March 23, 2008

Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus and with tenderness wrapped it in clean linen cloth and placed it in his own new tomb he had hewn in rock. Then Joseph rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away. Soldiers were sent to secure the tomb by sealing the stone and stood guard before the massive stone--a massive stone sealing and securing the reality and finality of the death of Jesus.

Sabbath Saturday past and Sunday came. And with Sunday, a new week began. And more than a new week, a new world and a whole new reality opened up--Resurrection reality.

The women arrived, Matthew tells us, just to look at the tomb. That’s all. Just to stand and look at the reality of death and the finality of the grave, helpless and hopeless to change any of it. Death won in the end and that’s the way life is. That massive stone stood to remind them that death is where it always leads and ends. The fact of death is the way of the world. All they could do was stand helplessly and look at the tomb.

All of a sudden, the ground heaved beneath them and earth’s foundations were shaking. Matthew alone tells us an earthquake struck that Easter morning as an angel-a messenger of God--came and rolled back the stone, not to let Jesus out. No, the angel rolled the stone away to show the women the tomb was empty. He was already gone, alive again and on the move. “I know you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here. He has been raised from the dead!” No wonder the earth shakes!

The Easter angel proclaims news of an event that rocks the world and our own little personal worlds. Something in the mind and might of God has happened that shakes the foundations of life as it is, locked in the grip of the powers of death. Something has happened that sends tremors through our world of our death-dealing doings. God has done something that affects everything and nothing will ever be the same again. Nothing is untouched. Cosmic in proportion. Earth shaking. “He is not here. He has been raised.”

I like the way William Willimon puts it. Easter is about God “who creates a way when there was no way, a God who makes war on evil until evil is undone, a God who raised dead Jesus just to show us who’s in charge here…On the cross, the world did all it could to Jesus. At Easter, God did all God could to the world.” God took the cruel cross and turned it in to the means of triumph over sin and evil. At Easter, God invaded the tomb to defy and defeat death. And the earth shook.

And in that moment as their world shook the women in the cemetery meet Jesus risen from the dead and are the first of his followers to worship the living Lord. It was the Easter earthquake that moved them from fearful death to joyous life, and the after shocks continue to move us, too, out of fear of death into joyous life. We are moved from looking at the tomb with fear to celebrating life with joy in the presence of the living Lord.

Have you noticed the powerful grip the fear of death has on people, not only outside the church but also inside? Out of fear of death, people live in denial of death. Our culture is obsessed with death avoidance. We resist thinking about it or talking about it. Such talk is considered morbid and maudlin and undesirable and unwelcomed. Death is often seen as an entrapment and we’ll do all we can to free ourselves from that eventuality.

I remember reading of a person who had a little bird in a cage that he found dead one morning. He was so afraid of his small son seeing the lifeless bird that he hurried to the pet store to buy a new one to put in the cage before his son discovered what happened. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t the same bird and never could be. What he feared most was to avoid death at all costs, even if it means deceiving ourselves or others. To fear death is to spend our days on earth with the stone sealed and secured to the door of the tomb.

The Easter reality and mighty act of God we celebrate this day has emptied death of its powerful grip on our lives. The resurrection of Jesus turns death from the end of the road into exodus to the future. As St. Augustine said so beautifully about death:

We shall rest and we shall see,

We shall see and we shall know,

We shall know and we shall love,

We shall love and we shall praise.

Behold our end which is no end.

With and in and through the living Christ and love of Christ, the grave becomes the gate to glory, the door of exist from this brief, temporal life and the door of entrance into life beyond what any eye has seen or ear has heard or mind has ever imagined or conceived.

I have always been moved, at times to tears, by that last scene in the last book of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. Throughout the chronicles, as you remember, some children pass through the back of a wardrobe to find themselves in the enchanted land of Narnia, where they meet a majestic lion named Aslan, who protects them in times of danger and gives them strength and courage on their journey. As book 7, The Last Battle, ends, the children and their parents are killed in a train accident, and they are left confused and frightened in death, where they found themselves “walking together…up towards mountains higher than you could see in this world even if they were there to be seen…The light ahead was growing stronger. And then they again meet Aslan, coming to them, leaping down from cliff to cliff like a living cataract of power and beauty. And he tells the children whose life has ended on earth in England: The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended; this is the morning.”

And the storyteller tells us: the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories…But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

In the end of every loss is a beginning. And at the end of life on this planet, it shall be the beginning of Chapter One of the Great Story, which goes on for ever, and every chapter is better than the one before.

When we meet Jesus in his resurrection power and presence, there is nothing to fear in the face of death. We are free to value life now more and more in all its preciousness, as temporal as it is. And the risen Lord sets us free to face death and embrace death fearlessly as entrance into God’s Great never-ending story. In the company of Jesus with trust and joy, we thank God for life today and we celebrate with joy life today. And we joyously anticipate the journey of the last breath as a grand leave-taking to our heavenly home where we fully belong, where we are given final and full healing of our brokenness, and where our spirit can soar and grow in praise of God. As the late Henri Nouwen wrote, “Confronting our death ultimately allows us better to live. And better to dance with God’s joy…”

Our joyous life is our witness to Jesus Christ, his transforming love, his ceaseless forgiveness, his triumphant death, his glorious resurrection, and his living presence. In your living and in your dying, may you know the power of the risen Lord. He is risen. He is risen indeed!

Prayer: Glory be to you, God, our strength and our redeemer. The vacant cross and empty tomb vindicate your claim that the love which suffers is the love that saves. So fill your people with joy and your church with celebration that the world may know that your holy Son Jesus is not a dead hero we commemorate, but the living Lord we worship, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be our praise forever. Amen. (Prayer from Iona Community)