What a week it has been for the Disciples. It began with them watching as Jesus entered into Jerusalem riding the donkey, going through the city gates with the crowds cheering him on, exuberantly welcoming him as their Messiah as they cried out, “Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna! Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord.”
And then within a matter of days, everything was flipped upside down, turned inside out as they watched Jesus tragically exiting that city, carrying his cross back through the gates. This time the crowd was jeering him, taunting him, mocking him, crying out, “crucify him!” Jesus went to Golgotha, and there he was murdered by the state in collaboration with the religious authorities, a combination that doesn’t turn out all that well. And there He died.
For the Disciples, it is not just Jesus’s body that was nailed to that cross. It was also their expectations and their dreams that were crucified with him. It was not just Jesus’s body that was laid in the tomb, it was also their very hope. It is in the wake of that disorienting trauma that we find ourselves this morning in our Gospel reading. Early in the morning, Mary Magdalene goes down to the tomb, and there she discovers that the tomb is empty. She and the other Disciples didn’t know what to make of this at the time, but it does not take them very long to figure out that this is good news. This is good news, indeed, for Christ is risen. Jesus has been raised from the dead, showing them that death does not get the final word, God does. Hatred does not get the final word, love does. Despair does not get the final word, hope does.
Over the coming months and years, and down through the generations, other followers of Christ have discovered over centuries and millennia that what happened on that first Easter morning was not an historic anomaly. It was a present reality. For St. Paul says, Christ’s resurrection was the first fruits of those who have died, the first fruits of that which was to come. The resurrection is not just a thing of the past, but it is a way of life. God is working in this world, bringing life out of death, love out of hate, hope out of despair.
We sang in the opening hymn, Jesus Christ is risen today. Not Jesus Christ was risen two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ is risen, present tense. Christ is risen in your life in this very moment. Jesus Christ is risen today. Death still does not get the final word. In all the pain and all the suffering and all the darkness and all the death and all the despair of this world, this truth still rings out: Jesus Christ is risen today.
God is still showing us this truth and inviting us to participate in it, to become one with Jesus in the resurrection.
Many years ago I went to Jerusalem for the first time, the first of three pilgrimages there. I met an Anglican Episcopalian priest who spoke to our group about all the challenges that he and other Palestinian Christians face in the Holy Land. At the end of the lecture, which was rather despairing, I asked him, how do you find hope in the midst of all this? And he said, we live in the city of the empty tomb.
The tomb is still empty, my friends. Death and darkness and despair are still trying to cry out, but Jesus Christ is still risen, the tomb is still empty, and we still have hope of a still more better way, the way of love, the way of life.
Jesus Christ is risen today.
AMEN
