Easter Day

Acts, 10:34-43
1 Corinthians, 15:1-11
Mark, 16:1-8

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen. 

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GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME!  I’m delighted that you are here.  The day is glorious; the music is magnificent; the flowers are stunning; and, you’re looking just as good.  Yves Saint Laurent once suggested that elegance is forgetting what you’re wearing, but I’m glad that before you forgot what you’re wearing, so many of you thought about it.  Easter colors – vernal greens, buttery yellows, vivid sky blues – express our hopes as well as the season and renewed energy, the return of light and life.  It’s sacramental, an outward sign along with the trumpets and flowers proclaiming joy, fecundity, energy, lightness, brightness – the climax of the year.

But if we were to paint today’s gospel, there would be no Easter colors, no pink, no purple, no peach, and no pastels at all.  In Mark’s gospel, the sun has risen, but the shadows are long and dark, the feeling is cold and hushed, the vision is gray and fuzzy, the scene is troubling and shocking.  The story is out of joint with our emotions.  We’ve spent the last week following Jesus through betrayal, rejection, suffering, and death, and reflecting on our part of it.  There’s been more than enough emotional trauma, a week of confusion, introspection, contrition, with feelings of sorrow, loneliness, even horror.  We’re ready to move forward into triumph, clarity, pleasure.  We’re here to rejoice and celebrate.

But not Mark.  He’s not welcoming a happy morning; hell hardly appears vanquished.  Mark does not give us a resurrection appearance, only hints.  Mark ends his gospel with silence, astonishment, trembling, and mostly fear.  He ends his gospel, “they were afraid.”  Although Jesus has said several times that he will be raised up from the dead, no one gets it.  All they know is that he is gone and that with him, their hopes.  They’re left, as we’d be, with disappointment and fear.

When confronted with a frightening situation or person, we think less and react more.  One of the most primitive parts of our brain, our amygdalae, two almond sized bits deep down near the base of the brain, the fear center, take over and cut out communication from the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that does the higher functions, that gives us personality.  Fear kills humor, mercy, joy, creativity, intelligence – the things that make us human.  Fear is why we might become a blubbering fool asking for a date or why we might attack a perceived threat without thinking things through.  When we’re frightened, when we’re intensely stressed or anxious, we’re stupid – sometimes very, very stupid. 

This is what’s going on, or not going on, in the brains of the women who show up to anoint Jesus.  I love Mark’s gospel in part because he’s very honest about the Church and about Christians.  Again and again and again, he points out how the disciples didn’t understand Jesus.  Mark doesn’t shirk from showing us the disciples as fearful, bumbling, self-interested, pompous, impetuous, presumptuous, tedious – that they embodied all of our weaknesses, and yet they are saints – loved and cherished by God.

The women who go to the tomb had their world turned upside down – not only was Jesus dead, but his corpse wasn’t in the tomb.  Many Jews then believed that there would be a bodily resurrection of the righteous dead, but this would happen when God acted to renew the entire world at the end of time.  It would have been inconceivable to them for a resurrection to occur within history.

Instead of finding Jesus’ corpse in the tomb, they find a young man, usually assumed to be an angel.  In the Bible when an angel shows up, often the first thing the angel says is, “Do not be afraid.”  Angels are not silly, light-hearted, cherubs bouncing around in the clouds.  Angels are frightening.  And if you were one of the women, and you opened a tomb expecting a corpse but found an angel, or even a young man, wouldn’t you flip out?

The young man knows who they’re looking for and says, “He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.”  The disciples had abandoned Jesus, had denied him, had run from him.  No one in Mark’s gospel remained faithful to Jesus, and now they are directed to meet him.

Imagine how we’d react to a message from a crucified person – a person we’d abandoned as he’s being murdered – telling us he’ll meet us soon, that he’s still got business with us.  We’d recognize that he’s got a score to settle.  We’d think, “How’s he going to mess with me?”  Jesus says, “I’ll meet you in Galilee.”  It’s like, “I’ll meet you at the O.K. Corral.”  If you believe God wants justice, if you believe the bits of the Old Testament about God getting vengeance on his enemies, wouldn’t you be afraid?  This guy’s coming back from the dead to get you.  It’s a cheesy horror movie.  It’s Freddy Krueger.  It’s Jason.  It’s Michael Myers.  It’s Chuckie.  

Mark ends his gospel before the disciples have met the risen Jesus, leaving us in the moment of terror and fear.  But we know where this story goes.  They don’t meet Jesus’ wrath, but his love.  There’s not justice; there’s a fresh start, an invitation to renewal.

Before they meet the risen Christ, the disciples assume a religion of fear.  Jesus offers a religion of hope.  The Resurrection changes everything for them and, if we allow it, for us.  We can move from fear to hope, darkness to light, death to new life.

And despite the fact that we, unlike his disciples, live completely on the other side of the Resurrection, all of us still succumb, at least sometimes, to the religion of fear.  Religion of fear encourages us to be suspicious of others and to separate ourselves, especially from those who are different.  Religion of fear makes us sectarian, wary and aloof in relationships, fearful of contamination.  Religion of fear we use to feel superior to other people, to justify a lack of learning and inquiry, to assure ourselves that we see the whole story, to make ourselves the judge and measure of reality, to hold ourselves as righteous – holier than thou.  Religion of fear makes our world smaller, more rigid, easily digestible.  Religion of fear gives us the illusion of certainty and control.  Religion of fear treats sorrow, doubt, and failure as shameful.  And the real shame is that Christianity sometimes is used as a religion of fear.  When that happens, Christianity is not being true to itself, and it is not being true to its vision of the Resurrection.

Our fear is the same fear that the disciples had on their way to meet the risen Christ.  Consciously or unconsciously, each of us worries: “after what I’ve done – the way I’ve hurt others and been unfaithful to God, what’s he going to do to me when we meet?  How’s he going to mess with me?  How could he love me?”  The good news is that he can love us and does love us – always.  And that’s the bedrock of true and healthy religion, the religion of hope.

Religion of hope leads us to acknowledge that even though we don’t understand all that much, we are loved; that life is full of mystery, sorrow, and aberration, and we don’t have to be fearful of it.  Sure of God’s love, we inhabit a larger world, appreciate new and strange things, see things we’d normally ignore.  Authentic faith expands our minds and our hearts, our sense of the possible, and the range and depth of our emotions and connections.  It melts the hardness of our heart.  It invites us to renewal and new beginnings – now and in the future.

The Resurrection gives us a religion of hope.  We can be brave, courageous, confident in every situation in life, including facing all of its injustices, indignities, humiliations, horrors.  It means that we don’t need to hide under a rock, but rather we rejoice in being the apple of God’s eye.  God finds our inner selves as beautiful and attractive as we’ve made our outward selves today.  When we forget that God thinks we’re special, that each of us individually is special to him, then we begin trying to make ourselves special, and pretty soon we’ve got a religion of fear, holding ourselves as superior to others and all the other ugly bits.

All the things we beat ourselves up about – how we lose our temper, let others down, make fools of ourselves, ignore responsibilities, hurt others, feel jealousies and resentments – these don’t diminish our specialness to God, his love for us.  He always invites us to be his saints, saints like the disciples, complete with weaknesses and failures, but moving from fear to hope.  In Galilee, beholding their friend, the risen Jesus, the disciples discovered that “perfect love casts out all fear.” (1 John 4:18)

Kiss your loved ones, eat some pork, and have a happy Easter.

+ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.