Speaker 1: If anyone is devout and a lover of God, let them enjoy this beautiful and radiant day. If anyone is a grateful servant, let them rejoicing enter into the joy of the Lord. If anyone has wearied themselves in fasting, let them now receive their recompense. If anyone has labored from the first hour, let them today receive their just reward. If anyone has come at the third hour, or if anyone has arrived at the sixth, let them with no misgivings, for they shall suffer no loss.
If anyone has delayed until the ninth, if they have arrived even at the eleventh hour, let them draw near without hesitation. For the master is gracious and receives the last even as the first, gives rest to him who comes at the eleventh just as to him who has labored from the first hour. He has mercy upon the last and cares for the first to the one he gives to the other he is gracious. For Christ is risen and not one dead remains in the tomb. These are the words of Saint John Chrysostom, words written for today because today is resurrection Sunday, the moment where we stare directly into the center of the Christian story.
For followers of the way of Jesus, this is the hinge point of human history. The moment where everything changed, where there was a before and there was an after. And today, in this moment, we stand in the long history of all those who have been shaped by the life, death, and resurrection of the Christ. For centuries, for millennia, through war and peace and pandemic and blessing, followers of The Way have celebrated the return of the spring with the celebration of Christ's return. Victory over death, over violence, over hatred, over despair.
The truth that in the end, love wins. And this year, maybe more than ever in recent memory, this story is good news for tired souls. For he is risen. Christ is risen indeed. So who'd have guessed we'd be here three hundred and sixty five days ago?
Now, three hundred and sixty five days ago, we had just wrapped our heads around the fact that our world had paused collectively. We had just learned how to use Zoom, how to stream a service, we had scrambled to pull together an Easter online, and we did it. In fact, it was a quite beautiful thing to gather together online one year ago and celebrate resurrection. Even as we were, we would learn just getting started with COVID. But here we are one year later still trusting resurrection, still believing in goodness, still waiting for it to come and find us.
And don't get me wrong, there is a lot to be thankful for this Easter. Spring has returned and weather is beckoning us outside once again. Vaccines are beginning to roll out across the province, an incredible testament to both science and logistics. And here we are and we have access to all of this technology to pull together a community that now a year into this experiment is drawn from across the country and even beyond. And yet, none of this is what we imagined a year ago.
I think it's okay to say that. In fact, maybe I think it's even necessary to start there. If we're going to embrace resurrection fully this year. This week, my son and I, we were creating superhero characters. It's a regular pastime in our house.
We're all Marvel fans these days. Am I right? But he came up with a character, a superhero named Inviso Kondo. No idea where that name came from. But this superhero's power was invisibility.
And like any good professional dad, I said, well, that sounds awesome. Say hi next time you don't see him. My son paused and he pondered this and then he said, I get it. That is hilarious. However, what we found out was that it was more than just hilarious.
My son had decided that this was perhaps the funniest joke in the history of humanity because he proceeded to spend the rest of the evening finding ways to get us to set him up so that he could tell the same joke again and again and again and again all night. Maybe that's a little like how you feel right now. You've heard this one before and it would be nice to move on to something new. And yet even as there are stories that outlast their welcome, there are other tales. Tales we find ourselves drawn back to over and over again endlessly.
And in fact, it's those stories. The ones we keep coming back to that are the ones that shape us most deeply in the end. And so, we find ourselves back at Easter again. And this year, we traveled with Jesus all the way from The Galilee to Jerusalem this Lent. We entered the city on Palm Sunday and we wept with Jesus about the peace that came so close to us and yet somehow remained just outside our grasp.
We watched Jesus die on Good Friday and we saw hope dim as his eyes faded as his breath failed him. And we sat with this loss on Holy Saturday. Let the realization sink in that salvation would not look like we had expected it to. And just familiar as that story is, all of that kind of feels perhaps real in a new way this Easter this year. We didn't expect to be here after all.
We expected to be together. And yet this is often where resurrection begins, where we least expect. 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 have taken my Lord away, she said, and they don't know where they've put him. At this she turned and she saw Jesus standing there, but she didn't even realize it was him. And He asked her, Why are you crying? Who is it that you're looking for? But thinking He was the gardener perhaps, she said, Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where you have put Him and I will go and I will get Him myself.
But Jesus said to her, Mary. And at this she turned toward Him and cried out in Aramaic, Rabboni, which means teacher. Jesus said, Do not hold on to Me, for I have not yet ascended to My Father. Go instead to My friends and tell them about Me. For I am ascending to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God.
And that's the account of Easter morning from the Gospel of John, chapter 20. I've always liked that passage at Easter because it just seems like there's so much going on here. Unfilled expectations met with an even better hope, mistaken identity and the way that grief clouds our vision of what's standing right there in front of us at times. Commission and purpose and how those we don't expect are often the ones who bring us good, maybe even the best news. And yet all of it starts Easter morning with tears in the garden and I think maybe that's important.
But let's come back to that in a moment. Because so far during this Lenten season, we have been following Jesus through the Gospel of Luke as he walks some 120 kilometers from where he's familiar in the Galilee all the way to Jerusalem where he rises with us this morning. And along that journey, Jesus has taught us that God is not in the business of destroying enemies the way we might have imagined. Jesus has told us that his path is one that leads neither to riches or obligations, but to the kind of life we are drawn into when we can scarcely look back from. He's reminded us that wealth is a way of sapping our imagination from us, that more of what we already have is ultimately uninteresting.
He showed us that God loves a good party. In fact, God is so full of joy and full of generosity that when God wants to party, God is going to party no matter who thinks they're too busy to show up. Jesus teaches us that sometimes the right thing is misunderstood, but that turning from evil can actually open people's eyes to new ways forward in life. And then last week, we saw Jesus heal 10 lepers pointing out that a foreigner among them was the only one who knew where to come and look for God. Then he proceeded to walk into the city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, weeping over the fact that even his friends, even those cheering him on had missed the location of God's coming to them.
And looking back, I think we see that when Jesus sets out from the Galilee resolute in his purpose, ready to set his face against the mountains, it really does seem that Jesus was intent on upending all of our common sense expectations of him, which I suppose is sort of the point of Easter. The good news, we couldn't see any of us coming. But there is one more story here in Luke that I want to explore before we reach Easter morning together. And for this, we have to back up to the night before Jesus was betrayed, in fact, just moments before he was. Luke writes in chapter 22 that Jesus said to them, But now if you don't have a sword, go and sell your cloak to buy one.
For it is written, He was numbered with the transgressors, and I tell you that this now must be fulfilled in me. So the disciples said, See, Lord, here are two swords. And he replied, That's enough. While he was still speaking, a crowd came up and the man who was called Judas, one of the 12, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him, but Jesus asked, Judas, are you going to betray the son of man with a kiss?
Then Jesus' followers saw what was gonna happen. They said, Lord, should we strike with our swords? And one of them struck the servant of the high priest cutting off his ear. But Jesus answered, no more of this. And he touched the man's ear and healed him.
Then Jesus said to the chief priests, the officers of the temple guard, and to the elders there who had come for him, am I leading a rebellion that you have come for me with swords and clubs? This is a really intriguing moment. I mean, Jesus tells his disciples to get their swords and then he scolds them for using them. He asks his followers to get their swords and then seems surprised that the authorities might come armed themselves. So what exactly is going on here?
Well, there's actually a lot going on in the subtext. First of all, Jesus quotes from the prophet Isaiah and he's done that before already in Luke. In chapter four, he cites Isaiah 61 as his life verse saying, The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. But now here, he he quotes Isaiah 53, for it is written, he was numbered with the transgressors.
And that's from a section known as the Psalm of the Suffering Servant. It's it's one of the most singularly striking passages anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures. It's it's beautiful. You should absolutely go and read the whole thing later today. Here's part of what it says: He grew up like a tender shoot, like a root out of the dry ground.
He had no beauty, no majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. And so He was despised and rejected, a man of suffering familiar with pain, like one from whom people hid their face. But surely He took up our pain and bore our suffering. The punishment that brought us peace was on Him, and by His wounds we are now healed. But after He has suffered, He will see the light of life and be satisfied again.
By his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many he will bear their iniquities. Because he poured out his life unto death, he was numbered with the transgressors. Now part of what's interesting here is that for the Jewish people of the time, this passage was not generally considered to be about the coming Messiah. The teachers tended to interpret this image as a reference to all of Israel who suffered as they waited under Roman occupation for the Messiah to come. So what Jesus is doing here is he applies this to himself is quite bold.
This is not just a claim to messianic identity. This is Jesus saying, God is not who you imagine the divine to be. God has not left you to suffer. God suffers with you. Salvation comes not in power or violence, not through war, but in standing with those who hurt.
In fact, Jesus goes as far as to say that salvation might even look criminal. Think about that for a second. Think about Moses standing before Pharaoh saying, Let my people go. Think about John Lewis getting into good trouble. Think about conscientious objectors who refused their part in war.
Peace has often been criminalized. And Jesus knows this, which starts to help us make more sense of his direction, Go sell your cloak and buy a sword. Jesus was never interested in a fight. After all, he shuts that down pretty quickly when it happens. Jesus was interested in who he might be associated with in people's minds.
And we can actually see this before the showdown begins. The disciples say, here, we've got two swords, and Jesus says, that's enough, with an exclamation point in the NIV. Now there is no punctuation in the Greek, but where they're getting that from is the language Jesus uses here. He says, More literally, enough it is. And apart from sounding like Yoda, what's happening here is that the sentence is constructed to emphasize the enough.
It's a hard stop. So the swords aren't about protection, they're about the fact that Jesus comes in peace and all anyone sees, be they his supporters or his detractors. Everyone else, it seems, wants war. And Jesus knows it. I love the way that Joel Green puts it in his commentary on Luke.
He says, the apostles manifest their dullness when they suppose that Jesus now opposes his own extensive and emphatic teaching on nonviolence. That's how an academic lays shade. John Nolan adds that it's unlikely Jesus expected a literal implication of his new directive, which is why he emphatically shuts it down. And then Jerome Nare wades in to add that this entire scene is an indication that the disciples are not fully in accord with Jesus' imagination of kingdom. In other words, Jesus is making a rhetorical point about the criminalization of peace and the authorities play along, but maybe even worse, his disciples seem to buy into the fiction.
That's got that's got to be frustrating because since the moment Jesus left the Galilee, he's been working really hard to upend all of our expectations, to demonstrate a new way forward for all of us. And here we are at the climax of the story, and we are still in our hearts somehow back there at the starting line, still wanting to call down fire from heaven on our enemies. And what happens? Well, the authorities come and the disciples fight back and Jesus has to not only stop his friends, but now heal his enemies. And yet perhaps it's only here now that we get to the real heart of this Easter story.
The resurrection isn't just for us, those on our side, those with us. It is for all of us, everyone we encounter. You see, the reason Jesus doesn't call down fire from heaven on Samaritans is because Jesus is for Samaritans. And the reason Jesus accepts dinner invitations at the homes of Pharisees is because Jesus is on the side of Pharisees. The reason Jesus stops his friends and heals his enemies is because Jesus is for his friends, and Jesus is for his enemies, and Jesus has come because God is for the world, all of us.
The good news isn't just you come back to life. The good news is that Christ recreates life between all of us forever. I mean you, you and God on your own without anyone else, maybe that sounds nice on paper, but that's not what you were built for. Because your life, resurrection, divine breath now in you alive is intimately connected to everyone you encounter. That's good news.
But then, I think that's been Jesus' point all along, hasn't it? That we, all of us, we love a good enemy. Samaritans that don't welcome us, disciples that don't follow like us, brothers that view their inheritance differently from us, party guests that get invited to different tables than we do. See, we often come to define ourselves by our enemies. We describe ourselves by who we're not, we spell out our self worth by who hates us, and yet Jesus keeps saying all the way along, all along the road, over and over again, you don't need this the way that you think you do.
And so in front of us, he spends time with Samaritans. He embraces women as equals. He sits with tax collectors and sex workers. He accepts invitations from religious leaders. And when he's about to be arrested, he dresses up in a bit of theater to look like their enemy, but then he refuses to act like one when the moment comes.
And yet still, he is taken, he is tried, he is crucified, he is killed, he is buried. He has made a casualty of the status quo. A sacrifice to ensure that nothing changes. And if that was the end of the story, it would be tragic, but it would be entirely unremarkable. Because every day there are people who are ground under the heel of the status quo and maybe in some small way you have felt that in new ways this year.
Hope receding, light dimming, breath fading. Enemies looming, frustration building, hatred compounding, and yet here on Easter morning in the depths of our grief and confusion, our loss and our pain, in the moment when it feels darkest, this is where resurrection now calls out to us. A return not just to life, but to new life between us. And as I said when we started, I love this moment in John's Gospel, the moment when the first human being encounters the possibility of resurrection. When Mary Magdalene, this tower of strength within the apostles, the only one to retain her faith and return to the garden to wait on Jesus, when even she has lost her hope.
She sees the empty tomb. It's everything that she wants except all that she can imagine is grave robbers that have gotten there first. And so gripped by fear and frustration, maybe anger even, she actually encounters Jesus, but even He seems like an enemy to her. She turns to Him in accusation demanding, Where have you taken Him? What have you done?
And yet it's in that moment when resurrection seems farthest from her that Jesus calls her by name. And in that moment, resurrection floods in bringing back to life something that had died inside of her creating something new in her story. She remembers who she is. She sees Jesus for the first time. She cries out in a loud voice, and I love this.
It's not in Greek, the language of her oppressors. It's not in Hebrew, the language of her religion, but it's in Aramaic, the tongue of conversation and family and dinner parties and friends. It's the language that came most freely to her in that moment. And she calls Him teacher, the one who shows us the way back to life Because this is resurrection. Those moments when we come face to face with just how truly lost and helpless we are and we flail about hoping we can find an enemy, someone to direct our rage against and define our self and yet it's in that moment when God speaks our name and tells us we are loved, reminds us that we are remembered and gives us back to each other with good news to share.
And look, I know it's been a tough year for a lot of you. Heck, it's been a tough year for me and I have been pretty darn lucky. But I cannot overstate this. Particularly as we begin to see the signs of hope and spring emerging around us in the world, resurrection is about more than just you. Resurrection is the new life within you that orients you toward those near you with grace and peace to give to them.
Christ says, Do not hold on to me. Go instead and tell my friends because resurrection isn't the point of good news. Good news is the point of resurrection inside us. And you have been raised to new life, to change the world, to share the story, to bring good news to everyone you encounter. To heal broken relationships and to repair damaged hopes, to restore justice, to participate in goodness, to trust that God renews all things.
To, in the words of James Baldwin, do something unprecedented. To create yourself without finding it necessary to create an enemy. Because this is how resurrection works. We see it, we glimpse it, we can barely understand it and then in that moment it calls our name. And slowly we begin to believe.
I thought my marriage was over, but maybe it wasn't. I thought the end of a relationship was going to be the end of me, but it wasn't. I thought we were done for, but we weren't. I thought hope was lost, but it found me. I thought he was dead, but maybe he's not.
I thought that we die, but maybe we don't either. And if that can be true, then maybe everything can be different from now on. So maybe today, as unsure as you are about resurrection, maybe you realize that you are more ready than you thought to hear God say your name. Because maybe you know somewhere deep in your soul, somewhere you can't quite explain that resurrection is more than just a good story. It is also somehow deeply true.
And my conviction as one who attempts to follow the way of Christ in the world is that when resurrection finds you, good news has a way of taking the story from there. May you hear your name today. May that open your eyes to new possibilities. May new life spring up in you and around you. May resurrection be only the beginning.
And may good news be your story from here. Christ is risen and not one dead remains. Thank you for joining with us this Easter Sunday, the climax of the Christian story where we are reminded that resurrection comes to find all of us. Let's pray one final time today. God of Resurrection, who brings new life into dusty, dark places, who breathes new breath into lungs that feel like they have not been full in a long time, May you remind us that the return of spring around us, new buds and grass and sun and warm air around us is the reminder of the fact that resurrection is the center of the universe, that all things are being renewed by you, and that your presence in us through us to the world is part of the story of resurrection today.
Might we begin to allow that story to take root somewhere deep inside of us, may hope begin to build in us. And when it does, ready to break forth into the world, may it shape our conversations, our relationships, our transactions, everything that we encounter in this world, so that we might be part of your renewal of all things. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.