Easter Forever

Scriptures: The Resurrection of Our Lord, A.D. 2016 C

Homily:

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

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

Easter means dawn. And that’s what this morning is, brothers and sisters, the Rising of the Son of God. Today is our Lord’s Passover from death to life eternal. Today is the New Creation in Jesus Christ.

The first witnesses of the Resurrection were dismissed as tellers of an idle tale. Who could believe such an outlandish thing, when death appears everywhere triumphant? It didn’t help, of course, that the initial witnesses were all women, whose testimonies in those days were not considered reliable enough to be admissible in court. And yet these brave women stood firm in the conviction of what they had seen, especially Mary of Magdala, to whom the Risen Christ first appeared, and whom He commissioned personally to be His Apostle to the Apostles.

This should serve as a reminder to us all that Christian faith does not rest upon nebulous myths or theoretical assertions. It rests upon the radically changed lives of men and women just like us, men and women who encountered the Risen Christ in their lives and were forever changed, resurrected, killed and made alive again! And these men and women went on to change the world, to change religion, to change our very concept of the destiny and dignity of every single human being on earth. The Resurrection is not followed by a question mark but by an exclamation point:

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

So I guess the big question for us today is, Where’s He now? I’d personally like to know because I think we could rather use a little Jesus these days, wouldn’t you say? Things can seem pretty bleak when we read the news or look out the window. Wars and rumors of wars. Earthquakes and disease. Cancer diagnoses. Nations pounding nations into rubble from the comparative safety of the skies, whilst men and women utterly consumed by hatred and despair prove determined to bring suffering to every corner of the earth. Suicide bombings. Genocide. Terror.

We look to New York, to London, to Paris and Belgium. We look to Syria and Iraq and Libya and Ukraine. And we wonder, Where is Jesus? He is Risen, isn’t He? So then where can we find Him when we need Him today?

For 40 days after His Resurrection, Jesus appeared time and again. He appeared to Mary, to Peter, to the gathered Apostles, to Thomas. He appeared to Cleopas on the Road to Emmaus, and to gathered crowds of 500 people. The Risen Christ appeared to the disciples throughout Jerusalem, and to all who witnessed His Ascension into Heaven. Finally, as to one untimely born, He appeared to Paul. But ascend He did. He returned to Heaven, to the right hand of the Father, to cast the accuser out from the presence of God; to prepare for us a place in His Father’s House; and to intercede for us always as our great and true High Priest.

But more than this, Jesus ascended into Heaven in order to send to us the Holy Spirit, who is none other than the very Spirit of life and love eternally exchanged between the Father and the Son in the living dance of the Trinity in Heaven! Jesus refuses to leave us orphaned, and so He sends the Spirit to bring us into the Trinity, into God. And the Spirit does this through the Sacraments: through Baptism, which forgives us our sins by joining us to the death and Resurrection of Christ, making our bodies into temples of the Spirit; and through Holy Communion, the Eucharist, which feeds us even with the Body and Blood of our Lord.

This is no small and obscure notion. The Sacraments are in fact inextricably related to Easter. For you see, in the Bible, separating blood from a body is death, for the blood is the life. Reuniting body and blood, then, is resurrection, the end of death. When we gather at this Table, brothers and sisters, the Body and Blood of Jesus are reunited in you. The Easter Resurrection dwells in you. And if we have within us now the Spirit of Jesus, the Body and Blood of Jesus, the very Resurrection of Jesus, what does that make us? Who does that make us?

It makes us Jesus. It makes each and every one of us into Jesus.

This was His plan all along! This is the true glory of Easter! Jesus died and rose again and poured out His Spirit upon us so that God might walk among us now not with a single pair of feet, a single set of hands to heal, a single tongue to forgive us our sins. But now Christ walks among us with more than two billion pairs of hands and feet, two billion tongues professing God’s New Creation and New Covenant! Where is Jesus, now when we need Him? Where is the Risen Christ to heal the sick and uplift the lowly and feed the hungry and clothe the naked, to forgive the unforgiveable and raise to life those already laid in the grave, to give impossible promises of infinity and eternity to those mourning and grieving in the valley of the shadow of death? Where is Jesus now?

Right here! He is right here among us! And He claims you as His own, and He claims your hands as His, and He claims your life for His mercies, and He says, “I know that you are broken and that you are tired, I know that all seems hopeless, but have no fear! I am Risen. Death has been defeated. Your sins have no more claim on you, your faults and fears and grief have no more claim on you, the grave itself has no more claim on you, for I am the Lord and there is no other! Now go! Go in My Name to continue My work, and proclaim to all that new life and new hope and eternal joy are given freely to all by the dawning of the Risen Son!” Our job is to make it Easter forever.

And we may look at Jesus and say, “Lord no, not I. I am not worthy. I cannot live as You would have me.” But that’s tough. Peter wasn’t worthy. Judas wasn’t worthy. Nobody was worthy. That’s kind of the point. But Jesus still chooses us, all of us, and calls us His own. “Deserve” has got nothing to do with it.

And then we may look at Jesus and say, “But Lord, whom shall I serve? Whom shall I forgive? Surely not the wicked, Lord. Surely not the evil or the cruel or the haughty. Surely you would have me seek out naught but the noble and the righteous, the humble and the good.” But no, that would be too easy, too facile a thing for the Lord of All. He seeks out the sick, not the healthy, the broken, not the whole.

Scripture tells us that between our Lord’s Crucifixion on Friday and His Resurrection on Sunday, Jesus descended to the dead. There He shattered the gates of Hades and raised the souls of all those who had died before Him up into Heaven to live forever in the light and love of God. We call this the Harrowing of Hell. Now, theologians are quick to protest that Jesus only sort of went to hell. He went to Limbo, to the borderlands, to rescue the good people, the righteous. Surely He didn’t enter the Abyss. Surely He didn’t rescue the well and truly damned. But such hedging doesn’t jive with Scripture. Scripture is more scandalous than that.

Scripture tells us that in the time of Noah, all of humanity was utterly corrupt, 100% evil. “Every inclination of their hearts was only evil continually,” that’s what Genesis says. So what would Jesus do with people like this, a generation so sinful, so destructive, that they had to be washed from the face of the earth just for humanity to have any chance of survival? Well, according to 1 Peter, when Jesus descended to the dead to harrow hell, He proclaimed liberation to the spirits in prison, “who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah.” Imagine that. 100% evil. “Every inclination of their hearts was only evil continually.” And Jesus saved them.

That’s your job now. That’s all of our job, together. We are forgiven. We are saved. We are Risen. And now that Jesus has given to us everything He has and everything He is, we must go out into the world, unafraid of suffering and death and humiliation, liberated from the petty concerns of a fleeting age, and we must be the Body of Christ for a needy world.

Christ has died. Christ is Risen. Christ will come again. On that day He will heal every wound, wipe away every tear, and raise every mother’s son from the loamy earth of the grave. Until that day, the Resurrection lives in us.

Go. And be Easter for the world.

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