Alleluia. Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia! This is the day for which we have been waiting and preparing, the most exciting, most glorious day of the year, because it is the day when Jesus broke the bonds of death and hell and rose victorious from the grave.
The resurrection is the reason we worship on Sunday; it’s the reason you and I are Christian; the reason for the Church’s existence; the reason there is such a thing as Christian faith. Without the resurrection none of these things would exist. We wouldn’t celebrate Christmas; there would be no Christian art, no Christian music (What would Bach and Michaelangelo have done without Christ to inspire them?). There would be no Christian hospitals and orphanages, no Christian schools; no Resurrection House and many other Christian charities.
As far as anyone was concerned, this was the tragic end to a promising life. They had great hopes that Jesus was not just another would-be Messiah, but Rome had once more been victorious, as far as anyone knew. But then sometime on Saturday night or early Sunday morning it happened. In the complete, utter darkness of that sealed tomb, Jesus came to life. We don’t know the exact time, for there were no witnesses of the actual resurrection. We simply know that Jesus somehow was raised. Frederick Buechner, in his book The Magnificent Defeat, says, “What in faith and with great joy I proclaim to you here is that he somehow got up, with life in him again, and the glory upon him.”
The best contemporary statement of the resurrection that I have seen is by John Updike:
It was not as the flowers
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as his spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for
each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.”
Updike, in this wonderful poem, alludes to the current fad among some Christian theologians to water down the resurrection. “He lived on in the disciples’ memory,” they say. “His teachings were simply too powerful just to say that he died, and so the myth of the resurrection was born.” Forgive me for one more quote, but Flannery O’Connor, in her novel Wise Blood, makes sport of such skeptics within the fold. Her central character, Haze Motes, is a minister in a church ‘without Christ.’ At one point Haze cries, ‘Church of Christ!…Well, I preach the church without Christ. I’m member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.’”
Our Lord lives because he was raised, bodily, from the dead. And because Jesus has been raised from the dead, we, too, shall rise. We have become participants in his resurrection through our baptism. We are people of the resurrection because the risen Christ lives in us. St. Paul states that through our baptism we have become “new creatures;” we are now adopted children of God the Father. It is, if you will, a kind of “divinization” of our humanity, the risen Christ living in us.
What is our response to be to such a wondrous reality? St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Colossians, says this, “…If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. Put to death…what is earthly in you: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, covetousness,…anger, wrath, malice, slander, and foul talk…Do not lie to one another…Put on, …as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other.
Because the risen Christ lives in us, making us new people, we are to live as he has made us anew. When we come to this altar to receive the Body and Blood of our Lord, we are taking into ourselves anew the risen Christ. What better way could there be to celebrate the resurrection than to live each moment in the knowledge that Christ comes to others through our very presence. May you and I truly celebrate our risen Lord this day and every day of our lives. Alleluia. Christ is risen!
Sermon preached by the Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
Easter Sunday
21 April 2019