“Participating in Resurrection’s Plot”
Prayer
Lord, you dwell within the limits and press beyond them all for borders are not borders with you and death is a gateway to life: take us to the thin places where hearts are thrown open wide, feet sink into earth and the sky sings a new song, through Jesus Christ, the passion of God. Amen.1
Growing up, one of my favourite writers was E.B. White who you probably know best for his two most famous children’s books, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. He also wrote numerous short stories for The New Yorker where White’s wife, Katharine, was the fiction editor.
She was also an avid gardener writing about the subject at length for the magazine. Her love of language and gardening was such a perfect marriage that, after her death, her husband, E.B., collected her most memorable essays into a book called: Onward and Upward in the Garden.
In the forward to that book White wrote about his wife’s final days in a poignant, loving, and memorable way as every fall she would get into a “shabby old raincoat much too long for her, put on put on a little round wool hat ... a pair of overshoes and proceed to [a] director’s chair [where] she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while [her assistant] produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate interment.”
As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion – the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.2
What we celebrate this day cannot be plotted out on a clipboard. It has too many twists and turns for charts and graphs. It doesn’t end where we would expect it to end and it doesn’t continue where we would expect it to continue. The plot of the resurrection doesn’t even begin the way most of us remember it beginning, with women rushing to the cemetery and the male disciples at home in their beds, it begins the day before. It began yesterday.
It all begins when “the learned ones” once again show up on Pontius Pilates’ doorstep. They may have been the first to believe that the resurrection just might happen so they go to the only one they can think of who, they also believe, has the power to stop it. They go to Pilate. He was the Roman authority. He had the power of the empire behind him. He had given them what they wanted once, maybe he will do it again. All they wanted was a little assurance. All they wanted was something that would give them some peace of mind. If someone was “plotting a resurrection” they wanted to stop that plot in its tracks.
“Sir, {they say to Pilate in their clandestine meeting} we just remembered that that liar announced while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will be raised.’ We’ve got to get that tomb sealed until the third day. There’s a good chance his disciples will come and steal the corpse and then go around saying, ‘He’s risen from the dead.’ Then we’ll be worse off than before, the final deceit surpassing the first.”3
Pilate only wanted those guys out of his palace. He just wanted everybody to move on and get this tawdry business behind him, so simply says: “‘You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.’ So, they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.”4
So, there it was, “done and dusted” as the British might say. Or, in the words of Stevie Wonder, “Signed, sealed and delivered.” With the tomb sealed and a guard posted there would be no way Jesus would get out. This resurrection plot would come to an unceremonious end before it got completely out of hand.
Certainly, that’s what the women expected. While the Mark and Luke remember the woman bringing spices, to do for their dear friend Jesus what there wasn’t time to do after he died, all Matthew remembers them wanting was go to his tomb and have a look. When they got of bed they expected Jesus to be exactly where they left him, “sealed in a stone-cold tomb.” They never expected the plot twist that followed.
It is here that the plot becomes, well, earthshaking.
Don’t you just love the way Matthew has set the scene?
The woman walking expect nothing. The guards on their stake-out of a tomb expect nothing. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the earth begins to move under their feet. There is a rolling stone and an angel perched triumphantly upon it smiling, no doubt, a broad smile. “The guards shook with fear when they saw him and fell into a dead faint.”5
These soldiers that “the alliance of political retainers, chief priests, and Roman governor Pilate had been dispatched to keep Jesus in the tomb ‘shook and became like dead men.’ As the angel proclaims resurrection and marks the tomb as a place of life. The demonstration of divine presence ... renders Rome’s military lifeless.”6 It all is there to show us that God, whom Jesus proclaimed, can’t be stopped by armed guards and an official seal.
That would be more than enough for any good plot but this one continues on a personal level when the two women hear from that very same smug and satisfied angel the central message of the Resurrection and of our faith. “Do not be afraid ... He is not here for he has been raised, as he said.”7
Running back to tell the other disciples they bump into Jesus who tells them where the plot will continue. Because this day had been more than they, or anyone else for that matter, had expected, Jesus had to repeat the angel’s “fear not” but then he ties it to a command, “go tell my brothers {and sisters} to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”8
This plot doesn’t end in a cemetery because Jesus is leading them back into life. The events in the graveyard can only get them so far. In order for the plot of the Resurrection to be completed it must be lived out in life, their lives, your life, and mine.
Recently I heard a podcast that featured Dr. Amy-Jill Levine who holds the very unique position of being both the Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. She was asked what she believed about the resurrection, and she said: “It isn’t about whether you can catch it on a camera, but can you see what the payoff is? I think the followers of Jesus generally experienced him as being alive and it changed their lives. Look,” she went on, “I’ve seen Elvis twice on West End Avenue pumping gas, but it didn’t change my life. The people who saw Jesus [the resurrected Christ] it changed their lives.”9
“They were beaten, whipped, stoned, and crucified, yet they would never cease proclaiming the risen Jesus. And it worked! Perhaps the most obvious reason not to dismiss the disciples’ resurrection experiences out of hand is that, among all the other failed messiahs who came before and after him, Jesus alone is still called messiah.”10
That is where we figure into the plot. We may not be asked to do what the original disciples of Jesus did, but we are call to announce bravely and truly to the world and the powers there-in that they do not have the last word.
We may feel as powerless as a woman wearing a tattered raincoat and mud-soaked wellies charting where flowers should grow in her spring garden, in the hope that she might someday see them bloom.
Our job as followers of Christ, the risen one, is to proclaim that not only did the third day come for the disciples but, in God’s great resurrection plan, the third day will come for us and our world.
We proclaim to the preening, performance politicians of our day, who make Pilate and his kind seem like Political Science 101 dropouts, that the third day will come.
We proclaim to those who put more faith in their guns that kill God’s children and leaves them dying and crying, than the God who saves them, that the third day will come.
We proclaim to those who, based on years of history and tradition, have relegated women to a subservient and frivolous status, that the third day will come.
We proclaim to any who seek to divide and diminish any one of God’s children because of their race, creed, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, that the third day will come.
We proclaim to those who continue to battle over which part of the land where Jesus lived that is called Holy, is theirs and will do anything to keep it or win it back, that the third day will come.
We proclaim that because in the cross of Christ God was reconciling the world and in the resurrection of Christ was proclaiming its ultimate redemption that the third day has come.
We proclaim the plot line of the resurrection: Fear not! He is not dead but alive, and he is going ahead of you and me, in the days out front of us.
We proclaim that we will see him in all those days in every pain and tragedy, every joy and moment of bliss, we will see him.
We proclaim that until the curtain falls in the final moments of our last act and the plot line of our lives is complete, when our days and years are gone, we proclaim that he will find us, and we will see him, and he will greet us.
Until then we proclaim: Fear not. Do not be afraid ... for Christ our Lord who was dead is risen and is going ahead of us into the future.
Earthly future. Eternal future. There is nothing to fear.
Christ is Risen! Christ is with us! Christ is risen and with us, indeed!
Sermon preached at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Saint Luke - Chicago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQf9xb94mio
April 9, 2023
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1. Steven Shakespeare, “Easter Eve,” in Prayers for an Inclusive Church (Church Publishing, 2009), p. 20.
2. Katharine White, Sergeant Angell and E. B. White, in Onward and Upward in the Garden (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux , 1997). p. iii.
3. St. Matthew 27:62-64. . (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language, with Topical Concordance (NavPress, 2005).]
4. St. Matthew 27:65-67. (RSV) [RSV=The Revised Standard Version]
5. St. Matthew 28:4. (TLB) (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible. (Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, 1971)]
6. Warren Carter, “Matthew 28:1-10. "Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” in Connections. A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, ed. Thomas G. Long, vol. 2 (Louisville, KY: Westminister|John Knox Press, n.d.), pp. 204-206.
7. St. Matthew 28:6. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]'
8. St. Matthew 28:10. (NRSV)
9 Amy-Jill Levine and James D. Howell, “Jesus And...Holy Week,” Myers Park United Methodist Church Weekly Bible Study webcast (Charlotte, North Carolina, April 6, 2022).
10. Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York, NY: Random House, 2013), 175.
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