Rise Immortal

Propers: The Resurrection of Our Lord, A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Gospel according to St Mark is the oldest extant Gospel account that we have, and the oldest copies of Mark end right here, with these verses: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” We are left, brothers and sisters, with fear and with awe.

Part of this has to do with the nature of Mark’s narrative. In his telling, the Gospel is breathless and kinetic, rushing from one moment to the next, culminating in the thorny Crown, the wooden Cross, and the empty Tomb. This was a Gospel declared on street corners, hooking in the hearer, forcing us to ask, “What happens next? What happened to Jesus? What happened to His people?”

And the answer, of course, was to be found here, in the community, in the Church. This community is the Body of Christ now, the Life of Christ. Mark wrote down his Gospel because the people who knew Jesus, the people who had witnessed the Resurrection firsthand, were dying—or more accurately, were being killed. Peter had been crucified, Paul beheaded, and James thrown down to be bludgeoned with clubs. Moreover, storm clouds were gathering over Jerusalem. The Zealots of the Holy Land had rebelled against Rome, and the Legions were massing to bring down the hammer of war, just as Jesus had warned that they would.

It was a time of darkness. It was a world of fear. It was an age of blood. No wonder Mark told the story of Jesus so breathlessly. No wonder he left his hearers hanging in amazement and in fear. “You have to understand,” Mark is telling us, “that Jesus is Risen! All this violence, all this bloodshed, all this fear, none of it can change the fact that the tomb has been rent asunder, that hell has been harrowed, that Christ is alive!—and He lives now within you.”

That’s why his Gospel is designed to bring us here, to gather us together. Because we are the Risen Christ! We are how Jesus chooses to continue His work in this world. He comes to us now in word and in water, in bread and in wine. He places into us, into our flesh and our bone, His own Spirit, His own Body, His own Blood. And when we have the Spirit of Jesus, the Body of Jesus, the Blood of Jesus—what does that make us? It makes us Jesus! It makes us sons and daughters and heirs of God! It makes us born again, born anew, born from above.

Here we are forgiven our sins and raised from the dead and sent out to be Jesus for a world still very much in need of Him. Because we live yet in a world hemmed in by death, hemmed in by violence and oppression and fear. And people need to know that Christ is Risen! They need to know that there is a power greater than the grave, a love that drowns out death, a hope that keeps rising and rising and rising from the tomb no matter how much state-sponsored violence or personal acts of betrayal we can throw at Him.

People need to know that there is so much more to our world than the suffocating narrowness of the shell in which we have entombed ourselves, a shell of limits, in which our identity and personal worth is determined by politics, preferences, and purchases, by what we buy or what we wear or what we eat or how we vote. There is more than your paycheck and your credit card debt! There is more to life than entertainment and consumption and the false faces we hold up to social media.

You and I and all of us have a destiny infinitely greater than any we could heretofore imagine. We are called to be immortal. We are called to raise the dead! We are called to clothe the naked and feed the hungry and free the prisoner and admonish the sinner and forgive the repentant without limit or condition! We are called to save the world. And we are called to do it all in Jesus’ Name, for it is He who is alive and moving within us.

Jesus is Risen. And He is hard at work saving and redeeming and resurrecting this world, no longer with one pair of hands to heal, one pair of feet to go, but with two billion pairs of hands to work and two billion tongues confessing that Christ is Lord! And this should rightly fill us with fear and with wonder. Because when Christ is Lord, that means that nobody and nothing else can rule us, can claim us, can kill us. Disease cannot stop us. Persecution cannot stop us. Death itself cannot stop us!

For those things will ultimately descend into the loamy earth of the grave, while we will rise and rise and forever rise up to the infinite life of God in Christ Jesus—because Christ is our King, and He has conquered death and hell, conquered them by filling them up to bursting with the very Life and Breath and Blood of God.

Let us remember this when we get up each morning and look at that aging face in the mirror. Let us remember that no matter what befalls us this day, this week, this life, whatever harm, whatever losses, whatever sins—it is not the end of our story. Our story ends with Him—with life beyond death, with love beyond loss, with every tear dried and every wound healed and every godawful tragedy somehow at last made right. We will live forever!

And not like this, not twisted and broken in sin. But we will live purified and perfected as the beings we were meant to become from before the beginning of time. We will at long last be human, at long last be ourselves. And each of us will shine like the sun, every one of us reflecting a facet of our Father that no one else could reveal to the world. And when we hold fast to the sure hope of this promise, then nothing in this world—not debt, not pain, not cancer or mourning—nothing can restrain us from the freedom found in the grace and the mercy and the love of God.

And this destiny belongs equally to every soul we have ever met or ever will. We are all of us children of God. And no matter what we do, no matter how far we have fallen, nothing can erase from us the image and stamp of the divine within. We have infinite value. We have infinite worth. And so does every other human being.

So when we say that Christ is Risen, when we rejoice in the sundering of His Tomb, we do so in full knowledge that we too are risen, we too arise in Christ, and it is our tomb which has been sundered, our own corpses pulled up from that grave! And so the song of our forefathers now becomes our own:

Ain’t no grave dug deep enough to hold me.

Ain’t no devil been slick enough to trick me.

Ain’t no gravedigger man enough to bury me.

You can’t hold me down!

Ain’t no grave can hold me down.

You can’t keep me underground.

When that silver trumpet sounds—

Ain’t no grave can hold me down!

Amen, I say to you, my brothers and sisters: Jesus is Risen, and we shall arise! That is promise enough, and terror enough, to fill any man with wonder and with fear. But it is a holy fear, which banishes all the terrors that would seek to torment or enslave us. All that we suffer, all that we mourn, all that we fear—we will outlive them. We will outlast them. They shall fall and we shall rise and then we will shine like the sun.

Now take this Risen Life and go—go out and raise the dead! Go and give witness to this fearful, fallen world, that death has no dominion here.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.