New Life
An Easter Meditation
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 3, 2016
Scripture: John 20:1-18
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth
and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our
strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Here’s a thing about Easter: In all
four Gospels Easter doesn’t begin with a vision of the risen Christ. The first
image the Gospels give us in their stories of Easter is not the risen Christ
but an empty tomb. Our passage this morning from John tells it so simply: Mary
Magdalene finds the stone that had sealed Jesus’ tomb rolled away, so she goes
to Peter and another disciple and says “they,” whoever they are supposed to
have been, have taken the Lord out of the tomb. In John’s account Peter and the
other disciple too first see not the risen Christ but an empty tomb. The empty
tomb is the first reality of Easter. Visions of the risen Christ come later.
Now, a vision of Christ risen from the
dead would be a powerful, life changing experience. There’s no doubt about
that. It would be overwhelming, awesome, which means frightening and inspiring
at the same time. Yet even just an empty tomb is a powerful image in its own
right, at least if you reject the slander that Jesus’ tomb was empty because
the disciples removed Jesus’ body so they could claim that he had risen when he
really hadn’t. What could the empty tomb of Jesus possibly mean?
Well,
a tomb means death. A tomb represents an ending. It says this person’s life on
earth is over. Jesus was in that place, that place of death, of ending, of
finality. He was really and truly dead. So his friends put his body in a tomb. It
was a tomb like any other, and it signified all the things that any other tomb
signifies. It was over for him. He was done. That’s how it was, and that’s how
his friends and family knew it would stay. It had stayed that way for everyone
else they had known who had died (except temporarily for Lazarus I guess), and
they knew it would stay that way with Jesus too.
So
on the morning after the Sabbath following the day of his death, women went to
his tomb. Only when they got there they found to their shock, horror, and
amazement, that his body wasn’t in the tomb. But this tomb isn’t empty because
someone removed Jesus’ body, it is empty because God raised Jesus from the
dead.
And so we ask: If a tomb means death
and finality, what does Jesus’ empty
tomb mean? That answer depends in large part on who we say Jesus was and what
we say he was all about. We say that he is Emmanuel, God with us. We say that
he was God Incarnate, the Son of God become human. And we say that as the Son
of God Incarnate he demonstrated to us God’s will and God’s nature to the
fullest extent that we mortals are capable of grasping it.
If
his life and his death were, as we confess, a full demonstration of God’s
relationship with humanity, then his Resurrection, his empty tomb, must also
demonstrate something about how God relates to us. It says: God does not accept
death. Our deaths may truly be death to us and our loved ones, but they are not
death to God. To us, our tombs may be full, but to God they are empty. God is
not going to be stopped by a little thing like death. God isn’t about to let a
little thing like death interfere with God’s love for us. Jesus’ empty tomb says:
Death may separate us from our loved ones for a time, but it will never
separate either us or our loved ones from God. Jesus’ empty tomb shows us that
for God tombs simply aren’t tombs. No matter how much they may mean the end to
us, they do not mean the end to God. For God, our tombs are empty too.
Jesus’ empty tomb means all that, but
I think it means even more than that. We all die a physical death of course,
but our lives are filled with other deaths, with little deaths, with
metaphorical deaths. We experience so many of them. We experience the end of
relationships as the death of something that was. We suffer burnout and
depression. Our lives head into dead ends, the dead end of addiction, despair,
hopelessness, or helplessness. We suffer the death of our faculties and our
abilities through age or illness. If we are as fortunate as most of us here
have been, our lives are filled with life; but our lives are also filled with
little deaths as well.
The empty tomb of Jesus tells us that
God does not accept those little deaths any more than God accepts the big death
at the end of our lives. God leads us to new life in a new plane of being after
our deaths, God also works always to lead us out of the little deaths of our
lives into new life in this lifetime. God is always there to help mend broken
relationships, or to lead us to new ones if the old ones can’t be fixed. God is
there to lead us out of depression, despair, hopelessness, and helplessness
toward newness and wholeness of life. God is there to help us cope with our
addictions when we turn our lives over to God and admit that we can’t do it
alone. As we lose some of our strength with age, God is there to help us be
everything we can be, and to assure us that a loss of capacities does not mean
a loss of worth. We may accept all these little deaths, but God doesn’t. To us
the little tombs of our lives may seem very full, but to God they are
completely empty, as empty as Jesus’ tomb was on that miraculous Easter morning
in Jerusalem so long ago. And because those little tombs are empty for God, God
can help us make them empty for us too.
So
when you think of Easter, think of the risen Christ to be sure; but think also
of the empty tomb. That empty tomb speaks volumes about God and about God’s
will for us. It says: God simply does not accept death. To God all our tombs
are empty, the one at the end of our lives and the ones during our lives. So
when a loved one dies, when you face your own mortality, when you’re feeling
one of those little deaths of which life can be so full, remember Jesus’ empty
tomb, and know that with God, all of our tombs are empty too. That is the great
good news of Easter. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Thanks be to God. Amen.
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