Terror and Amazement

Make Me Like Christ, by kevron2001

Propers: Easter Sunday, Holy Pascha, the Resurrection of Our Lord, AD 2024 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.

“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.” Thus end our oldest manuscripts of the Holy Gospel According to St Mark. Later editors added other endings, incorporating other witnesses, but Mark appears to cut us off right then and there, with an empty tomb, and silence, and fear.

At the time when Mark was writing, Christians faced quite the crisis. The first generation of our leadership—James in Jerusalem, Peter amongst the Diaspora, Paul ministering to the Gentiles—all died in a wave of persecution. Shortly thereafter, Jerusalem fell, again, and the Temple of God was destroyed, never to be rebuilt, not for 2000 years. The world as Jews and Christians knew it had ended.

And so the second generation wrote down the witness of the first in order to pass it along to the third. The Gospels were written for grandchildren, to bequeath continuity to the faith. And Mark chose to end his here. Why? I firmly believe that the ending of any given story either makes or breaks the whole. Mark concluded his story at the open tomb—with the same women, mind you, who were at the Crucifixion. They weren’t frightened at the Cross. They weren’t scared to risk their lives for love of Christ. Yet here they are afraid.

You know, from a strictly historical perspective, it’s rather amazing that we know anything of Jesus Christ at all. He was a miracle worker from the Galilee, yes. But there were several miraculous rabbis, also from the Galilee, working wonders at that time. Crowds hailed Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ, whom they hoped would liberate Israel from Rome. Yet there were many would-be messiahs, both before and after Jesus. Rome had gotten pretty good at killing them. I’ll be impressed if you can name a one.

By rights, Jesus ought to have been forgotten, meriting a mention in the Talmud perhaps, or a footnote to Josephus. Instead He is worshipped as God Almighty by some two billion souls across every continent of this earth. What changed? What made the difference? It was Easter. Holy Pascha. The Resurrection of Our Lord. It was that open, broken tomb, the resulting fear and the shock that death herself had died.

Had Jesus stayed dead, He wouldn’t have done any good. He tells us this Himself: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” There’s always the possibility that He’d have been remembered as a wise and moral guide, but I sincerely doubt it. He rooted His teachings firmly in the sapiential and apocalyptic traditions of His Jewish contemporaries, and how many of us remember them?

No, it was what happened after His death that changed the world, that changed everything. It cast His life, His mission, His Gospel in an entirely new light. Time and again the Evangelists remind us that His own Apostles, let alone the crowds, could not begin to understand Jesus until after He rose from the dead. James and Paul, the respective heads of the Jewish and Gentile Church, were not even followers of Jesus until after His Resurrection. They met the Risen Christ.

Peter and John, who knew Jesus in life—who followed Him throughout His ministry, who witnessed all His miracles, from the Transfiguration to His raising of the dead—they were consistently cowardly and confused until that very first Easter Sunday. Then they were transformed, utterly, made strong and wise and fearless, as though they were the resurrected, as though they had been raised from the dead.

God bless the teachings of our Lord. God bless His wisdom and His healings and His merciful, loving example. They are the lodestone of our lives. But all of that would amount to a hill of beans if He had just stayed dead, if sin, death, and the devil had had the final say. “Oh, look, somebody lived a life of love and we nailed Him to a Cross for it. Too bad, so sad.” Death ends everything. Death negates it all, isn’t that right? We tossed that hippie rabbi into hell, so that we could all get back to business as usual.

Only it didn’t work. This one time, this one Man, killing Him didn’t work. Violence didn’t work—which is ridiculous, really, because violence always works. That’s why we use it. And that’s what makes the tomb so scary: not in that it’s a tomb, but because somehow now it’s empty. It couldn’t hold Him. It couldn’t stop Him. Why, it barely slowed Him down. And on some level that’s more terrifying than all that went before, more frightening than the lash, the rod, the thorns, the nails, the spear. Because those things we understand.

We are intimately familiar with death. It’s what our taxes pay for, why we put cameras on our bombs. But to encounter Someone who outlives death—who accepts all of our violence, all of our hatred, all of our savagery, into the wounds of His flesh, where He then drowns it in the ocean of His love—what can we do against that? How can we fight a Man who is beyond all violence, beyond all vengeance, beyond even death?

All of our pointy little sticks, our nasty bits of metal, the fires that we light to drive the engines of our wars, all of that is impotent. All of that is useless. We are powerless in the face of His forgiveness. We have no defense at all against a grace that conquers hell. We can fight and we can spit and we can run and we can cry, but sooner or later He finds us. He absolves us. He gathers us all home in Him. And then at last our life begins.

The message of Easter is simply this: that Jesus is alive! He is alive within this community, alive within His Word, alive within these Sacraments we share. Everything that we do here, every tradition, every lesson, every song, is to put the life of Christ within you. Here in this congregation, this motley crew of sainted sinners, Jesus has baptized you into His death and His life: into His own death, already died for you, that you need never fear death again; and into His own eternal life, already here begun.

We read the Scriptures because they are Jesus’ Scriptures, the tales of His people which have shaped His heart and mind. We gather at this Altar, at the eternal Table of our Lord, to share together in His Last Supper, His Holy Eucharist, the Christian Passover feast. Here we are given His flesh and His blood, together becoming His Body: the hands and feet and voice of Christ at work within this world. Here His Spirit dwells within us, the Life and the Breath of our God, burning as a fire that can neither dim nor die.

Jesus takes upon Himself all that we have been—our arrogance, our pride, our prejudices, our mistakes, every time we’ve fallen short—and gives to us all that He is: eternal and perfect and loving and healing, alive beyond all death. We are sons and daughters of God, the Bride and the Body of Christ. Our destiny is eternal. Our future is immortal. And all the things we suffer here shall pass away at the last.

Life now outlives death. And this is not simply some future promise, but our present reality, because it changes who we are, how we live. With Christ we can brave anything. Not because bad things won’t happen—we know very well that they will—but because we know that ultimately, death has no power over us, violence has no power over us, for Jesus has had the last Word. Indeed, He is the last Word, the eternal revelation of the Father’s hidden heart. And His will for us is life without limit, life forevermore.

So live now as though this were true. Live as though death were no worry. Give as one who has received a priceless gift. Dedicate the time we have to loving as we have been loved. And know that in God no good thing is ever truly lost, and not one of us shall be forgotten. Salvation begins here and now, in people who are liberated to live as Jesus lives. And all that we are called to do is to share His life with the world. Christ is alive! And in His Resurrection, we can now be too.

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.

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