Easter—A Long Time Comin'
Texts: Luke 24:1-12 and Isaiah 65:17-25
“But. BUT… that’s the first word in today’s Gospel reading. “But on the first day of the week…” To understand, one needs to go back to the beginning of the sentence located at the end of Luke’s 23rd chapter.
“On the Sabbath day they rested according to the commandment.” It could very well have been the end of the passion story. Jesus had been betrayed by his own follower, Judas Iscariot. He had been on trial before both the temple leaders and the secular court. Though he could find no legal justification for condemning Jesus to death, Pilate acquiesced to the mob that gathered in the street outside the governor’s palace. The crucifixion took place; Jesus died; and a wealthy man, who heretofore had been a silent admirer of Jesus, saw that the corpse was laid to rest.
End of story. End of Jesus’ life. End of the traveling, teaching, and healing. End of the community that had formed around this rabbi from Nazareth. Well, maybe, maybe not. The disciples needed some time to figure out what was next. They needed a chance to rest. But the story of Jesus, the story of his life with the disciples, could have ended here: “On the Sabbath day, they rested.”
“But.” I lived for a while on the plains of Eastern Montana. The land was flat and the roads straight. You could travel miles with scarcely a curve in the road, and certainly no traffic lights. Sometimes we’d drive west and over the mountains to Idaho. I was always amazed as we crossed the mountains. The road wound up the Rockies segment by segment connected by switchback turns. You’d travel a mile or two, then make a sharp turn and travel in the opposite direction, come to another switchback which turned you around, and so on.
That little conjunction, “but” is like a switchback in the Easter story. It appears seven times in Luke’s account of early Easter morning. Just about the time you think you know where the story’s headed, there’s a “but.”
On the Sabbath day, they rested. It could have been the conclusive statement at the end of the story. But, on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb. The Sabbath rest was not the end of the story for the women.
They needed to go to the tomb once more. There was some unfinished business to attend to. We might think the story is finished, but for them, there were a few last things to be taken care of. The corpse needed to be rubbed down with spices. One last act of love mingled with tears. Here’s the first switchback. We, the readers, think we have come to the end of the story. But the story continues.
Unlike some of the other Gospel accounts, the women in Luke’s story did not seem surprised or perturbed when they found that the stone closing the entrance to the cave had been rolled away. Maybe they assumed that others of the disciples had also come early to the grave. Without so much as a thought about the open entrance, they stepped into the dark interior of the cave in which the corpse had been left.
But. … there was no body there. They squinted their eyes against the cool darkness and looked all around. Nothing. No body. Not on any of the ledges carved into the rock. And while they were shaking their heads in dismay and confusion, two men appeared.
The women were terrified. But—here we are again at another of those switchbacks, but, the men spoke to them.
“He is not here, but he is risen.” Another switchback. The angel’s words contradicted all the assumptions that had brought the women to the tomb. They had come looking for a corpse, but the corpse was gone. They had come to anoint and massage for one last time the cold body of this man they had loved. They had come to assuage their own grief and sense of helplessness. And now, a few words from a terrifyingly brilliant apparition shattered all those assumptions.
The angel reminded the women of Jesus’ own words about how he would be handed over and crucified and on the third day rise again. The women remembered and ran back to where the disciples were staying. They told the others about what they had seen, but these words seemed to those who heard them, to be an idle tale.
Another switchback. The whole story, which had shaken these women to the core, was dismissed by the eleven as the delirious ranting of overwrought women.
But, one of the eleven, Peter, got up and ran out to the tomb to see for himself, and when he saw only the linen cloths and no body there, he was amazed at what had happened.
So, what do you make of this story? How do you respond to the church’s story that God indeed raised Jesus from the dead?
Perhaps there is no portion of the Bible that raises as many doubts among believers as the story of Jesus’ resurrection. We joke sometimes that the initials of our denomination, UCC, really means “Unitarians Considering Christ.” There may be some Christian congregations gathered this morning where almost everyone affirms the resurrection of Jesus and the divinity of Christ, but that’s not how I’d characterize Pilgrim.
In our congregation, a significant number of folks admit to reservations about the resurrection. I’ve heard people who appreciate the wisdom of Jesus’ teaching add, “but I don’t believe in the resurrection.” And I’ve heard people here talk about Jesus as teacher and prophet and martyr, and add, “but I’m not so sure that I believe in his divinity.”
We value spiritual and theological diversity in this congregation, and if you are one of those who respond to the Easter stories with that little word, “but”, I will not chastise you or attempt to dissuade you. But I would like to take this opportunity to talk for a minute about the nature of faith.
It occurred to me this week that faith is a matter of living with cognitive dissonance. In 1956 the US psychologist Leon Festinger introduced this theory in the field of social psychology. His theory was that when a person’s experience runs counter to his or her beliefs and assumptions, that person experiences psychological dissonance. Most people find this dissonance unpleasant, so unpleasant that they are motivated to reduce the stress they feel in one of two ways: either they discount the experience, or they change their assumptions and beliefs to better match the experience.
The women who went to the tomb that first Easter morning had every reason to seek Jesus among the dead. He had died. And the dead, stay dead. But somehow, in the days that followed Jesus’ death, those who had been his closest friends experienced his presence in profound ways; ways so profound, it challenged their assumption that the dead stay dead. The empty tomb was not the source of their belief in the risen Jesus—it was their experience of Jesus’ palpable presence among them that gave rise to these Easter morning stories about an empty tomb. New Testament theologian Frederick Grant says the stories of the empty tomb were not the source of faith in the risen Jesus, but the consequence of experience with a risen Jesus.
Belief in a risen Jesus began, not with stories about the empty tomb—that seemed nothing more than an idle tale. The first believers began to talk about a risen Jesus because of their experiences of his presence: Mary heard him, unmistakably, in the garden. Thomas put his finger in the marks left by the nails. Cleopas and another disciple sat down to the dinner table and were absolutely sure when they saw how him reach for the bread. Peter smelled smoke from a fire someone had built on the beach, and when he went to investigate, there was Jesus, preparing breakfast. There was only one explanation—the tomb must have been empty on Easter morning.
Maybe one of the reasons we find it hard to talk about our own personal faith is that so often matters of faith place us into cognitive dissonance. Let me give you an example from my own life, my own life of prayer: I don’t believe that God orchestrates every event of my life; nor do I believe that God can be manipulated by my prayers. And yet I believe that when I pray, events in my life seem to suggest that God indeed heard my prayer. I live with that cognitive dissonance. I’ve learned to say, this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s what I’ve come to believe. A friend of mine puts it this way, “I don’t believe that God answers prayer, but I believe in co-incidences that happen for good in my life. I also notice that there are more such co-incidences when I pray, and when I stop praying, there are far fewer.”
Christian faith is more than a matter of living an ethical life; it’s more than adopting a particular philosophy; it’s more than working for some humanitarian end. Christian faith is about trusting a power capable of action that defies all the assumptions that make sense in this world. Christian faith is a willingness to live with cognitive dissodance.
We make reasonable assumptions about the meaning of justice—and discover that the biblical notion of justice favors the least and the lost. We make reasonable assumptions about what it means to forgive—and discover that the biblical notion of forgiveness requires a much larger heart than we ever guessed. We make reasonable assumptions about the future—and are told that God is just as likely to do a new thing, quite beyond our imagining.
We assume that the dead stay dead, but the resurrection of Jesus challenges our assumptions about death as a permanent end to life.
That little conjunction, “but” that shows up so often in Luke’s story—we do not need to be embarrassed if we use it in expressing our faith. It’s a word that can help us hold things together when we experience the dissonance between our reasonable assumptions and God’s transforming power.
If you come to the Easter story each year with full faith in all that happened; with conviction that Jesus was raised and is now Lord and Savior; with a sense of triumph over all evil and sin—blessings to you. I envy you.
But if you come to the Easter story and your soul and your intellect feel somehow caught in an uncomfortable tension; if you’d like to believe but just can’t quite; if you respond to the story with words like, “yes, but. . . .” –blessings to you, too.
Faith didn’t come immediately to the first disciples. The women’s story remained, for quite a while, nothing more than an idle tale. It was only much later, after seeing and hearing and touching the risen Jesus that anyone believed stories about an empty tomb. For even those first followers of Jesus, faith was a long time coming. Amen.