Jeremy Duncan: Easter is about trusting that every failure is the possibility of forgiveness. That every dream you've had shot down is the start of something new somewhere on the horizon. That every death is the beginning of a new resurrection. First, we get now to rehearse our story. And so before we begin today, let me read the account of the first Easter morning.
And this is from the gospel of John chapter 20 starting in verse 11. Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. And as she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white seated where Jesus' body had been. One at the head, the other at the foot. And they asked her, woman, why are you crying?
They've taken my Lord away, she said. I don't know where they've put him. At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she didn't realize it was him. And he asked her, woman, why are you crying? Who is it that you're looking for?
Thinking he was the gardener, she said to him, sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you've taken him. I will go and I will get him. But he said to her, Mary. This is maybe, perhaps, almost for sure my favorite moment anywhere in scripture. The moment where the healing of the world and the repair of the garden where we were born, The point where everything everywhere is finally made right, and it now becomes recognizable with a name.
Today, are gonna talk about the grand scope of resurrection, how the world was set on a path toward goodness on that first Easter morning. It is big. It's beautiful. It's breathtaking. And, we want to revel in all of it.
But, please know that even as God is at work saving the cosmos, Christ is pausing to call your name today. Yours and mine and Mary's because the salvation of the world can only ever matter once it becomes personal for all of us. And so Jesus turns toward her in her grief and in her confusion and he says, Mary. With that, she turned back toward him and cried out in Aramaic, Rabboni, which meant teacher. But Jesus said, don't hold on to me.
I have not yet ascended to the father. Go instead to all of my friends and tell them I am ascending to my father and yours, to my God and yours. So Mary Magdalene left and went to the disciples with the news, I have seen the Lord. Let's pray. Father of all life, son of all grace, Spirit our mother who upholds and sustains all of us.
God of such great surprise as to put a catch in our breath and wings in our heart. We praise you for this joy too great for words. For this new world unleashed in us and now us in it. For today, there are no more dead ends. We've journeyed towards you through this season, and now we've arrived through life and death here at resurrection.
At goodness and truth now alive and breathing again in the world. Would you remind us today that resurrection is all around us always. As life returns with spring, as hope is renewed within us, as you continue to repair your world piece by beloved piece. Would you breathe new breath into dusty lungs this day? Pump fresh blood into tired hearts this morning?
Bring new vision to eyes that have become too dull to see the beauty that surrounds us in every moment. Also that we might celebrate life wherever it comes to find us today. In the strong name of the Christ who died and rose to new life, We pray. Amen. This week on Tuesday evening, my kids and I, we rode our bikes down to the church to walk through the stations of the cross together.
And this is something that I've participated in every holy week for honestly decades now. But it's also something that we are now slowly introducing into our rhythms as a family as our kids get a bit older. But on Tuesday night, Scott was here from the team doing his shift in the back of the room when I came through with my family. And so on Wednesday morning, Scott joked with me saying that his favorite part of watching us come through the stations was once we got to the backside of the stations over here. As the story was getting more intense, closer to the climax with every painting we encountered, my daughter who's only five now would say to me, has he died now?
And I would say, not yet, baby. And we would encounter the next painting which seemed to her even more inconceivably distressing, and she would say, has he died now? And this is one of the hard parts of Easter. About parenting in general, really, talking to your kids about mortality. See, my kids have been very fortunate.
They have not encountered a lot of difficult news in their lives as of yet. That is, of course, setting aside the drama that erupts every time I ask my son to load the dishwasher, which seems very distressing to him. But this year, our family, we had our first encounter with death. An encounter through which my daughter was now processing the Easter story when at the final station, she finally asked, is he died now like Cedar? Cedar was our beloved golden retriever who passed away earlier this year.
Except that now, at the final station of the cross, I realized I had a new dilemma on my hands. Because when Cedar passed, my kids needed to learn about the permanence of death. For about a week after Cedar died, my daughter would crawl into bed with me every morning if she does and ask, Cedar is still dead? Yes, baby. And you are still sad?
Yes, baby. Something profoundly touching about the fact that my daughter could not yet comprehend death and yet was very aware of her father's grief. But then, of course, later that afternoon, we would go riding our bikes through the neighborhood, and my daughter who loves to talk to everyone she ever meets would alternately call out to strangers along the path. My dog has died and my dad is sad. And then to the next, look, I got new shoes.
They're pink. I told you this story before, but she contains multitudes. The thing is it did slowly sink in that Cedar was gone. Cedar was not coming back because Cedar had died. And here we were at the final station of the cross here.
We are all of us on Good Friday taking in the story of Jesus, wanting to feel every bit of it, and yet encountering that moment through the only stories of death that any of us have ever known. Because Jesus has died just like cedar. At least for today, baby. See, I think one of the hardest parts of Easter is making sense of a story that doesn't make sense. Why does Jesus die just to come back?
Why all that pain just for it to be undone? Why choose something so irrevocable to inaugurate the salvation of the world? And perhaps, I think just like my kids, I have found myself for almost twenty years now, largely unsatisfied with the answers I've been offered. Now, maybe that feels familiar to me. Because I don't mean unsatisfied with Jesus.
I find the story of the life and death, even the resurrection of Jesus incredibly compelling. That's why I've given my life to trying to make sense of it, but it's the explanations and the shorthand versions that have often left me wanting. See for the most part, the story I've been told is that Jesus died because God was mad. The story goes that someone, somewhere, at some point along the line made a bad mistake. And because of that mistake, all of us, we have been making mistakes ever since.
Except that at some point, someone was always gonna have to pay for it all. So one day, God took God's son who hadn't done anything wrong and punished him to let us off the hook. Except didn't really matter all that much because he came back anyway, and we're forgiven. We don't have to be sad as long as we don't think too hard about everything that God did to Jesus. Now, it's an oversimplification.
It's a caricature, really. But I think that's the problem. Right? We're trying to explain the salvation of the cosmos in an elevator pitch to a five year old, and it doesn't work. The story is too big.
The implications, too important. The scope, far too grand for a purely transactional approach to salvation. Easter, all of this is so much more than the bow tie on Good Friday to send us home with a smile. Easter is where the world turns. And to properly understand that, we have to do more than filter Easter through our experience of losing furry friends, and we have to do more even than filter Easter through ancient imaginations of appeasing the gods.
We have to, I think at least, turn to what Jesus tells us is taking place here. And for that, I wanna go back to you. Well, exactly where we left off last Sunday on Palm Sunday. There we walked through Jesus' entry into Jerusalem in John twelve. The crowds took palm branches and went out to meet him shouting, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Blessed is the king of Israel. Except Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it as it was written, do not be afraid daughter Zion, see your king is coming seated on a donkey's colt. That that right there, that is the politics of Jesus. The crowds want a king that will fight for them, So Jesus rides out to meet them sitting on a donkey's colt. That's a symbol of peace.
A sign that war is undone. A callback to a story that we had forgotten long ago. Except Jesus is not done here because in verse 23, he continues our re education. He says, the hour has come for the son of man to be glorified. And to be fair, that sounds nice on its surface at least.
At least, if you're in the crowd waving palm branches and holding signs of national sovereignty, believing that a king would come and fight for you, that sounds very much like what you might want to hear. The hour has come for the son of man to be glorified. We're with him at this point. Amen. Except, he says, very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains but a single seed.
But if it dies, it can produce many more. Anyone who loves their life will lose it. Anyone who hates their life will find it for all of eternity. But now my soul is troubled. So what should I say?
Father, save me from this? No. It's for this reason that I'm here. To that part feels very unlike what we might have wanted from a savior. I mean, glorified sure, but falling to the ground and dying, losing his life, and struggling with the weight of that implication, that doesn't feel very kingly to me at all.
So, why? Why did my dog die? Why did I have to explain that to my kids? Why did I have to stand at the bedside of a friend, a young dad who'd been part of this community since day one, a good man who died on Good Friday? Why does our greatest celebration need to start here at the cross?
Well, it's actually there. At the end of Palm Sunday, right on the verge of holy week, just steps from the depths of the cross that Jesus offers us one of the most enigmatic and perhaps maybe also one of the most important descriptions of what Easter is all about. He says this in John 12 verse 31, now is the time for the judgment of the world, for the prince of this world to be driven out because when I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself. That is what the son of God thinks Easter is about. Not appeasing an angry God, but the very work of God that will judge the world and drive out evil.
The work that will draw all of humanity toward resurrection. Except, if that is what is happening on the cross, then it seems to me at least that something has gone very wrong in our shorthand explanations of Easter. First, the cross is the judgment of the world. See, I've often been told that judgment is what happens after you die. Like you stand before the pearly gates and God opens up a big book and he sends you either to the good place or the bad one.
Jesus tells me that it's here in holy week on the cross that the world was judged. Now, think part of our problem is that our default is to assume that judgment must mean retribution. You did a bad thing, bad things gotta happen to you. It's not what we see here in Jesus. What's reflected here is an imagination of sin, not primarily as infringement, but maybe something more like corruption or sickness.
Sin is not when you break the rule. Sin is when you have trouble seeing what's good for you in the first place. Not knowing what's good for your neighbor. Not seeing what's good for your world. Not grasping what a good God desperately wants for you.
So the judgment of the world is not when the world gets what's coming to it. The judgment of the world is when all of our brokenness is held up in front of us and God finally refuses to let us look away. I've already talked about my dog today. Cedar was one of the most beautifully, brilliantly oblivious dogs I've ever met. Look, Cedar has passed.
There's no point besmirching his reputation. So let me put this out there before I begin. He was a wonderful dog. But every once in a while, Cedar would decide that we had been gone a little too long or that he needed a little more stimulation than we had provided, and we would come home to find the kids' artwork, maybe left on a table now torn to shreds on the floor, or a compost bag left unsecured, now scattered across the room, a child's stuffy love, let's say, just a little too recklessly. And if you ever wanted to see a beautiful, brilliant dog, all of a sudden turn into a black hole of awareness, all you had to do is pick up any shred of that mess and hold it near him.
All of a sudden, it was invisible to him. You were invisible to him. He could not see anything. He would avert his gaze and turn his head to avoid even a hint of acknowledgment that anything had happened. Guys, we do that all the time.
We ignore each other. We acquire more than we need. We accumulate excess at the expense of our neighbor. We avert our eyes when someone else is sacrificed for the common good. As long as they remain nameless so that we can maintain plausible deniability.
We outsource sin so that we can pretend we don't see our mess. And on the cross, God says, no more. This is what your violence looks like. This is what your disdain for each other does. This is the pain that you're blaming and you're scapegoating manufacturers in your world.
And it's no longer hidden, and you can't look away. That's what judgment is. It's not God's retribution. It's not God's violence. It's not because God wants anyone to suffer.
The cross exists because God wants us to finally stop passing our pain back and forth between ourselves forever. The cross is where we stop pretending we're okay. And we come face to face with what we do to each other all the time in this world. The judgment of God is not violence. The judgment of God is when we are finally honest with our violence.
Father, forgive them. They don't even know what they're doing. Which means, it's now time for the prince of this world to be driven out. And that's wonderful, but it's a very loaded language. The Greek here speaks about the archon of the cosmos.
Prince of this world is certainly one way that you could read that, but archon is a word that speaks about authority or power, not a person. And cosmos here refers to not the planets and the stars, but the social world that we live in. It's everything that we've constructed for ourselves. And Paul actually uses the same idea in his phrase, the principalities and powers over in Ephesians. But there he very specifically says, our battle is not with each other, not with some kind of enemy, but with ideas, ideologies, principalities, and powers that reinforce our violence in the world.
And the cross is really the judgment of the world, the place where we see ourselves clearly, perhaps for the very first time. I think it makes a lot of sense then that the power of the systems around us, the authority they think they hold over us, well, all of that would slowly begin to crumble next. See if our sin, our violence can actually become visible to us, if we can see it for what it is, then slowly it will, I believe, necessarily have less power over us. Which means that when Jesus is finally lifted up, he will draw all of us toward himself. See, this isn't just some merely evangelistic claim like prophesizing propaganda.
This is Jesus declaring that once an alternative to our violence has been seeded into the world, once an option is actually visible to us, it will slowly but inevitably, maybe like a mustard vine creep itself across the cosmos. And that, this, that's why Easter has to begin with death. It's why it has to start with something that seems so irrevocable. It's why I will struggle to explain it to my kids every year. That's why I will probably wrestle with this story for the rest of my life because Easter is about the impossible.
Our violence, our systems, our structures, our sins that make our world possible, finally crumbling under the weight of peace. And that seems absurd, which is why I think we try so hard to retrofit Easter into our imagination. That's why we turn the judgment of cross into the punishment of hell. I mean, how can judgment really be grace? I don't wanna treat my enemies that way.
Much easier to think it's about retribution. So I return what needs to be driven out of this world into an enemy rather than our own culpability. So much easier to blame someone or something rather than to do the work of divesting ourselves of what's broken. So we turn the lifting up of Jesus into our job, a propaganda campaign to celebrate listening to ourselves talk. I mean, I can get behind that.
Much easier than trusting that the spirit of Jesus is at work right now in every single person you meet, calling them toward futures that seem too good to be true, even if they don't use the same language that you do to describe it. That's the point. Because things don't change somewhere at some point, sometime down the line, things changed at Easter. And you and I, we are just watching the light slowly creep across the land. That's why we celebrate today.
Not because we believe the world is everything it could be, but because we trust it will be. And you and I, we are ahead of the curve. Easter is about believing somewhere deep in our bones that goodness is inevitable. Easter is about trusting that every failure is the possibility of forgiveness. That every dream you've had shot down is the start of something new somewhere on the horizon.
That every death is the beginning of a new resurrection. Easter Sunday is about celebrating that tomorrow is a new Monday morning, where you can wake up more honest with yourself than ever before, more free from whatever it was that felt like it had you trapped before, more motivated to good than you ever imagined possible before. Perhaps even believing for the very first time that whatever kind of death that you have encountered or experienced anywhere in your life, it was not the end. And that resurrection is somehow the natural state of the cosmos. Because Christ is risen and not one dead shall remain.
Let's pray. God, on this Easter morning where we struggle to make sense of your story, and it is necessarily, objectively too good to be true, we ask that you would help us sink deep into those arms, To believe in something that is irrational. To trust in something that is inevitable. To believe that the light of the world slowly creeping across the land, making its way toward us this day. And that because of that, we can wake up tomorrow morning full of something new and vibrant, something motivating and energizing, something like hope.
Hope for ourselves and those near us. Hope for this world that you love that much. May that story slowly become ours, and may we live in the light of resurrection. In the strong name of the Jesus who died and rose to new life, we pray, Amen. Hey, Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast.
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