Hilton Head Island, SC – March 31, 2013 - Easter
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 24:1-35
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – "But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them." – Luke 24:11 (RSV)
There are four different accounts of the resurrection of Jesus, one for each of the four Gospels. No two of them are exactly alike. In specifics, there are many notable differences among the four narratives. But in all four Gospels it was female followers of Jesus who went to the tomb on Easter morning; none of the twelve disciples went there. In all four instances, it was the women who told the men that Jesus had been raised from death. Only in John’s Gospel does it say that any of the twelve went to the tomb to see for themselves that Jesus’ body was no longer there. Even at that, however, only two went. They were Peter, and the apostle identified as “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” presumably John.
In Luke’s Gospel, as in Matthew and Mark, none of the disciples went to the empty tomb on Easter morning, even after they were told the astounding news by the women. But Luke adds a detail unique to his resurrection account, “But these words seemed to them (the disciples) an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”
If you had been there, and if you had been told what Mary Magdalene and the other women told the disciples, would you believe them? Be honest with yourself; would you? That is such an astonishing claim, and beyond the bounds of all reason and all human experience, as to render it almost incredible, which is to say, unbelievable. How could anyone, even Jesus, be brought back to life more than forty hours after he had been declared dead?
Last August, in Leicester, England, a remarkable thing happened. A lady named Phillipa Langley had long suspected that the body of King Richard III was buried beneath a parking lot in the ancient city. It was widely believed that site was the location of an old priory where the king’s body had been taken at the time of his death. King Richard was the last of the Plantagenet monarchs. For centuries it has been alleged that he had two relatives murdered in order to obtain the crown. They also were also potential claimants to the throne.
Probably few people in England or beyond would know much about Richard III, were it not for Shakespeare’s play about him, written more than a century after Richard’s very brief reign, representing all the then-current prejudices against the controversial monarch. In its opening scene, the king utters the famous lines, “Now is the winter of our discontent/ Made glorious summer by this sun of York/ And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house/ In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.” He became king in July of 1483, and in late August of 1485 he and his army lost the pivotal Battle of Bosworth to Henry Tudor of Wales. Richard was slain when he was knocked off his steed (“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”), and he was attacked by enemy swordsmen, who hacked him to death. Henry went on to become Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs, and the father of the far more famous and notorious Henry VIII.
After much intrigue, which I can’t take time to explain, Phillipa Langley, an amateur historian, became convinced that Richard’s remains were beneath a particular parking space. She visited the parking lot in 2005, and found the exact spot where her inexplicable vibes told her the king’s body lay. A year later she came back, and someone had painted an “R” on the parking space, which was meant to indicate “Reserved.” But to her it clearly signified “Richard.” After many machinations over the next few years, Phillipa Langley finally coerced the Leicester city government to allow her to oversee an archaeological dig at her mystically selected burial site. In a newspaper interview, she said, “We found him on the anniversary of his burial, August 25, and on the first day of the dig. So I absolutely believe that he wanted to be found. He was ready to be found. The time was right. I think with our sciences and our knowledge and everything we have been able to do in this project already we are getting to the real Richard now.” Subsequent forensic analysis has virtually authenticated that the bones thus discovered were indeed the last remains of Richard III, curved spine and all.
How could Phillipa Langley sense that a king’s body lay buried beneath a parking lot? By what measures of intuition could she be so certain? And how could one woman, Mary Magdalene (John), or two women “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary” (Matthew), or three women “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome” (Mark), or several women – Mary Magdalene and associates -- (Luke) be so certain that Jesus had been resurrected? Or how did the disciples know it? How does anyone know such a thing?
We don’t! We can’t! We cannot know that Jesus was raised from the dead. We can believe it, but we can’t know it. The resurrection is above or beyond or outside of any kind of knowledge as knowledge is properly understood.
An amateur historian was able by what can only be described as intuition to locate a body that had been missing for over five centuries, and have it verified. However, no one in Jerusalem in 33 CE or thereabouts could verify that Jesus Christ, who had been crucified, was alive again. They could believe it, but they couldn’t prove it, because it cannot be proven. It simply can’t. Nor can it be proven today.
Was Jesus bodily resurrected? I don’t know. Neither do you. Was he spiritually resurrected? I don’t know. Neither do you. Was he resurrected at all? I believe he was. Upon that conviction is the Christian faith founded, and upon it is my personal faith in Jesus founded. Everything else springs from that. Easter is not the end of everything we believe; it is the starting point of everything we believe. Surely we begin here, today, on Easter --- not Christmas, but Easter.
Throughout Lent I have been preaching a series of sermons. The overall theme has been The Messiah Who Answers Questions. This morning we are thinking about the answer to the greatest question the human race has ever asked: What is the answer to death?
Death is ultimately an enormous mystery to us. During World War II Winston Churchill said of the Soviet Union, “Russia is a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma.” Well, for all of us, death is a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma. We know it is coming for all of us. Of that we can be certain. We know it. But what does it mean? Is death nothing more than, as Hamlet said, a long sleep? “To die: to sleep/ No more; and by a sleep to say we end/ The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/ That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation/ Devoutly to be wished.” But the morose prince has another sobering thought: “To die, to sleep/ To sleep, perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub/ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil/ Must give us pause.”
A century ago the American Irish composer of operettas, Victor Herbert, wrote a famous song called Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found thee. For Naughty Marietta, the title character of that particular operetta, love is the mystery of life. But how about the mystery of death? Is death not even more of a mystery? For all time, writers and poets and philosophers have been intrigued by death. Thousands of poems and books have been written about death. We have all seen hundreds and even thousands of people die in movies. Death is so ubiquitous in literature and art because it is so final, so certain, so awesome and awful and awe-filled.
On Good Friday Jesus died. He was really, truly, completely dead. The disciples knew it. There could be no denying it. Jesus of Nazareth, in whom they had placed such high hopes, was dead.
And then, on Easter, he was no longer dead. He was alive again! He was raised from the dead! Jesus was resurrected, not by his own action, but by the action of God. Jesus Christ is risen today --- hallelujah; praise God! The day of resurrection! Earth, tell it out abroad! Thine is the glory, risen conquering Son!
Do I know that? No, nor do you. Do I believe it? Yes, I do. I hope you do as well. Was it physical or spiritual? I don’t know. Nor, I think, do you. Was it real? Absolutely, except that probably it can be neither known nor believed absolutely. We won’t know if Jesus was truly resurrected until we die, if we shall know it even then.
The answer to death is this: Be not afraid. The answer to death is this: We shall be granted life eternal. The answer to death is this: Death does not have the final answer. God has the final answer. He who created us for life on the earth shall also create for us a life beyond earthly life. Do I know any of these things, or do you? No, but we can believe them. We can have faith in them. We can trust in the validity of these assertions.
There is an old aphorism: Life is a beach, and then you die. Maybe the word isn’t “beach,” but it’s something like that. Besides, there are lots of bumper stickers in these parts which proclaim that Life Is a Beach. In any event, whatever life is for any of us, whether happy or sad, long or short, full or empty, the Christian faith proclaims that death is not the end. It looks like the end, when we observe it in someone we have greatly loved it feels like the end, and when we dispassionately contemplate our own earthly existence, we know it shall end, and without question it shall end in death. But if there is any validity to Easter, the starting point of the Christian religion, death shall not be THE End, the Finis, the brief candle which flickers out, as MacBeth observed with such dark melancholy.
Whatever else you come away with on this Easter Sunday, the last day of March, in the Year of Our Lord 2013, I hope you come away with the deep conviction that death is not the end, that God has the answer for its inevitability with an inevitability of His own divine design. I don’t know where it is, I don’t know what it is, I don’t know that it is, but I believe it.
If this life were all God gave us, it would be fine with me. I, like most of you, have had basically a happy and fulfilling life. There have been some rough patches, to be sure, as likely there have been for you as well, but all things considered, I have had a great run, as I hope you have, also. But as good or happy or productive or fulfilling as life has been for any of us, we certainly should never suppose that we deserve another life beyond this life. If anyone thinks that, she or he has another think coming, because we never “deserved” this life in the first place, let alone another one.
In Thorton Wilder’s classic play Our Town, Emily says almost at the very end, “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” Then, through her tears Emily says to the stage manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?” Laconically the stage manager responds, “The saints and poets, maybe - they do some.”
But God is not content with that. God has other plans, and they reach beyond the Grover’s Corners cemetery, where Emily Webb Gibbs has her conversation with the all-observing stage manager, and beyond the empty tomb which Mary Magdalene and the others discovered on Easter morning. If we thought God has been a God of grace all along, we haven’t seen anything yet. It shall get exponentially better. That’s what Easter proclaims. The greatest and most uplifting and exhilarating hymns are the hymns of Easter. This is the day of days. Why else would this be the Sunday with the highest attendance in almost every congregation in Christendom, except maybe this one? (We are the exception to many ecclesiastical rules.) Intuitively, people know that if the only message they ever hear (and for some it is the only homiletical message they ever hear), it is not only enough; it is more than enough. It is the summam bonum, the highest good, the crème de la crème, the pot of gold at the end of the theological rainbow.
But I have some sober news for you: The only way to verify all that is to die. Thus the answer to death is to die. Death is the only way we can discover the meaning of the sweet mystery of death.
In a New Yorker cartoon a while back a minister was standing at the door of a church at the conclusion of worship. An elderly woman, toddling along with a cane in each hand, says to him in passing, “Thank you, Reverend, your sermon has me super-excited about croaking.”
Well, I’m not trying to encourage your premature demise here. I encourage you to live as long as you effectively can do so, in both heath and strength. We should all live as fully as we can until we die. But when we die, as die we shall, we should do so as Easter Christians, trusting that super-excitement of some sort lies beyond. It is not possible to know that, but it is certainly possible, and is devoutly to be wished, that we believe it.
Most of us are familiar with the late, great American writer John Updike. In continuation of the Shakespearian allusions, what a literary piece of work was John Updike. Furthermore, unlike many successful novelists, he was a church-going, strongly-believing Christian. As wild and wooly as some of his works were, he was a man of deep faith.
We do not think of John Updike as a poet, but he did write some poems. One of them was called Seven Stanzas at Easter. In one of his Stanzas, he said, “Let us not mock God with metaphor,/ analogy, sidestepping transcendence,/ making the event a parable,/ a sign painted in the fading credulity of earlier ages:/ let us walk through the door.”
Easter does not mean something besides Easter. Easter means Easter. It gives God’s answer to death. It isn’t fundamentally metaphor or analogy; it is what it is. It is, as the apostle Paul wrote in the 15th chapter of his first Letter to the Corinthians, in the only chapter in the entire Bible devoted solely to the concept of death and resurrection, “Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain. …If for this only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
Don’t get hung up on what you don’t and can’t know. Rather get caught up in what you can both trust and believe.