April 20, 2025
Readings and Message
“And Christ Also Appears To Us…Can You See Him?”
ISAIAH 65: 17-25
Well, our first reading of this Easter Sunday is truly a proclamation!... and there is a universality with this declaration…the great prophet, Isaiah, is directing us to focus our eyes, our hearts, our minds, our all, to the new heaven and to the new Earth which is to come…the new resurrection…the new Easter…and when we do, we will live truly authentic lives, enjoying the fruit of our labour and living lives that are long enough to be fulfilled…in spite of the arrogance and the danger to life of all fundamentalisms everywhere, there arise folks like Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi (and hundreds of thousands of unknown faithful people) who give evidence that the Spirit of God is completing what God intends for all creation…
1 CORINTHIANS 15: 19-26
In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians I sense that he is trying to explain the significance of the events of the day – especially in terms of the resurrection of Jesus and what this ultimately means…death has been conquered and Paul uses his own personal life experience with this one in terms of being a persecutor of those who followed Christ and now an apostle…the dysfunction symbolized by Adam is reversed in the death of Jesus so that finally, death is dead…whatever your theology may be in terms of ‘original sin’, we may now say, with total certainty, that in Jesus’ death, we now have new life and new breath…this is the true message of Easter Sunday and what strengthens us in the weeks and months to come – knowing that resurrection is for me – and for you…
JOHN 20: 1-18
This passage is probably the best rendition of all the Gospels of the resurrection of Jesus…and if we are ‘studiers’ of the biblical text, we know that putting all of the Gospels side by side and trying to figure out what’s true or not, we’ll fail…the four Gospels don’t agree and that’s all there is to it…what is of greatest importance is that in John and Luke, the renditions with the most information about that early morning, we, #1 cannot deny the fact that Jesus is risen and both male and female folks in the story attest to this… and #2, Mary of Magdala was the first to reach the tomb…and, #3, some people get it – and some don’t….jettison from the first Sunday morning to today and guess what?....some of us get it (thank God!)….and many of us couldn’t care less…
“And Christ Also Appears To Us….Can You See Him?”
Easter Sunday…probably THE highlight of our Christian faith, alongside of the birth of Christ and the Christmas festivities…and I want to spend a few minutes today, with all of you in some sort of a “what’s really going on” conversation…and it primarily has to do with the voice from the person whom Mary thought was a gardener…why didn’t she recognize his voice?....until, of course, he calls out her name... and we may think of all the different reasons we also do not recognize our Christ…for we can probably come up with countless excuses to answer this question…and it’s not just that the crucified Christ rose from the dead for the folks who were present at that time but it’s also that he rose to us…appeared to us…and that he keeps rising and appearing to us…you will note that the Gospels don’t really argue the truth of the resurrection of Jesus – they simply report it through stories which focus upon people who saw the risen Christ…real living witnesses to what was happening…and folks, as you listen to these stories of the first Easter, I really think that three things stand out, at least when I internalized this story once again in a different light this year…I was seeking something else from it…I’ve been preaching it for over 25 years and what is underneath it all?....
Well # 1….the Gospels give to us the resurrection as a series of unexpected, unexplainable appearances in which the crucified Jesus appears to his disciples as the resurrected Christ…Easter is not something we dreamed up!...Easter is the result of a God who comes to us and appears to us out of God’s loving determination to be with us…in all that are we are and in all that we do…we who live in a culture which sometimes dismisses God as some kind of psychological fiction are surprised that in Easter, the God who we had thought we had crucified and buried shows up once again…persistent…that we get the message that love conquers all…here I am!...now believe in me!!...for heaven’s sake!!...and with the New Testament, Jesus’ earthly life was pretty well filled with never staying in places very long and focusing much of his life and teachings on “Come…come and follow me”…we’ve just done a turn around now with the tomb empty…and Jesus appears, rather quickly here, and in the next chapter or two, sporadically, to many of the disciples and others…he was a body in motion before and now he is a Spirit in even quicker motion for the conversation is no longer “Come…come and follow”…now the conversation has changed to “Go…go out share the good news”….and this is probably why control freaks do poorly with Jesus…because they are being told what to do…but Jesus’ presence now is future present…and you know, for some of us, the closer to us he comes, the more we realize our distance… and we now have a distinct definition of God, if ever we could have one of who God is, “God” is whoever raised crucified Jesus from the dead…
One who gifted us in the ultimate!!...but I transgress here a little…
let’s have a look at # 2 of what I think really stands out in this passage…
Jesus was not only raised from the dead but he appeared to all of the wrong people…how odd of the risen Christ to spend the first day of his resurrection in a sorry place like Galilee…and this is where the angel told the women he was, in Galilee…and we note here that he didn’t appear to Pontius Pilate or to our Prime Minister in Ottawa…no…he was raised to powerless Mary…Peter…and Thomas…back in Galilee… he appeared to the very ones who betrayed him and disappointed him in the first place…the same losers whom he shared his last meal before execution…so something struck me as a truism – resurrection and forgiveness are linked – inextricably!...he didn’t just rise from the dead, he rose from the dead to us…
And #3…talk begins when God shows up!....and the resurrection could possibly be the first sermon the church has to preach and maybe the last as well – Christ is risen!!...the angel didn’t say to the women, “Jesus is raised and now you shall live again after you die”…nope…the angel says, “Go tell the men the good news; Jesus is raised!”…
And I share these, what I hope are understandings, of this passage with all of you because I truly believe that this has also happened among you…you are here…celebrating Easter…believing in the triumph of God in the resurrection, mainly because in some way or another, Christ has shown up to you…in certain inexplicable, often subtle but undeniable ways, Christ has appeared…Christ has spoken to you… Christ has called you by your name just as he called to Mary on that Easter morning…so the empty tomb, to me anyway, is pregnant with potential meaning which is not yet understood to those who first found it empty…what it means to them is still unknown but what it will ultimately mean transforms both past and future for all of us…and this is why Mary cannot hold on to ‘her’ Jesus…her story and his…his experience and hers…can never be anchored in the past…as I mentioned before, Jesus is future present…he calls her by name to announce to the disciples – and, I believe, by extension to all who would believe – a new creation….an unimaginable future…the good news that Mary reports to the disciples is only the beginning of an ongoing revelation of what resurrection and all of its implications might mean… Mary speaks…and in her speaking, we find our own voice…
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!!!