Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Easter Sunday
April 8, 2007
W. Gregory Pope
THE SEVEN FIRST WORDS OF EASTER
Luke 24
John 20
It was very early on the first day of the week and still dark when Mary Magdalene came to the tomb.
Easter, have you noticed, always begins in the dark, in the dark before the impossible dawn. In the dark of pain, sin, guilt and grief, when, in the words of the cowboy poet, you’re “just before beyond redemption.” It may be the point of death, or death of life as you know it, where you’ve lost what you thought you could never live without, and it is so dark you cannot even imagine dawn. It is then and there when Easter happens.
While it was still dark, unable to imagine dawn, Mary arrived at the tomb of Jesus and saw that the stone had been moved and that Jesus’ body was gone. She ran to tell Peter and the other disciple what she had seen.
Peter and the other unnamed disciple raced to the tomb. The other disciple outran Peter and got there first. He looked in and saw the burial cloths, but he didn’t enter. Peter arrived second and, never slow to barge in where angels fear to tread, went right on inside and believed.
According to Luke’s resurrection account, it is the women who enter the tomb first, and lo and behold angels are there, and they speak to the terrified women the first words of Easter:
Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.
The reality of those words changed the world. A new creation was brought into being. Jesus rose on the first day of Easter with God’s voice ringing throughout all creation: “Let there be life forevermore!” In this world, where death and darkness remain, Easter’s light is present if we eyes to see and ears to ear: He is risen! The transforming reality of those words make it possible to sit in the dark at the grave of a son, a daughter, a mother, a father, a spouse, a friend, and grieve with hope. While the pall Good Friday as fallen upon our hearts, with our greatest joy and the love of our life now lifeless, the tears that flow down our cheeks may just glimmer with the light of resurrection hope. He is not here; he is risen!
According to John’s Gospel, Peter and the beloved disciple enter the tomb and believe; then they return to their homes and Mary is left alone weeping in the garden. As she wept, she peered into the tomb and saw two angels sitting where the body of Jesus had been laid.
“Why are you weeping?” they asked her.
And she said, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they have laid him.”
Then she turned around and Jesus was standing there but she didn’t know it was him.
“Why are you weeping?” he said, “Whom are you looking for?”
Still failing to recognize him, thinking instead he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you’ve taken him, please, tell me where you’ve laid him.”
Then Jesus speaks her name, “Mary!” He calls her by name and she knows who he is.
“Rabboni!” she exclaims, “My dear Master!”
Naturally, she seeks to cling to him. She wants to wrap her arms around him so tightly and never let him go. Wouldn’t you? Jesus says, “Do not hold on to me. I am on my way to the Father. But I have something for you to do.” And with the second word of Easter he speaks her name and commissions her:
“Mary . . . go tell the disciples.”
And she goes, becoming the first apostle of the Easter gospel. Early church father Tertullian called Mary, “The Apostle to the Apostles.” She went and preached the glorious good news of Resurrection. She announces to the disciples the third word of Easter:
“I have seen the Lord.”
Like Mary, we too are sent to tell what has happened to us. We don’t have to be full of Bible verses or have a gospel tract in our hands or a seminary degree on our wall. We don’t have to worry about making sure we’re wearing the right clothes when its 25 degrees on Easter Sunday. We don’t have to try and prove that the recently discovered tomb with the names of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus does not disprove resurrection. We simply go and tell what Christ has done for us. “I have seen the Lord do this for me.” “I have seen the Lord change my life.” Go and tell others where you have seen Christ and what you have seen Christ do for you.
The fourth word of Easter comes Easter evening as the disciples are huddled in fear behind locked doors. Jesus appears among them and says:
“Peace be with you.”
And as he does he bestows on them - and on us this Resurrection morning - his blessed peace. He shows them his hands and side, and they are filled with joy. He opens those lips that have healed all kinds of brokenness and calmed raging storms and says: “Peace.”
Is this the word you most need to hear today? If the truth be told, most of us live in a Good Friday world. People we love continue to die. Family relationships remain strained. Life often doesn’t turn out like we hoped it would. You want to say, “Yes, Jesus rose from the dead, but I’m dying inside. I’m afraid. Locked up in a prison of despair.”
If that is where you live these days, would you hear Jesus speak these Easter words to your Good Friday heart? Peace be with you. Peace be with you. I am with you always. And I am not finished with you.
Then came the fifth word of Easter, his commissioning of the apostles. Apostle means “sent.” So Jesus says,
“As the Father has sent me, so send I you.”
We are sent not only to tell of Jesus and what he has done for us. We are sent to be Jesus in the world. Jesus has returned to his Father and has commissioned us to continue his work. What a staggering task! Does Jesus really know what he’s doing here? Sending us to be his presence in the world? Perhaps he’s still a little groggy after three days dead in a tomb! How can we be Jesus to the world?
Well, Jesus knows we cannot do it on our own. So he gives us the sixth word of Easter, an empowering word. He breathes on the disciples - and on us this Easter Day - and says:
“Receive the Holy Spirit.”
Jesus sends us the Holy Spirit and calls us together to be the community of Christ in the world. In the sending of the Spirit and our commissioning to be the church, Jesus is reminding us who we are and what we are called to be doing.
We are not called to be a social club or a country club or a self-help therapy group. We are not an institution like other institutions of the world. We are not an arts society. We are not a social services agency. We are the community of Christ. And we are the community of Christ only if we let the Holy Spirit blow among us and lead us.
We are called to be Christ in the world, ministering to the sick, befriending the outcast, welcoming the stranger, giving of ourselves in sacrificial love, continuing the work of Jesus here on earth. That is what it means to be the church. And we can be the church only as we allow the Spirit of the Risen Christ to have his way among us. So let us on this glad Easter Day receive the Holy Spirit.
The Easter faith is now almost complete. Jesus has been glorified and raised from the dead. He has appeared in a resurrection body. He has commissioned the church and given us the Holy Spirit. But there is one final word of Easter that is meant to be ours. The word that makes Easter faith our own.
We find it on the lips of Thomas. Thomas was not there that first Easter evening. The final round of the Masters was not over yet. And he said he would not believe until he had actually seen the nail marks in Jesus’ hands and put his hand in Jesus’ wounds. Now before we criticize Thomas, let us understand that he was no different from the other disciples - they had seen the nail marks, the wounds, and believed. Thomas, skeptical of fishermen and the stories they tell, was just asking for equal opportunity.
And Jesus obliged. The next Sunday he appeared again, this time with Thomas present. He turned to Thomas and said with deep love and compassion,
Thomas, put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out and place your hand in my side. Do not be unbelieving but believing.
And Thomas did. He touched the scars and cried out the most complete confession of faith in the gospel, the seventh and final word of Easter:
“My Lord and my God!”
“My Lord and my God!” is our beautiful confession of faith when we meet the Risen Lord.
How do we meet the risen Lord? In more ways than we can count. As Gerard Manly Hopkins penned it:
For Christ plays in ten thousand places
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
Human faces. Our faces. We meet Christ in the faces of one another. Wounded faces. Dying faces. Hungry faces. Faces of forgiveness. Faces of friendship. Faces that embody gospel hope and gospel love. Ten thousand faces. Ten thousand places. We meet the risen Lord.
Anne Lamott, a West Coast writer, who grew up among the literati of Berkeley life, tells the story of how she met Christ in her spiritual autobiography, Traveling Mercies. She had just had an abortion. The father of the child was married. And she was broke. She didn’t know what else to do.
She came home from the abortion clinic, drank a pint of Bushmills whiskey, then took the codeine the nurse had given her. The next few days she continued to drink and smoke dope. She got deathly sick. She got into bed, in her words,
. . . shaky and sad and too wild to have another drink or take a sleeping pill. . . . After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner. . . . The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there - of course, there wasn’t. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this.
And I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud: “I would rather die.”
But still, she said she felt Jesus sitting there watching her “with patience and love.” “Finally,” she writes, “I fell asleep, and in the morning he was gone.”
The next day she was spooked by what had happened, thinking it was a hallucination born of fear and booze and loss of blood. But she couldn’t shake the experience of Jesus with her in the room watching her “with patience and love.”
She went back to the ghetto church she had started attending recently, still shaky. She never stayed for the sermon, only for the singing. And that day, as everybody began singing the last song she writes,
I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling - and it washed over me.
She began to cry and left. She raced home to her houseboat, opened the door, and, in her words,
. . . took a long deep breath and said out loud, “[All right.] You can come in.” And this (she concludes) was the beautiful moment of my conversion.
In the deep darkness that was her life, before the dawn, Easter happened to her. She met the risen Lord.
How has Easter happened to you? Maybe it’s happened in stages where you believe more and more as you experience more and more. And you finally reach the point where you can say to Christ, “All right. You can come in.” Maybe its been more like a roller coaster of faith and disbelief, faith and disbelief. Or it could be more like Thomas. You come face to face with something so real and so holy, the only words you can say are: My Lord and my God!<br>
Whatever your faith experience, there is one final word for us all in the last book of the Bible. It is a word to the church. It is a word to you and me. Jesus says:
Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.
Will you open the door?
In the silence, the Easter silence of resurrection mystery, will you listen to the knock of the Risen Lord upon the door of your life, and open the door?
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CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425
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