Alleluia The Lord is Risen!
He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!
We often think of Easter as being the end of Jesus’ story. After years of preaching, healing and challenging the religious authorities, he was betrayed and died. But then, like all good heroes, he turned the tables on his opponents in the ultimate triumph and rose from the dead.
This morning I want to suggest to you that the resurrection is not even the climax of the story, let alone the end. It all begins with Creation, or rather it begins with God who is limitlessly creative. Out of the ever active love and creativity of the Trinity, God created a universe which she longed to be in joyful communion with her – like another player in the Trinity – but she longed for this universe to want to be in relationship with the God head; to choose to dance with God. And so she gave the creatures of the earth free will. Maybe she gave creatures of other planets free will too, but we don’t know that story so we get to stay with ours.
She knew that it would take more than just hoping and calling for humankind to come and play within the Trinity, especially given our tendency toward violence, and so she herself in the person of the Christ became human. Christ incarnated as God and human and we called him Jesus. Once he was grown, he spent three years living and teaching and healing. He showed us what it means to be God and human. He called us to be peacemakers and to love not only one another but our enemies too. But the darkness of humanity could not stand the light he brought and so he was betrayed and killed.
Then came the Sunday morning when the disciples, still in shock and ravaged with grief, went back to his tomb. They couldn’t imagine what had happened when his body wasn’t there. Mary was crying, stricken with grief that not only was Jesus dead but now his body had been taken, when she saw two angels and then Jesus himself. But she didn’t recognize him. She didn’t recognize him until he spoke her name.
The story doesn’t stop there. Jesus tells her, “go to my brothers and say to them, `I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'” Jesus’ life goes on, Mary’s life goes on, the disciples’ life goes on, our life goes on. But everything has changed. The one Jesus called Abba is no longer just Jesus’ Dad but the disciples’ too. Their relationship with the Trinity has changed irrevocably. The invitation was always there, but now God and human have merged in an unimaginable way. God has incarnated as human and human has become immortal with God. For this is not simply a near death experience or a bringing back to life like Lazarus – Jesus fully and completely died and came out the other side. His post-resurrection body was not the same as the one that died – the disciples consistently don’t recognize him when they first see him and he could suddenly be where he wasn’t before, yet his body bore the marks of the crucifixion and he could still eat. He was not a ghost. He had come through death and showed that it is not the end.
However hard the dark side of humanity tried to get rid of the light, it failed. Christ was raised from the dead.
Most of us have had the experience of working towards some important goal – perhaps graduation, or a wedding – and then of life continuing on, yes we’re proud to have graduated, yes it was a lovely wedding, but life goes on afterwards.
Life goes on for the disciples and life goes on for Christ. Soon he will return to the Godhead. And soon they will experience God in a new way themselves as the Holy Spirit comes upon not just one or two but upon many people. The Godhead comes in a new way to live with and in humanity.
And it is still not the end of the story.
In the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the hotel manager, Sonny frequently reassures his residents, “Everything will be all right in the end… if it’s not all right then it’s not yet the end.”
I think this is the Christian message in a nutshell. Because Jesus the Christ died and rose again, conquering the powers of darkness and showing that death is not the ultimate enemy; because through his incarnation and his obedience to his calling to reunite human and God; everything will be all right in the end. Christ is the ultimate end of creation. At some point in the future, everything will be gathered up in the Christ just as it all started with the Christ, and it will be all right.
But that doesn’t mean we get to relax and do what we want. Mary went directly to the other disciples to tell them the amazing news, “I have seen the Lord.” And soon they were on a roller-coaster ride, finding out what it meant to have a Risen immortal Lord. Soon they were busy changing the face of the world as they spread Jesus’ message of hope and reconciliation.
And that’s what we get to do. Many people are afraid and there is good reason to be with the climate catastrophe upon us and a lack of integrity in our leaders. But we know that “Everything will be all right in the end… if it’s not all right then it’s not yet the end.”
The disciples thought it was the end when Jesus was killed so brutally and so completely. There was no doubt in their minds that he was dead. When Mary saw that his body was gone she asked where it had been moved. And in that moment of extreme sorry, Jesus spoke to her. Our world is full of sorrow. Our hearts are broken many, many times. And in those moments, God is right there with us even though we may not recognize him.
But it is not yet the end. And our job is to cooperate with God in her work of creation; to recreate ourselves as we model our thoughts and our behavior on that of Christ who spoke words of peace and brought healing not contempt and anger; to recreate our world as we work to mend relationships and to build community based not on exclusion but on the inclusion of God’s reign. And so Easter continues to glow and to grow in our hearts and our lives.
So, Easter is one part in the process of creation, in the process of creating a world which is in loving relationship with the Trinity, a world where Christ is honored as the Lord of all. And we have the tremendous privilege of participating in making the New Creation, the post-Easter world where everything is coming right in the end.
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