Peace be with you, and a very blessed and happy Easter to everybody.
Friends, I don't know why this is true, but I've always been attracted
to the graves of famous people.
So, I've had a chance in my life to travel around the world
and study in different places.
For example, when I was in Washington many years ago as a philosophy student,
I used to love to go to Arlington Cemetery,
and especially to that beautiful little hillside in front of the
Custis-Lee Mansion, where the Kennedy brothers are buried.
I'd go there, and I would just sit for a long period of time and contemplate.
When I was a doctoral student in Paris, one of my favorite places to go
was sort of the mother of all cemeteries.
It's called Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Jim Morrison, the rock and roller is buried there, but so is Chopin,
so is Oscar Wilde, so are Abalard and Heloïse.
I mean, all kinds of famous people.
And I would go there and spend hours just kind of musing at these graves.
One of the most interesting ones is a grave in far southern Indiana.
I used to go on retreat at Saint Meinrad Monastery,
which is way down there, and usually I would take a morning
when I was on retreat, and I'd go about a twenty-minute drive away
to the Lincoln Boyhood Memorial.
They had a replica of Lincoln's log cabin there.
But on the grounds of that memorial, there is the grave of Nancy Hanks.
Nancy Hanks was Abraham Lincoln's mother,
and her grave now has a beautiful stately flag on it.
And the grave —I always found this very moving—
is covered with Lincoln pennies
—so, engraved with the image of her famous son.
I found it moving because here's a woman who died,
I think she was about thirty-five, in the year 1818.
I think young Abe was only about nine when she died.
Oh, she probably was known by a handful of people, and yet now,
hundreds and thousands come to her grave to honor her.
I would muse there, and I would meditate.
Well, that's what you do at graves.
They're places of finality.
They're places of peace, of contemplation.
Then there's the grave at the center of our story for today.
Then there's the grave that the Gospel writers are fascinated by.
I'm talking about the grave of Jesus,
to which three women go early on Easter Sunday morning.
They've gone with oils to anoint the body,
according to the Jewish custom.
They worried about who would roll the stone back,
but I'm sure they were planning there to perform this ritual,
and to muse and to ponder,
remembering the great things that Jesus had said and done,
oh, probably feeling some anger at those
that had betrayed him and denied him,
probably weeping in their grief.
That's what they were intending to do at this grave.
But they arrive, and to their infinite surprise, they find first,
the stone rolled away.
Has a grave robber perhaps been at work?
But their astonishment only increases when,
looking inside, they see not the body of Jesus
but rather a young man in a white garment,
who says to them,
"You're looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.
He has been raised; he is not here.
Look, there is the place where they laid him."
The young man's message, to put it bluntly,
was not that someone had broken into this grave,
but rather that someone had broken out of it.
What was their response to this shocking news?
And this is the first account we have in Mark's Gospel.
What's the reaction of these women? Listen:
"They went out and fled from the tomb,
for terror and amazement had seized them."
Yeah, graves, sure; they're places of quiet contemplation,
places to muse, places to think.
Then there's this grave, from which these women run in terror.
And thereupon, brothers and sisters, thereupon hangs the tale of Easter.
Jesus is not a fondly remembered figure from the past.
He's not, oh, a great spiritual teacher whom we recall
with fond contemplation.
Mm-mm.
We participate in the terror that these women felt
as the absolute novelty and shock and surprise
of Jesus' Resurrection dawned upon them.
What I love, friends, about this story is
it militates against all attempts to domesticate the Resurrection.
And there's been a lot of this up and down the Christian centuries,
and certainly in our own time.
Oh, I think when I was going through seminary
—this is some years ago—
but these were books that we read in the seminary.
"Oh, Jesus’ Resurrection; oh, don't read that as something that really happened.
Rather, the disciples after the death of their Master,
knew that his cause would go on,
and so they invented this story of an empty tomb
and appearances to symbolize the fact that his cause goes on."
Or this view that was held by a very prominent theologian
when I was going through school.
After the terrible death of Jesus, the disciples nevertheless
felt forgiven, and so they expressed this conviction
with the stories of the empty tomb and the appearances.
Come on.
I mean, this is impossibly thin gruel,
and it does not correspond to the clear sense of
shock, novelty, and excitement
that runs through every page of the New Testament.
Can you really imagine Paul tearing into Corinth with the news that
"Hey, the cause of a dead person that I admired goes on."
They would have laughed him out of town.
Can you imagine all the Apostles,
they go careering around the world to their own deaths
—with the message that they felt forgiven?
I mean, give me a break.
These attempts to flatten out and domesticate the Resurrection
are undermined by this fundamental witness
of the facticity of the Resurrection.
Can I just draw three implications, friends, from the fact of Jesus' Resurrection?
First of all, It means that Jesus is Lord.
You'll find this phrase often now in the writings of St. Paul.
In his Greek, "Iesous Kyrios," Jesus is Lord.
And we might say, "Well, that's a blandly spiritual thing to say."
But that was deeply subversive in the first century.
Why?
Well, because a watchword of that time and place was
"Kaisar Kyrios," Caesar's the Lord.
He's the one to whom my allegiance is due.
He's the one in charge of my life.
How wonderful: the first Christians, in light of the Resurrection,
they purposely twisted that language.
Not Kaisar Kyrios; Iesous Kyrios.
Mind you, someone whom Caesar put to death,
but whom God raised from the dead, he's the true Lord.
He's the one to whom your allegiance is due.
And furthermore, how wonderful that they proclaimed this
long before there was anything like an institutional Church,
long before there were armies and armies of believers.
These are a handful of people who were declaring this
deeply subversive message of the Lordship of Jesus.
Here's a second implication of the Resurrection
—again, not as some thin gruel, some vague symbol,
but the fact of the Resurrection—
that Jesus’ claims about himself are now ratified.
Unlike any of the other religious founders,
Jesus consistently speaks and acts in the very person of God.
"My son, your sins are forgiven."
"Who's this man think he is?
Only God can forgive sins."
Right. That's the point.
Jesus is speaking and acting in the very person of God.
"Oh, you've heard it said in the Torah, but I say…"
Well, for a first-century Jew, to claim authority over the Torah,
which was the supreme authority
—the only one that could possibly do that would be God himself.
Uh-huh.
"You've got a greater than the temple here,"
Jesus says, in reference to himself.
Again, for a first-century Jew, the temple was the dwelling place of God.
Who could possibly say he's greater than the temple,
except the one who in fact dwells in the temple?
In fact, this is why Jesus is brought to the cross:
this apparent blasphemy, this man claiming to be God.
And then see, when he died on the cross,
even his most ardent followers
were convinced that he was a sort of a sad fraud.
Think of those two disciples on the road to Emmaus.
"Yeah, we thought he was the one, but clearly he's not
because there'd be no greater proof possible
that someone was not the Messiah of Israel,
than his death at the hands of Israel's enemies.
Clearly he isn't God.
Clearly he was just a diluted figure."
But when he rose from the dead
—and I don't mean some vague feeling they had of being forgiven; come on—
when he rose from the dead and appeared alive again to them,
they knew now, he is exactly who he said he was.
They knew that Jesus' divinity, his claimed divinity, is ratified.
And therefore, we have to give our lives to him.
If he is who he says he is —not one teacher among many,
but God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God—
what choice do I have?
I must give my life to him.
Here's a third and final implication of the Resurrection:
that God's love, everybody, is more powerful
than anything that's in the world.
What brought him to his cross?
Cruelty and violence and hatred and injustice and stupidity and
all forms of human dysfunction.
It's on that cross, he bore all of this.
The sin of the world came upon him.
He went into the muck and the mud of the human condition.
In fact, it closed over his head.
But then in the Resurrection, when Jesus says "Shalom,"
and he offers this peace on the far side
of all the dysfunction of the world,
he shows thereby that God's love
is more powerful than any of it.
That's why Paul can say,
"I'm certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities,
neither height nor depth, nor any other power could ever separate us
from the love of God."
He knows it because of the Resurrection, because he saw the risen Christ.
That's where we find our hope, everybody.
That's where we find indeed our salvation.
That word just means our healing.
What's wounded us?
Well, all the darkness and sin of the world;
that's what's wounded us.
In the Resurrection of Jesus, we find our salvation.
Now, I wonder if you remember, if you listened to me last week,
I made reference to that mysterious figure that appears
in the Garden of Gethsemane, this young man wearing a white garment.
And at the moment of truth, he runs away in fear,
and they grab the garment, and he's—I argued there—
every baptized Christian, who, at the moment of truth,
leaves behind his baptismal identity.
But I suggested to you last week that he's going to make a comeback.
You know where he appears?
Right in the heart of this story.
It doesn't say angel, by the way.
When they look into the tomb, they see a young man.
And what's he wearing?
He's wearing a "sindona."
He's wearing this white garment.
And what does he do?
From inside the empty tomb of Jesus, he declares the Resurrection.
This is now—listen—every one of us.
Yes, we're sinners.
Yes, we tend to run away at the moment of truth,
leaving behind our baptismal identity.
But now, this is every one of us, having recovered
our courage and our identity,
and now standing in the empty tomb of Jesus
clad in our baptismal garment, announcing the Resurrection.
That's your job this Easter and beyond.
That's your job.
We don't take in the Resurrection as some,
"Oh, that's an interesting fact from long ago."
Come on; come on.
We take it in as the definitive sign of the lordship of Jesus,
the definitive sign that he's God from God, Light from Light,
the definitive sign that God's love is more powerful
than anything in the world.
And our job, wearing that baptismal garment,
is to declare it to all the world.
That's the Good News of Easter,
and that's the missionary call of Easter.
And God bless you.
Thanks so much for watching.
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