Sermon for Easter-Day
“Christ is risen. Alleluia, Alleluia!”
Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, “early when it was yet dark,” John tells us. She “seeth the stone taken away.” And so it begins. She runs to tell the others, apostle apostolorum, an apostle to the apostles, as the Fathers put it. She says “to Simon Peter and to the other disciple” that “they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” He is not there. Who has taken him? Who are ‘they’ that “have taken [him] away”? Confronting something that counters her expectation, she suspects a conspiracy, it seems. Don’t we all? Simon Peter and “that other disciple” run and see. They, too, find only an empty tomb. And so it continues. It is the Resurrection.
With apologies to President Obama, and for that matter most politicians, the Resurrection is change you can believe in. This is what the Gospel accounts show us. In a way, of course, it can only be believed in. There is, after all, no ‘CSI Jerusalem’ with respect to the Resurrection, nor can there be. There is no DNA. There is no forensic evidence whatsoever; not much to go on, it might seem. Folly to even think there could be, it seems to me.
At best, we might say there is only evidence which points to an absence beginning with the stories of the empty tomb. Then, there are the accounts of angels. Ah, an angel told me! Right! Hardly convincing, it might seem, at least to the empirically minded. Then, there are the supposed eye-witness accounts of strange encounters with the risen Christ who appears and disappears behind closed doors. Right! Explicable, perhaps, according to “superstring theory” in Physics, but then one might feel about that the same way the British travel writer, Alexander Kinglake, felt about churches in England, wanting to inscribe upon their lintels the caveat, “interesting, if true.” Perhaps that is where we are with the Resurrection, “interesting, if true.”
If so, why are we here this morning? (more…)
