Very early in the morning on the first day of the week, the women went to the tomb, bringing the fragrant spices they had prepared. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they went in, they didn’t find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 They didn’t know what to make of this. Suddenly, two men were standing beside them in gleaming bright clothing. 5 The women were frightened and bowed their faces toward the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? 6 He isn’t here, but has been raised. Remember what he told you while he was still in Galilee, 7 that the Human One[a] must be handed over to sinners, be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” 8 Then they remembered his words. 9 When they returned from the tomb, they reported all these things to the eleven and all the others. 10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles. 11 Their words struck the apostles as nonsense, and they didn’t believe the women. 12 But Peter ran to the tomb. When he bent over to look inside, he saw only the linen cloth. Then he returned home, wondering what had happened. (CEB)
Easter 2013
The
nine of us American missionaries stood in a semi-circle around our tour guide,
a nurse at the HIV/AIDS clinic in this small town in KwaZulu-Natal, the region
in eastern South Africa, not far from the coast of the Indian Ocean, which of
all the regions in the country had the highest rate of HIV/AIDS. We had come bearing some supplies for her
clinic, but we had also come here to educate ourselves, to learn about the
force of this plague that had been set in motion halfway around the world. She fielded our questions gamely but
somberly…
How many people in South Africa have
AIDS? About 5.5 million.
How many of them die? About 900 every day.
And
the question that I remember as the one that felt like an ice pick driven
through my heart:
How many of the HIV tests that you
administer at this clinic come back positive?
About 90%.
And
all of this was happening in a country where, that very year, the national
government’s minister of health publicly claimed that a diet of garlic, lemons,
and olive oil can cure HIV.
I
had braced myself for this mission. I
had some semblance of an idea in my head of what I might be facing, but
nothing—nothing at all—could have prepared me…or anyone, really.
Because
I was, in a manner, doing exactly what Jesus’ female disciples are doing here,
in Luke’s Gospel, which is what the angels accuse them of when they encounter
the empty tomb:
Why are you looking for the living among
the dead?
Luke
does not record what answer, if any, the women give. But I can imagine what it might be:
We are looking for the Christ. We thought that He would be here. We came to honor Him.
It
was why I was in Africa that summer myself.
I was looking for Jesus. I had
hoped to find Him there. I thought He
would be there, and that I could honor Him by being there.
Jesus
WAS there, but my mistake in having that attitude was in the assumption that
the world contained, offered, and promised only death. Who goes on mission to where there is no need?
No,
we go where we are sent, where we are called, precisely because of the
possibility of transformation, the transformation of sinner into saint, of
broken into redeemed, and of, ultimately, death into life. We plunge forward into our lives with the
expectation that every day will, in exchange for our time and energy that we
give it, do something or offer something to make us better people and to make
our lives more worth living.
It
is why, I have to think, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James
go to the tomb as soon as the Sabbath is over.
They brought spices to anoint Jesus’ body with as a gesture of their
reverence; that task does, in a manner, offer something to make them better
people—there is, I am sure, emotional significance to this as well, and might
be meant to help heal them in their own grieving and mourning, much like how we
may visit the grave of a loved one today.
But
we all know what happens next. They find
the stone rolled away and the body gone.
Do
you remember what happens the moment that Jesus dies on Good Friday?
The
curtain of the Jerusalem temple is torn asunder.
The
curtain that is meant to separate the Holy of Holies, the innermost room where
God Himself is said to dwell on earth, from the rest of all creation. The room was so revered that only one person—the
High Priest (Caiaphas)—could enter the room, and only then, just once a year.
The
boundary between heaven and earth, between sacred and profane, between holy and
worldly, is ripped in two the moment that Jesus dies. The final boundary between us and God is no
more. No more do we have to wait once a
year for only one man to stand in God’s presence.
And
here, the stone being rolled away stands in mirror image to the temple curtain. Because just as the temple curtain being torn
in two means that heaven has re-entered earth, so too does the stone being
rolled away mean that Jesus has, quite literally, pushed aside the finality of
death.
It
is not enough for Him to simply disappear from the tomb and reappear outside of
it, like a Harry Potter character apparating and disapparting from place to
place.
No,
instead, Jesus chooses to demonstrate exactly what has just happened.
But
as Luke says, the women do not understand all of this, and so two angels appear,
and ask them that powerful, fateful, life-changing, world-upside-down-turning
question.
Why are you looking for the living among
the dead?
More
to the point, why do you look for the dead when death was just rolled aside
like a stone?
And
the light bulb goes on. They remember
Jesus’ words, they remember what He had taught about His death and
resurrection, and they go to tell the Eleven everything they had just seen.
And
I love this part—the Eleven view the words of these women as, depending on your
translation, either “nonsense” or “tall tales” or, my favorite version, “idle
tales.”
Keep
in mind that the male disciples have not been seen from or heard from since
Thursday night. They all desert Jesus
and flee, and the one episode we have of them is a shameful one—Peter denying
his relationship with Jesus.
The
female disciples, by contrast, stay with Jesus to the very end—they are present
even at the Crucifixion, presumably because in that day and age, they were not
seen as a threat like the male disciples would have been and so were allowed to
be there.
And
in Luke’s Gospel, it is they, not the male disciples, who journey to the empty
tomb as soon as the Sabbath is over to anoint His body and pay their respects.
So
the male disciples considering the words of their female counterparts to be “idle
tales” should strike us as particularly rich.
Never mind the fact that the guys were also there for the resuscitation
of Jairus’s daughter, and for the raising of Lazarus, and that maybe, just
maybe, we were hoping that the mustard seed of faith had grown in each of them
just a little bit.
As
it turns out, it does, for one of them—for Peter. He goes to the tomb himself and sees “only
the linen cloth.” Just in case the
rolled-away stone wasn’t a big enough clue, this is another. Jesus is like Hansel and Gretel here, leaving
bread crumbs to show exactly what has happened.
Just as the rolled-away stone mirrors the torn temple curtain, so too
does the left-behind linen cloth mirror the rolled-away stone. The linen cloth was, essentially, Jesus’ burial
shroud. And it, too, is left behind. The trappings of death are left behind in the
promise of immortality.
So
why do we, too, seek for the living among the dead? We can take the so-called “idle tales” of the
female disciples as our own invitation.
We have now been told the truth of what has just happened, and we too
can be as Peter and beat a path for the promise of immortality. As the late, great Harvard theologian Peter
Gomes put it, “Easter is not just about Jesus; it is about you. He has already claimed His new life, now is
your chance to claim yours.”
Now
is your chance, your moment in time to take that mission trip to the door of
the dead in search of what still lives.
And what still lives is your connection with the God who made you.
Because
there is no creation without at some point later having to renew that very same
creation. Just like there is now no death without life, there is now no judgment
without grace, and there is now no human life without the possibility of
eternal immortality, because life and love eternal have finally conquered
earthly death.
The
empty tomb itself is something of a one-off.
Never before or since have we seen a man rise from the house of the
dead, having been gone three days, of his own accord. But what the empty tomb offers…well, that,
much like God Himself, is pure eternal promise.
God
created you, and now, today, God seeks to renew you. Your journey is not yet over. Your faith is not yet finished. For God’s love for you has just been
demonstrated in the best way that He knew how—to take the gift of His Son that
we so selfishly and short-sightedly cast aside just three days prior, and to
give that gift new life, to give us the second chance of all second chances of every
hope of our place in Heaven, alongside the Risen Christ. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
March
31, 2013
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