Resurrection Changes Things

March 31, 3013 - Easter Sunday
Resurrection Changes Things
Luke 24:1-12, 36-48;
Isaiah 65:17-25; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26

Do you remember where you were when Jesus was raised? No, I’m not suggesting that some of you are old enough to have been around back then. Actually I am suggesting just the opposite. None of us were there. None of us went to the garden. None of us discovered the stone rolled away from the tomb opening. None of us were startled by the appearance of the two men who asked us why we were looking for the living among the dead. None of us had the opportunity to remember what Jesus kept saying about being arrested, crucified, and rising.

Our memories are better about other things. We remember where we were and what we were doing when key events in our personal lives or the life of the community happened. Events like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, the events of 9/11, the 1960 World Series seventh game, ninth inning, game-winning walk-off home run by Pirate Bill Mazeroski, the first human steps on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the confirmation of Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman associate justice of the Supreme Court, the last episode of M*A*S*H. Each of us could add many other event memories, all the way from the deeply personal to those that changed national history.

We experienced those things. They are permanent entries on the Facebook time-lines of our lives. Emotions which run the gamut from tribulation to trauma help to make up who we are.

There are three words that can either clear a room or bring people to rapt attention: “I remember when....” Psychologists tell us that we don’t remember some of our earliest memories. We remember them because we heard about them so often that we can recite all the details as if we really did remember the event. For example, when I was around two years old, I named my first dog. Dad brought this young blond cocker spaniel mix home from work in order to save it. Dad showed the dog to me and I said, “Do, do,” because I couldn’t say “dog.” That became her name “Dodo.” I remember that – not. What I remember is the story.

Isn’t that where we are with the resurrection? We don’t remember it for real. None of us are 2,000 years old, as much as we might feel like it some days. We remember the story. Or stories. The four gospel writers give us the basic details of the tomb being empty, but then add in their own special “memories.” John may have been the only one to actually see the empty tomb. Mark and Matthew may have seen the risen Christ. Luke gathered the first person memories for retelling.

We are at a disadvantage because we weren’t there. We have to take at face value what the Gospel writers and Paul tell us in their writings. And there is no real way of testing what we read. Our knowledge of the resurrection is mostly in our heads. We know the story so well that it is almost as if we were there.

And that is an advantage. If we had been there, we would have reacted in the same ways as the women and disciples did on finding the tomb empty or on having the risen Lord suddenly pop into their midst. According to Luke the women didn’t know what to make of the stone being rolled away from the tomb and its empty cavern. They were frightened and they cowered when the two brightly-clothed men broke into their confusion to ask why they were looking for the living among the dead.  The women must have appeared hysterical when they went and told the disciples the news, for it struck the disciples as nonsense.

In the second gospel reading, it is Easter evening in Jerusalem. Two disciples had made the seven-mile journey to Emmaus unknowingly in the company of the risen Christ, only learning his identity when they broke bread together. They breathlessly raced back to the city to tell the rest of the disciples their experience. And while they were doing that, Jesus himself stood among them. They all were terrified and afraid.

Confusion, terror, and fear are the dominant outward emotions that seized any of the people who discovered the empty tomb or encountered the risen Christ.

If we had been there we would have been terrified and afraid. That’s because resurrection changes things. Resurrection knocks the pins out from under everything that we thought we knew, everything that we thought was hard and fast. We complain about the changes we face in our physical bodies, in our relationships, in the goings and comings of the world, and in the technology that guides our daily living. All those changes, as aggravating as they often seem, are nothing compared to the change that resurrection brings.

Resurrection takes us out of the realm of knowledge and data and information. Resurrection takes us out of our brains and into the realm of our spirits, our hearts. Resurrection takes us out of presuming that we know what’s what. In the words of Wendell Berry, we can no longer presume that life is “knowable, predictable and within our control.” Resurrection life is a mystery.

Robert Cording says that we are “all too ready to say that a word like ‘mystery’ is a nostalgia.” He goes on to say that “we limit the meaning of ‘mystery’ to a quantity of the unknown, thereby opening the possibility that the inevitable acquisition of further knowledge will reduce that which is unknown and, in the future, erase the unknown entirely.”(1) In other words we only think of mystery as something to be solved. Thank you, Agatha Christie.

But when the biblical writers use the word “mystery,” they are not referring to a quantity of the unknown, but rather to the quality of the unknown. In Cording’s words, it “refers to awe rather than ignorance.” In that sense, mystery attests to the fact that no amount of research could make anything having to do with God, including Christ’s resurrection, less mysterious. We can never be finished with it. Mystery does not allow a conclusion. It goes beyond all evidence. The Spanish writer, Federico Garcia Lorca, noted that “only mystery enables us to live.” The poet Theodore Roethke wrote that only those “who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”(2)

The resurrection is a mystery. It is a mystery that evokes awe and wonder. It is a mystery that changes us and makes us vulnerable. It is a mystery that gives life. And that terrifies us and makes us afraid.

Resurrection changes us. And we have to let it change us from data based, information driven, findi-the-unknown kinds of people into people of the mystery, people willing to be confronted by what we don’t know and can’t rationally understand, and to say, “I am alive, thanks be to God, because Jesus was raised.” Resurrection is scary because it sets aside everything that we cling to, everything that makes sense to us, everything that lines up square and true. Like the mystery that it is, resurrection is not about quantity of life, but quality of life. Resurrection is about saying to the world, “I don’t live because of what I know. I live because of what I don’t know. I live because of the one who knows me through and through. I live because God knows way more than I ever will.”

In Christ’s resurrection we encounter God as Job did in the midst of the whirlwind. God does not answer Job’s logical questions, “Why this and why that?” God presents Job with images so intense that Job doesn’t hear. Rather he sees “things I didn’t understand, wonders beyond my comprehension” (Job 42:3, ceb).

We are awe-struck by Christ’s resurrection, which takes us out of our data-oriented lives and puts us into the realm of a quality of living that cannot be measured, cannot be surveyed and platted, cannot be graphed and charted, cannot be listed in a financial balance sheet. Resurrection life bursts the bonds of standard reality just as Jesus burst the bonds of the tomb.

Resurrection changes everything. Don’t be afraid of the change that resurrection brings. Allow yourself to be vulnerable to the mystery of life with God. Be daring to live a resurrected life of quality rather than a dead and buried life of quantity. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, crucified, buried and gloriously risen for the world. For you. For now. For always.

Alleluia!

(1) Robert Cording, “Mystery,” Image, No. 75, Fall 2012, p. 40.
(2) Cited by Cording, ibid.

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church, Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.