H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
April 15, 2001
WHY DO YOU SEEK THE LIVING AMONG THE DEAD?
Texts: Isaiah 25:6-9; Luke 24:1-12
I love this day! It is more than any other "the day the
Lord has made." God takes over when all is lost. Friday is our day, the day
of the cross, the day of sacred violence, cowardice, fear and lost hope. But
Sunday, Easter Sunday, is the day the Lord has made.
I
There is one tradition in Lutheranism where the Lutheran
pastor begins the Easter Sunday sermon with a joke. Luther once said that next
to music and the word of God, what the devil hates most is laughter. On this
day, why not all three!?
Easter has an almost giddy joy about it -- or should. Death,
which we fear above all things -- not just the death at our final breath, but
the death which can encompass us even while we live -- is shown to be weak. On
Easter death is the bully exposed.
Death is not the end; it is the door to greater life! And this
door is open to us every day, not just our last day. "I have set before you
life and death," says the Lord, "choose life." "I have come
that you may have life and have it in fullness," Jesus said.
Luke’s Easter account has a delicious dramatic
irony going on. Does God ever wink? I think God winks at us here: When the
angels ask, "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" Do angels
ever wink? There are these two great angels carved into the stone facade of the
famous Cathedral of Rheims, in France. They have these most wonderful smiles on
their faces, smiles which seem to cast a benediction over the city, but smiles
which also have a hint of mischief, as if to suggest they know something we don’t
-- and can’t wait for us to find out.
The resurrection stories do not want to bludgeon
you into belief, but to invite you there -- in the surprise of laughter.
II
Do you remember the famous funeral scene in Mark Twain’s Tom
Sawyer? Tom, Huck Finn and Joe Harper had set off on a raft trip down the
Mississippi to be pirates. They had gotten lost, and after a while the town
assumed they were dead.
So the town had a funeral service for the three boys at the
main church in town during Sunday morning worship. All through the Sunday School
hour all the people could talk about was what had happened to the boys. When the
bell rang for Sunday School to be over, they all filed over to the sanctuary for
worship. The preacher talked about the boys in such winning, moving ways that
the people began to feel pangs of guilt that they hadn’t seen such good in the
boys while they were still living. Why had they focused so on their faults and
flaws? Soon everyone was sobbing in their grief.
Then there was a rustle in the back balcony and the sound of
feet clattering down the stairs. Then the back door crept open. The minister,
wiping his eyes with his handkerchief, stood transfixed by what he saw. Here
down the aisle came Tom, Huck and Joe. They had gotten home and had been hiding
in the balcony watching their own funeral service!
The congregation rushed to embrace them. The minister shouted,
"Praise God, from whom all blessings flow! Sing it, everybody. Put your
hearts into it."
They didn’t need much prompting. Their hearts were bursting
and they sang as never before. The Old Hundrdth swelled from the organ, and
their voices filled the rafters:
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow
Praise him, all creatures here below
Praise him above, ye heavenly host
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Had you remembered the scene? We the readers knowing the boys
were alive, everyone else thinking they were dead. It was like we were up in the
balcony with Tom, Huck and Joe watching the funeral service with them. What fun!
In today’s text it is like we are up in the balcony with
Jesus watching his funeral in progress -- only it is not really his funeral. As
the women come to anoint his body, Jesus punches us in the ribs and says,
"Just watch; you’re going to love this part!"
III
It was the first day of the week, Sunday, the third day after
Jesus’ death. The women who had become part of Jesus’ circle of disciples
came to anoint his body with spices. When they got there they saw the stone
removed, went in and saw that the body of Jesus was gone.
They were perplexed. What does this mean? Perplexity is a
necessary part of the dawn of faith. Nothing about faith is pat.
Jesus whispers to us beside him in the balcony: "Now
watch this."
As they stood there two figures appeared in streaming
brightness. They ask, "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" The
question, like a good line of poetry, needs an open space within us to dwell
before it can have its way with us. "Why do you seek the living among the
dead?" Is there a wink?
Then they announce the impossible news of Easter: "He is
not here. He is risen."
The angels go on: Don’t you remember when Jesus said the Son
of Man must die and then on the third day rise? Yes, they might have thought,
but we didn’t know he was talking about himself! Words have a life beyond the
moment. They take up residence in us; they are put aside, then we discover them
as lost treasure.
The women then ran to tell the disciples what they had seen
and heard.
When the disciples heard the women, the text records their
response:
But they did not believe them, for their words seemed
to them an idle tale.
Like nonsense, a fairy tale, the delusion of grief-stricken
minds.
Interesting that God should choose to entrust to women the
first message of Easter. Ancient sources suggest that women could not even give
testimony in court:
From women let not evidence be accepted because of the
levity and temerity of their sex.1
Some fundamentalist Baptists like to trace their roots all the
way back to John the Baptist. The reaction of the apostles to the women makes me
believe they were there!
You see in the New Testament a kind of jostling around for
position and authority based on who got to see the Risen Christ. The Easter
tradition handed down to Paul in I Corinthians leaves out the women completely
(I Corinthians 15:3-8). It figures.
But God chose women to be the first evangelists of the Easter
gospel. If we had written the Easter story we’d have done it differently. But
God will not force our faith with Cecil B. DeMille resurrection scenes, and God
will not let Easter be captured by human systems of hierarchy.
The Apostle Paul got it right -- he did not always get it
right -- when he said,
God has chosen the foolish things of this world to
confound the wise and the weak things of this world to confound the
strong (I Corinthians 1:27).
And he is not talking just about women, but about us all.
This is the way of God’s salvation throughout all history,
enacted in Israel and in Jesus. Easter is not the revenge of the weak, a new
cycle of retribution. That’s how we would write it. Easter is about free
grace, unexpected forgiveness and lowly service. It is about the continuation of
the life of the historical Jesus in the human vessel of the church and in all
who follow his way, whether they are in the church or not.
IV
The empty tomb pictures something essential for us
theologically. I point you there and to the altar of our church. British
theologian Rowan Williams pointed me there this week.2
What we see in the tomb is an empty slab of stone with angels
on each side. There is something essentially and crucially Jewish about this
image. It is a visual echo of the ark of the covenant. We may first have to be
Jews to get this part of Easter.
Israel’s ark of the covenant depicted an empty throne with
cherubim on each side. The throne was empty of any representation of God, not to
depict God’s absence but rather to symbolize God’s otherness, God’s
elusive presence. God cannot be captured in any image created by human hand or
human imagination. God will be who God will be, where God will be, when God will
be. We cannot control God or conjure God with any word or image.
So the empty tomb of Easter is an empty throne, depicting the
elusive yet faithful presence of Jesus who leads, present-tense, us on.
It is like the altar of our sanctuary created to be the focal
point of our worship. There is nothing in-between, no pulpit or table or
baptistry, or creed. (Only an occasional musician!). There is the symbol of God
- an empty tomb and an empty throne - and of a Risen Lord, who is not there, but
leads us on.
When God gave to Moses God’s name, God said, "My name
is Yhwh." Yahweh: not a noun but a verb, a form of the verb "to
be" which we still do not know how to translate. God gave us an elusive
name so that we never get our fix on God and turn God into an idol. Professor
Toni Craven says that God gave this enigmatic, untranslatable name to Moses to
say: "Moses, my name is Yahweh. You will learn what this means."
When we call Jesus "Lord" we call him more than what
that first-century name, Kyrios, Lord, meant. Jesus says, "Follow me and
call me Lord, and I will teach you what this means."
Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza works on Mark’s resurrection
story where the angels tell the women:
Do not be afraid. He is risen.
Go tell the disciples: He is
going to Galilee ahead of you.
It was there in Galilee that the ministry of the inbreaking
kingdom of God got its start, and it is from there that it will go to all the
world. Fiorenza captures the message in these galvanizing words:
Jesus is going ahead --
not going away.3
What Easter means is that the work of God begun in Jesus of
Nazareth is going ahead in the lives of those who follow.
V
The resurrection appearances of Jesus in the gospels have this
unpredictable, enigmatic quality; they are filled with non-recognition and
misperceiving. Here and there he appears in some transformed state, momentarily,
then is gone: To the women on the way to tell the apostles about the empty tomb,
to two unknown disciples along the road to Emmaus, to disciples afraid, huddled
behind locked doors, to Mary in the garden, to the disbelieving Thomas, to the
disciples gone back to fishing.
What this suggests is that Jesus is now the Risen Christ, but
we can’t pin him down. He is unpredictable, elusive, un-conjurable. He has
gone ahead, not away, and we’re still running to catch up. He is more than a
dead founder, more than the memory of a heroic life or an inspiring example. He
has gone ahead.
He came to Francis of Assisi in the kiss of a leper. He came
to Simone Weil as she, an agonistic Jew, committed socialist, read the
seventeenth-century poem of George Herbert, "Love Bade Me Welcome." He
came to Anne Lamott while she was weak from loss of blood after an abortion and
muddled by pain pills and booze. He came to Toyohiko Kagawa. Kagawa was the
illegitimate, half-blind, sickly Japanese orphan who became the heroic slum
reformer of Tokyo. It happened one day as he cried: "O God, make me like
Christ." What we have been given to be and to do on Easter is to carry on
"the unfinished business of the historical Jesus."4 We
attend to his life in the gospels, and we attend to where he leads us today.
He has not gone away. He has gone ahead. Sometimes all we see
is the back side of a figure we think is he. Sometimes he is a she. Sometimes
all we see is a cloud of dust. But there he is, going ahead.
So, on this day of mystery and great gladness may the words of
Gerard Manley Hopkins be our prayer and by the grace of God our experience:
"Let him easter in us
be a dayspring to the dimness of us
be a crimson-cresseted dawn
more brightening [us
and our world]
as his
reign
rolls."5
1 Josephus, Antiquities (4:8:15/219)
2 Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
2000), pp. 183-196.
3 Ibid, p. 191.
4 rowan Williams, op. cit., p. 194.
5 From "The Wreck of the Deutschland" The Poems of Gerard Manley
Hopkins eds. Gardner & MacKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1970), p. 63.
