Reflection for Easter

A Sermon for the Feast of the Resurrection All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC March 31, 2013 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Isaiah 65:17-25 1 Corinthians 15:19-26 John 20:1-18

From John’s Gospel for today:

Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.

Tombs in Jesus’ day were not large affairs. They were caves carved out of the rock, and there was one big room about 4 by 6 feet and about 5 feet high, big enough to crouch in, with a slab to lay the body on, and there were several small holes off that room - the openings the size of a pizza oven and the depth the length of an adult - where a prepared body could be slid into. When a person died, the men of the family would carry the body to the burial site and place the body on the slab. Here the women of the family would wash the body and wrap it up with some spices to cover the smell of the decay. The body would then be placed into one of the openings and the opening covered over with rocks and masonry for about three years. Then the remains would be slid out, the bones placed into a small box, an ossuary, and the box would be buried.

However, if you were a capital criminal, your body would stay and decompose on the cross as a warning to others, until the bones fell to the ground and were finally thrown into a pit where other criminals’ bones had been tossed. Families were not allowed to mourn or bury criminals because that would be a sign that they were accomplices in the crime. But the political and religious authorities, wishing to avoid any marring of the festival time, allowed Jesus’ body to be taken down by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus and placed in Joseph’s own tomb which he would not need for several years. Joseph was doing a kindness since all of Jesus’ followers had fled to avoid possible arrest. It was too late in the day to prepare the body, and so the body was hastily wrapped up in a shroud and placed on the slab until the women could come and do their work after the Sabbath was over. And later there might be men - and that was unlikely since they were in hiding - showing up to place and wall the body in. That was the plan. But as the old Yiddish proverb goes, “Man plans and God laughs.”

Mary Magdalene could not mourn her loss, since she had work to do. It is one of the ways that we put off dealing with loss - we get busy so we don’t have to enter the empty place in our lives. The disciples could not mourn their loss because they were so busy being angry at themselves, each other, and the religious and political authorities. That is another way we avoid dealing with the empty place in our lives - if we can just find someone to blame. We tend to blame God if there is no other victim available; after all, if God were running a good and proper universe, this loss would not have happened. What we are really mourning is the re-discovery of the lack of control of the universe we want to have. In that loss of control we find what it means to be a creature rather than the creator. We find that we are fully human, and in this life, loss is part of being human. In the end we will lose everything, but in the midst of loss, we can gain our very selves. To be fully human is to give and let go and embrace a new life where we are not the center.

In our Lenten series we were looking at loss and how we find the strength to go through the loss into a new and deeper life. On the morning of the night we were to have the class on the loss of parents, I woke up as I was dreaming a song that I remember being popular when my father died, and I realized that the song pointed to the way I dealt with that loss. Does anybody remember a song in 1966 called “Winchester Cathedral”? 

 

The song is about a man who is sad over his girlfriend leaving him after he had planned to bowl her over with a day trip to Winchester Cathedral. The song goes:

Winchester Cathedral
You're bringing me down
You stood and you watched as
My baby left town

You could have done something
But you didn't try
You didn't do nothing
You let her walk by

Now everyone knows just how much I needed that gal
She wouldn't have gone far away
If only you'd started ringing your bell

In the song, the Cathedral, the religious outward sign of the presence and majesty of God, is a failure at being a good magic servant or genie who will grant all of our wishes. The song implies that God doesn’t care, and it reflects the popular idea of the 60’s that God and religion were anachronisms that outlived their usefulness in the human pursuit of individual happiness. The question “What has this God stuff done for me lately?” is answered “Not much it seems!”

When my father was dying, my older brother and I went to the hospital, my brother on leave from the Marines and I on leave from college. We were both facing the loss of my father and the way we avoided dealing with it was to fight with each other over the Vietnam War. Anger was easier to get to than the awareness of loss of control of our universe. I just kept feeding the anger against God, who could have done something and seemed not to try. For years, as long as I fed the anger against God’s incompetence to do what I wanted God to do, then I didn’t need to enter the depth of the loss. There are lots of ways to avoid going into those places that seems forsaken by God. We can use busyness, substances, denial, blame and anger. But the problem is that, when we get stuck in those ways, we cannot get into a new life.

Mary goes to the tomb and when there is no body on which to get busy, she runs away and will not enter into the God-forsaken place. The disciples cannot use their blame and anger anymore because they cannot figure out what is going on. The Gospel writer wants to tell us about how they hesitate to enter the tomb: if they enter the tomb they have to enter the God forsaken place. 

 

However, they enter into what they think is God forsaken and, while they do not understand what the deeper message of new life is, they come to an awareness that there is no place where God is forsaken. God has never left them- it may feel like it, but God’s spirit has been with them, ready to give strength in the time of loss. The older we get the more we realize that loss is part of life. The first necessary loss is when we lose our place as the center of the universe. Our ego has to lessen in order to give God room for God to bring in new life, to bring in what Isaiah in the first lesson refers to as the “creation of a new heaven and a new earth”.

When Mary returns to the tomb, Jesus as the Risen Christ tells her not to clutch on to him but to open her hands and heart so that we might all be reunited with God. For Mary, the letting go is the living into the new heaven and the new earth. There are two major feasts in the Christian year in which people show up at church - Christmas and Easter. Christmas is when we celebrate the divine entering the human and Easter is when we celebrate the human entering into the divine. These two feasts are mirrors of each other and they complement the fullness of each other. There is no real Christmas without Good Friday, there is no depth of nativity without death and resurrection, and there is no gain without redeemed loss.

Jesus dies because of the fear of the political and religious authorities of his time. They were afraid to let go of their power to control - a power that was only a fantasy in their minds, but they ordered their lives around this delusion. Jesus spent his ministry letting go of his life and ego, giving and forgiving, in order to participate in the ultimate reality of the ground of being. By giving up his life, Jesus becomes the Christ and teaches us how to live abundantly in this world and the next. Jesus dies because of the fear of others to lose control, and Jesus lives into the Christ because he gives up control as an entrance into a deeper life.

Today we celebrate an event that happened almost 2100 years ago, but if that singular event is all we celebrate than we miss the point. The meaning of the feast of the Resurrection is about today and the strength to allow losses to become doors through which we are able to receive from the power greater than ourselves the strength to live a life of letting go and giving ourselves for a love greater than our attachments. Following Christ we will rise to go deeper in this life and the next.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia, Alleluia!