Easter Sunday (April 4, 2021)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

I will exalt thee, I will praise thy name; for thou hast done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure. This is hte Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

Every Church year, Holy Week and its culmination in Easter are times set aside for us to live into the story of Christ. And isn’t it wonderful that we can do this with each other in-person?

Has the degree to which this story at the heart of our faith is mind-boggling struck you yet? As Christians, we believe that a Jewish carpenter who lived 2000 years ago is both God and man, was born to a virgin, lived a life of obedience, culminating in an ignoble death on the Cross. Far from such a death being a shameful thing, or an end to a movement, it’s a moment of victory where the gap between God and man has been closed. Further, we argue, he didn’t stay dead but was resurrected on the Third Day.

Over the centuries, different world religions have tried, and failed, to tell this story. Some of them got closer than others, many of them even include themes of virgin birth and divine deaths, echoing the Christ story. But the Truth is stronger and more beautiful than fiction.

Ever since the first Easter, there have been cynics who try to cast doubts on the Resurrection. Many have tried to discredit or redefine the Christian story.

One theory proposed to explain the truth of the Gospel away is that Christ didn’t actually die on the cross but just swooned out of consciousness.

Others have argued that the resurrection depicted in Scripture is a purely “Spiritual” phenomenon: he lives on in the hearts of his followers, not in any physical sense.

These views fall radically short, something we are reminded on Easter. The Apostle Paul says, “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised…If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:14-15; 17-19).

There’s an interesting feature of our Gospel reading: notice how the text is abuzz with activity. Mary magdalene runs to the disciples with the news of the empty tomb. Simon Peter and the Beloved Disciple race to the Tomb.

Seeing the empty tomb, they believe in the resurrection.

What we know now is that the Resurrection is a vindication of Jesus as the Messiah.

On Good Friday, Christ made redemption possible by overcoming the distance between us and the Father.

On Easter, his claims, and the Church’s claims about him are vindicated by the Resurrection: Christ really has overcome death, conquered Hell and Satan under his feet, and opened for us a new way of life.

This Easter day reconfigures our reality. Death has been trampled, Hell has been harrowed, Satan is defeated.

Resurrection forces us to see life in a new light. It frees us from nihilism, it frees us from the constrains of believing that we are the authors of our own story and masters of our own fates. Instead, it places us directly in the midst of GOd’s story of redemption. How could we not follow Peter and the Beloved Disciple and run for that empty tomb?

“yYour life is hid with Christ on high,” Paul tells us. In Baptism, we are put to death, the old is gone. Simultaneously, however, we are raised to life, behold the new is come.

The world cannot understand it, that’s why Paul says we’re hid with Christ.

Our joy is foolishness to the world. When they look on the cross, they see a political martyr, a nice person, or a sad but misguided idealist. When we look on the Cross, we see the source of all life, we see the victorious conqueror, the might king.

So we must follow with the urgency of Peter and the Beloved Disciple and “seek the things that are above.”

Christ’s life, death, burial, and resurrection are not merely external events that happened in history. They did occur there but they are more than that. Christ’s life, death, burial, and resurrection happen in us as we are transformed into Temples.

Because the old has been done away with in Baptism, we are called to higher and better things.

We are called to leave behind the sinful practices endemic to our old selves in the Tomb. Let the anger, lust, gluttony, pride, greed, sloth, and envy fester in the grave. Instead, let us depart the Tomb with a love for God manifest in the resolve to pick up our crosses and to follow him. Rather than dwelling on sin, let us dwell on whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, gracious, excellent, and worthy of praise — all of which point us ultimately toward Christ and the way of the Cross.

Because of what Christ has won for us in conquering the grave and restoring us to God, it is only possible to live in perpetual doxology.

No abstraction, no cold and clinical reasoning, no dry, syllogistic argumentation but only praise: I will exalt thee. I will praise thy name; for thou hast done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure. For thou hast been a stronghold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.