to be said to put it into context. Without that context, the event we are here to celebrate together would make no sense. How is it possible that this man's life so impacted the world that time itself was altered? That time itself, by his life, was cleaved in two? A life of such significance that all that led up to it was accounted backwards receding from it and all events since his life, proceeds from it?
In the language of our American psyche over these last several months, the life of Jesus is truly "ground zero," but without some context, such claims must seem fantastic.
By our standards, Jesus of Nazareth doesn't amount to much. He was born in poverty in a backwoods region - the Galilee - of a backwoods province - Palestine - of a troublesome and backwards people, the Hebrews. Born of peasant stock, Jesus was most likely illiterate and learned the scriptures of his people the way all young men in the Galilee did, by memorization. Rumors about his questionable parentage hounded him in Nazareth so much so that he early left home and became a follower of the controversial John the Baptist.
Jesus chose to hang with all the wrong people - with prostitutes and shepherds - universally regarded as thieves and drunks - and with tax gatherers, men who betrayed their own people by collecting taxes for the Roman army's occupation of Palestine and other lands, forcing the marginal poor into ever deepening despair and poverty. Some said he was himself a drunk because of his policy of breaking bread with outcasts and disreputable people. And he tended to bitterly and caustically criticize the powerful and respectable people. He truly had a knack for saying the wrong things to the right people. He once called the Pharisees -religious authorities - whitewashed tombs -beautiful to behold but full of death. If your son - or even worse your daughter - brought Jesus home for supper, you'd call your Pastor to ask "where did we go wrong in raising this child?"
But Jesus was also a healer and an exorcist of broken lives and spirits. Everyone knew in the first century that if one was diseased or disabled or not quite in his right mind, it was because he had done something to offend God. Or, if she were born with a birth defect, her parents or ancestors had offended God. And so, those who were blind, or deaf, or who had a speech impediment, or were crippled or who suffered from a skin disease or were just "beside themselves"; those people were clearly sinners and were ostracized from their family and tribe and were, by law, not to be admitted to the Temple. Jesus, in healing people, restored them to the human family and reconciled them with their God. Holiness, Jesus taught in his healing, is not to be found in purity and perfection - in seeking to be uncontaminated as the Pharisees did by avoiding others (the word "Pharisee" means "separate ones") - but holiness is found in trusting in God's mercy.
Secondly, Jesus was a Rabbi, a teacher. But whereas other rabbis saw their role as passing on the tradition they had received, Jesus taught in his own authority ("You have heard it said of old, but I say to you ..."). His message was that the values proclaimed by the religious elite were false values and that the time is imminently coming in which God's reign on earth will be manifest. The proclaiming of the Kingdom of God was a message of hope for those who lived, generation after generation, in despair. The dawning Kingdom would bring liberation for the poor people of the land, especially Salileans who were abused and humiliated by the Judean elites; but it also brought hope for the liberation from Rome. In Jesus, people began to see an echo of the legendary Judas Maccebeaus who, 150 years earlier, had taken back Palestine from the Syrians with but a small but powerful army. The Syrians had captured the temple and rededicated it to Zeus and sacrificed swine on the High Altar, had made it illegal to process a copy of the Torah, illegal to circumcise little boys and had turned the side courts of the Temple into brothels. Judas' victory is celebrated to this day as the Feast of the Rededication or Hanukkah.
Was Jesus also anointed by God for leadership for the people; to end the corruption in the Temple authority and rid the land of the puppet King Herod and his prince sons? In this coming Kingdom - a "new" Israel - would Jesus reign as a true King, another David?
And so, bearing the hopes of his people, Jesus was arrested by the Temple police, convicted by the priestly caste for blasphemy and then condemned by the Roman governor for Treason (there is no true King but Caesar).
On a cross he was executed - a brutal public execution, so brutal and painful it was thought to be an effective deterrent to other would-be revolutionaries - a death of deep shame as this rabbi was displayed naked under the sky (Jewish men did not expose their nakedness), bruised and beaten, whipped with a leather thong into which tiny bits of metal had been woven.
And the final shame: his broken, dead body was buried in a borrowed tomb in Jerusalem, instead of, as is Hebrew custom, to be gathered with his ancestors and buried in the family tomb in Nazareth.
And this is where this story begins today (Matthew 28:1-10). Some women came at the end of the Sabbath as it was unlawful to work on the Sabbath and impure to touch a dead body especially on holy day - they came to do the work women are often given to do, to wash and anoint and scent the body of a friend so tragically - but not uniquely - killed. And a messenger meets them at a now empty tomb and tells them that Jesus is in the Galilee, gather his friends and go home; there you will see him.
The Gospels tell us a number of fascinating stories about encounters with Jesus who was dead and who now lives. But clearly, whatever this thing was, it was no resuscitation, no near death experience. The Galilee was days march away, a distance no man as severely beaten as Jesus had been and as critically wounded, could ever undertake, much less win a race with former disciples elated to be given leave to "go home." As we read these stories, clearly whatever life Jesus lives now, is a new form of life, a life that has come out of death, not in spite of it. It is resurrected life.
How do we know that the resurrection happened? Because the Church happened. These frightened, persecuted, defeated men and women began living the life that Jesus had proclaimed and lived among them. The Kingdom that he foresaw became alive in their hearts and imaginations and deeds. And God's spirit dwelt within them and in spite of persecution, imprisonment, torture and death by gladiator or wild beasts, they continued to live in Resurrection Life.
Christians today are inheritors of this new life when we remember who we are. For those visiting here today (or reading this text from afar), let me tell you who we are here at St. Augustine's. We are a community that lives in expectation of lives transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit.
We are people who expect miracles but we also understand the difference between magic - the effort to get God to do our will - and true spirituality - the effort to make ourselves available to do God's will. (Sadly, some churches today are more into magic than spirituality). We are a people who pray for healing and know profoundly that healing is much more significant than a cure of disease, although we have witnessed cure as well. We are a people who seek to live by God's grace and not by rules and law. And what is grace? Philip Yancey once defined "grace" as the knowledge that there is nothing we can do to make God love us more and that there is nothing that we can so that will make God love us less. That God's love is a gift and in gratitude for such unmerited love, we are to love ourselves and others.
We are a people, who are learning not to seek meaning in things - materiality itself is a distraction and a false God - but rather who try to live with a vision of God's justice and who work and give of ourselves and our substance in witness to a vision of a world in which God's will is done in heaven as well as on earth and in which every human being on this planet is given the dignity that is theirs as a child of the Creator irregardless of what name they may call him (her) by.
Do we do this well? Of course not. We fall miserably short of these values, to be sure, but we have come to understand this place to be a place where God's spirit dwells and that we are, however imperfectly, surrendering an old life for a new one.
The Easter Message from an empty tomb is precisely this: to join the followers of Jesus - here or in some other church - in New Life in the dawning Kingdom.
Friend, what is it you need today to leave behind in the tomb of the dead in order to enter into a resurrected life?
Jesus invites you today: Come and follow me and I will give you life in this world and in the next. Amen!
Copyright © 2002 St. Augustine by-the-Sea
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