Please note: The written word and the spoken word are almost never  the same.

Easter Sunday                                                         March 23, 2008

John 20:1-18

Once there was a young boy who came home from Sunday school and showed his mother a picture. When she asked, "What is it?" he replied proudly, "It's Easter!" Pleased that her son was learning about the resurrection but having difficulty with the details of the drawing, she asked, "What did your teacher say about it?"

"Well," he slowly began, "after they nailed Jesus to the cross, he was hurt real bad, so when the Special Forces finally rescued him from the cross, they rushed him to the trauma center at St. Luke's. They worked on him for hours in the ER but couldn't get a heartbeat and gave up. They moved Jesus' body to another room, heavily guarded by soldiers with a German accent. Just then, when no one was around, there was a blip on the heart monitor and Jesus woke up. He radioed for help and his buddies came with plastic explosives, wiped out the soldiers, blew open the door, and carried their buddy, Jesus, fireman style, across enemy lines to an awaiting helicopter where they would evac Jesus back to his dad."

The mother put her hands on her hips and said, "Is that what your teacher taught you?" Sheepishly the boy confessed, "Well, no. But if I told you what she said, you'd never believe it."

He has a point, you know. Who would have believed it? The age in which we now live has been called the age of cynicism, but it is naive to think that ours is the only generation filled with skeptics. The first century had its fill of skeptics as well. Even the women and the disciples, people whom Jesus told plainly that he would be arrested, whipped, crucified, and on the third day rise, were skeptical. They needed more proof. So instead of waiting outside the tomb with a large banner, "Welcome back, Jesus!", the disciples were hiding. Mary Magdalene came not to greet the risen Lord but to pay their last respects to the corpse of a friend. When she sees the stone rolled away her only comment is – “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

The resurrection exhausts our capacity to imagine and it pushes our reasoning ability to the breaking point. However we don't have to explain the resurrection.  Rather it explains us. It establishes who we are and why we are here today.  Because Easter happened, because the resurrection happened, the church happened.

The story of Easter is so familiar that we sometimes fail to hear some of the details of the account. Today I want us to look at three of those details as they are found in John's account of the first Easter morning.

First, the stone was rolled away - not to let Jesus out - but to let us in.

I say this because the idea that God rolled the stone away from the door to let Jesus escape is inconsistent with the resurrection appearances of Jesus recorded elsewhere in the scriptures - appearances in which he suddenly appeared in the midst of the disciples, even when they were behind closed doors. Closed doors never kept Jesus in or out.

John makes this clear in today's reading. When Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, she saw that the stone had been removed and she ran to tell Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved.

When they arrived and stuck their heads in the tomb, they saw the linen wrappings lying there and it says ‘they believed.’ But what did they believe? -  because in the very next verse it says- ‘for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” Was it simply- “Yup, you’re right Mary, Jesus is not here.” Or something else.

For centuries the curious have always wanted to look into the dark depths of death, but the tomb has been sealed with secrecy. The tomb has always mocked us. It has always stood as the "dead end" of all our efforts to peer beyond this life into the life to come. After Peter and John leave, Mary looks into the tomb and sees two angels who ask “Why are you weeping?”

Easter rolls the stone door of the tomb away for us who are weeping so that we might penetrate the mystery of death. It makes the tomb a tunnel - a tunnel into the heart of the eternal and shows us that the holy heart of God is love and life. God rolls the door of the tomb away not to let Jesus out - but to let us in - to allow us to see that Christ's promises are true.

Second - the tomb is not completely empty - Christ's body is not there, but the place is filled with the words of the angel, the words we just heard, the words that say, “Why are you weeping?”  In Matthew’s gospel the angel says- “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, se the place where he lay.”  That is great news and the women run quickly with great joy. In John Mary turns around and almost walks into Jesus. If Mary, Peter, and John had looked into an empty and silent tomb, then our resurrection faith would be a belief based on human speculation, an assumption of the moment, an argument based on negative evidence. 

But no! Our faith is based on a word spoken to us by God. It is based on God's holy promise, spoken by Christ before he died, and upon God's holy assurance - spoken by the angel on the first Easter Sunday.

That same word that echoed and re-echoed in that Easter tomb still fills the emptiness of world today. "He is risen". The tomb has become a trumpet proclaiming the victory of life over death, and the continuation of Christ's presence and mission in this world - first in Galilee, and ultimately to the ends of the earth.

The third detail is this - because of Easter we can turn our backs on the grave.

John tells us that Mary Magdalene having seen the risen Christ turned her back on the grave and ran to tell the disciples- “I have seen the Lord”

Matthew’s gospel says that the women were filled with joy. Joy is the key word here. Christ was buried, but he wouldn't stay dead. The tomb could not hold him - and because of him - the tomb cannot hold us either.

This indeed is what Jesus promised to us before he died, a promise that seemed at the time totally incredible, a matter, at best, of metaphor, and hyperbole, but which - because of the first Easter morning, we now know to be a matter of fact and substance.

The stone of was rolled away from the tomb, not to let Jesus out, but to let us in, to show us that death is not the end - but rather a new beginning.

A beginning that proclaims the victory of life over death, and which allows us to turn our backs on the grave and face our future with faith and hope, confident that all of God's promises will indeed bear fruit

Soldiers, who go to places like Iraq or Afghanistan, and return home seriously wounded, often speak of their "Alive Day." It's not so much the day they were wounded, as the day they looked around and realized they were still alive, and were going to make it after all.

No soldiers celebrate their wounds, but some do celebrate the anniversary of their Alive Day. It was a day when, as perhaps never before in their young lives, did they feel so grateful to be alive.

That's what Easter can be for us. Battered and wounded as we sometimes are by life's struggles, Easter is our Alive Day.

It is our day to realize that what Jesus promised did and does come true.

It is our day to move beyond the struggles of this life and to realize that life has great meaning because of Jesus Christ.

It is our day to realize that we will live for eternity in Christ.

A man left Chicago for a vacation in Florida. His wife was on a business trip and was planning to meet him the next day. When he reached his hotel he decided to send his wife a quick e-mail. Unable to find the scrap of paper on which he had written her e-mail address, he did his best to type it from memory. Unfortunately, he missed one letter and his note was directed instead to an elderly preacher's wife, whose husband had passed away only the day before. When the grieving widow checked her e-mail, she took one look at the monitor, let out a piercing scream, and fell to the floor dead. At the sound, her family rushed into the room and saw this note on the screen:

Dearest Wife,

Just got checked in.

Everything prepared for your arrival tomorrow.

Your Loving Husband.

P.S: Sure is hot down here.

What could be more powerful than news from the other side of death? Easter is that and more.  Easter is…

Not an email message, but a living message.

Not from man, but from God.

Not from hell, but from heaven.

Easter is our Alive Day.

Have a great one today and for all eternity!!!

God loves you and so do I.