Sermon

Easter Sunday

 

Fr. Troy Beecham

 

What are we to make of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus,  and what do we think these Gospel accounts are endeavoring to teach us?

Western Christianity, Protestant, Reformed, and Roman Catholic alike, have slowly turned the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ bodily Resurrection, and the glorified, divinized nature of his resurrected body, into the story of what we are to expect about our life after death. But if this the point of the Resurrection narratives, it is extremely strange because at no point do they mention the future hope of the individual Christian. This is, of course, counter-intuitive to most western Christians: Catholic and Protestant, conservative and liberal. We have 1500 years of writing thousands of hymns and untold numbers of sermons, poems, icons, and liturgies, all focused on ‘winning a bodiless, spiritual life after death’ for ourselves as the defining issue which drives the entirety of the Holy Scriptures. But the Scriptures do not support this narrowed focus, narrowed by our self-obsession. This truncated version of the Gospel proclamation has so distorted the Resurrection of Jesus that it has long been assumed that the real point of his resurrection is both to assure us that there is indeed a kind of ‘life after death’ and that those who belong to Jesus will not disappear, fade into nothing in death. This is certainly a concern for the Scriptures, and we are rightly interested in what comes next, but are we the focus of the story? As much as it pains us to hear, and as beloved as we each are to the Lord, this is not the point of the Resurrection of Jesus, only part of the grander, sweeping promise of God for all of creation.

Limiting the focus upon ourselves falls utterly short of the grand narrative of the Holy Scriptures. English bishop and New Testament scholar NT Wright likes to talk about “life after lifer after death”. That is, the true aim of the Christian hope is more robust, more amazing than our fuzzy ideas about post-mortem existence. Instead, we are invited to discover what will be our true destiny in Jesus in life after life after death, and the destiny of all creation.

We are assured that upon our mortal death we will be with the Lord, and that is admittedly a little vague. Are we bodily with the Lord before our resurrection? Is it a spiritual reality. Certainly, the heart of the Christian hope is that we will physically share in the bodily resurrection of Jesus in a new creation when heaven and earth become one conjoined reality, not some ghostly existence somewhere out there. Until then, we are presented with an open-ended commission within the present world: ‘Jesus is risen; therefore, you have work ahead of you.’

So, what are the Scriptures endeavoring to teach us? What is the goal for which Paul boldly announced that he was forgetting all his accomplishments and accolades and pressing forward to the high mark of our call as disciples of Jesus?

The story, from Genesis to the Revelation, is that God has an intended purpose and goal for His creation, a purpose that cannot be thwarted. And that goal has always been the new creation, heaven and earth made one, and the human family finally freed from sin and death through Jesus Christ. In the time between the cross and the new creation, the time in which we now live, God’s plan is for all people to be fundamentally transformed in this mortal life through the forgiveness given to us in Jesus Christ in conversion of soul and Holy Baptism, forgiveness from our sinful, broken human drive towards self-worship and self-destruction. God’s purpose is that we will also begin to participate in the new creation which sprang gloriously to life in the Resurrection of Jesus, sharing in the resurrection life of our Risen Savior, Jesus.

Now, our human plans for creating a new world have long relied upon violence and war, in enforcing some human scheme upon others, in controlling the thoughts and lives of others, and getting rid of those who will not obey the will of tyrants or share in our schemes. But the Gospel of Jesus tells us that violence, manipulation , controlling others, and war, as legitimate means of shaping the world and guiding human destiny, died with Jesus on the Cross. Jesus refused the option of violence when he told Peter to put away his sword when the mob and Temple hierarchy came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Mounting a violent insurrection in order to liberate Jesus and his followers from the violent injustice of the Empire and their collaborators in the Judean aristocracy and Temple hierarchy would have been a just war — but Jesus refused to engage in any violence, much less a war, even a just war.

He chose instead to bear witness to the truth that God is love, and God is fulfilling His purposes for His creation in His own manner and timing. Jesus chose instead to forgive those who were murdering Him, and to die that we might be forgiven for our sins. Jesus took the death of our world, a world hijacked by the powers of someone ritual darkness and human desires and framed by control and war, into his body, and He and the nightmare of the world both died together. Jesus was buried and with him was buried the old world under the control of the spiritual powers and principalities, and our human family so devoted to sin and death. And on the third day, Jesus was raised to new life, transformed, divine, resurrected life, the firstborn of the new creation, and a new world came into being, born in love. Of course, the old world of death still lingers around us, but in the midst of it, the world to come is being born.

The first person to meet Jesus on that morning was Mary Magdalene. She thought he was the gardener. She wasn’t wrong. Jesus is a gardener — the true gardener, the gardener Adam was meant to be. The Gospel is, after all, about the dawning of the New Creation.

Jesus is the firstborn of the new humanity — a redeemed, transformed, resurrected humanity of gardeners turning garbage dumps into gardens, swords into plowshares, and waging peace as the children of God. The resurrection of Jesus is not just a happy ending to the gospel story; it is the dawn of a new creation.

G. K. Chesterton, that brilliant writer, wrote in the close of part one of his classic work, The Everlasting Man,

“On the third day, the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place, found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways, they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener, God walked again in the garden, in the cool, not of the evening, but of the dawn.”

So what does all this mean for you and for me? On what course and towards what destination is Jesus ever working to set us on our earthly pilgrimage? It begins with trust, that God is indeed working out His good purposes for our human family, and for all creation. If we will but trust in God, we can live without fear, fear of anything and anyone, neither death nor life, powers and principalities, nothing in all creation. That’s what the Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus is offering to us, a life so filled with loving trust in our Heavenly Father, that we will courageously begin to live as heralds of the new creation and gardeners of peace in a violent, divided, and broken human world. As Jesus commanded us all as He was ascending to the right hand of the Father, “As you go into all the world…this frightening, war torn, burning, polluted, dangerous world…make disciples of Jesus of all peoples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey all these things which I have commanded you, beginning first in our own back yard in over the fence conversations, at the check-out line, at work, in our towns, cities, and throughout the whole world.”

God is preparing to walk amongst us again in the garden of the new creation, and is calling each and every one of us to be renewed today by the power of the Holy Spirit, and through becoming one with Jesus in Holy Baptism, in receiving Jesus again in the most Blessed Sacrament of his Body and Blood, that we, being transformed by grace, may take up our cross, God’s supreme gardening tool, and participate as joyful, fearless, Jesus loving and Jesus proclaiming gardeners in this new creation that was born on a morning like this so long ago. So as we wait for that great and glorious day to dawn, when heaven and earth are made one conjoined reality and we are clothed with immortality, let us come, dear people of God, come to the waters of Baptism for those who have yet to come to Jesus, and to His altar of grace to be restored, revived, and empowered to be faithful witnesses and co-laborers of Jesus as God is working through us to fulfill his loving purposes for us, all humankind, and all of creation. Come with glad and joyful hearts to find our freedom from fear. Come to be clothed with new garments washed clean of all stain. Come to Jesus today with hearts wide open to the love that casts out all fear.  Come.

Amen.