The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
April 15, 2001

He is here. He is risen!
Luke 24:1-12

Easter morning. Now this is the day for preachers. You can usually count on a full house and you can always count on a great Gospel reading full of the hope of the resurrection.  He is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! How can you go wrong? Even a bad preacher can have a good day on Easter. The story practically preaches itself. Well, that’s what I thought anyway until I took a closer look at the Gospel reading for this morning. It turns out that the folks who created the lectionary cheated. The lectionary is the calendar of what we read in church each Sunday. And they were so determined to give us our Easter joy that they snipped two verses off the bottom of our reading for this morning.

I was left with a dilemma. Do I tell y’all the real story, warts and all, or do I cheat it too and give you the edited for Easter morning version of Luke’s Gospel? I was taught that all a preacher has is his or her honesty. If honesty goes out, there’s nothing left to preach. I have no choice but to tell you the whole story and then deal with that first Easter morning the way it happened.

The problem is this. When we tell the story, we act like the empty tomb is good news. Jesus’ empty tomb is great news, but only once you know why it’s empty. Otherwise an empty tomb is just confusing. Let me show you how they cheated and you’ll see what I mean. Our reading from Luke’s Gospel ended, “They told the apostles what happened” period. They put a period at the end of that line. But that’s not all. The next two verses say,

But the story sounded like nonsense, so they didn’t believe it. However, Peter ran to the tomb to look. Stooping, he peered in and saw the empty linen wrappings; then he went home again, wondering what had happened. (Luke 24:11-12 in the New Living Translation).

Then Luke changes gears and tells the story of what happened to two other men that day. The logical stopping point for a reading is here with Peter going home shaking his head in confusion. If we just say that the women told the apostles, we haven’t told the whole story.

What we learn by reading the whole story is that an empty tomb is not Good News in and of itself. We have to know how it came to be empty. I think the key to this whole reading is the announcement of the two angels who told the women, “Why do you look for the living among the dead. He is not here. He has risen.” That announcement is the Good News at the heart of the Gospel for today. But don’t take my word for it. Imagine the other possibilities. Try Christianity on for size if the angels had said something else instead. I have a few possibilities. In fact, I made up a top ten list like David Letterman does on his show.

Here are the Top Ten Things We Are Glad the Angels Did Not Say on Easter Morning.

10. He is not here. He decomposed really fast.

9. He is not here. He sublet the tomb.

8. He is not here. He is on a coffee break.

7. He is not here. He’s gone to Wal-Mart.

6. He is not here. Take a seat and I’m sure he’ll be with you shortly.

5. He is not here. He was abducted by aliens.

4. He is not here. Someone stole the body.

3. He is not here. Leave a message and he’ll call you right back.

2. He is not here. He’s two tombs down on the left.

And the number one thing we are glad the angels did not say on Easter morning:

1.      He’s not here. He’s gone to Disney World.

Do you see what I mean? “He is not here. He is risen!” You change that sentence, and you’ve changed everything. The reason the tomb is empty is that Jesus was resurrected. God raised him to new life. This was then and is still something completely new and not yet repeated. Sure, the Bible tells stories of Jesus raising people from the dead. Jesus raised Jairus’ daughter from the dead. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. But Jairus’ daughter and Lazarus were raised to die again. Jesus raised them from the dead to live and die another day. But God raised Jesus from the dead to die no more.

Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and the other women expected to honor Jesus’ dead body by properly preparing it for burial. Instead, the women were blown away to find out that their crucified teacher was now their risen Lord. The angels reminded the women that Jesus himself had taught them that he would suffer, die, and be resurrected and now they remembered Jesus’ teaching with unspeakable joy. The female disciples rushed back to share the awesome, unexpected news with the apostles and the other disciples who were hiding out, trying to figure out how to continue with their lives in the shadow of the cross.

Imagine the scene as the women break in and share their news. The stone is rolled away. Jesus’ body is gone. The only thing in the tomb is Jesus’ burial clothes. Jesus doesn’t need those burial clothes again because he is risen and will die no more. It’s just too much for them to take. Jesus’ followers are still in shock. The disciples can’t take someone else’s word for it. They will need their own encounter with the risen Jesus to believe.

You could decide to blame it all on the fact that they were women. Some folks who have read this story have decided to see it that way. No one believed them because they were just women. Sure, you can defend that idea by pointing out that women were not allowed to testify in a Jewish court at that time. You could stack up all the female witnesses you wanted to and no court would believe them. But to read the Gospel that way has you fighting against the author.

Women are a vital part of Jesus’ story all through Luke’s Gospel. From the Gospel’s beginning with Jesus’ mother Mary and John the Baptist’s mother Elizabeth on through to the end, women are fully a part of Jesus’ life and ministry. And, if you notice this morning’s reading shows that the women are the only ones who understood the meaning of what happened. The apostle’s thought they were talking nonsense and did not believe them, not because they were women, but because the story was more than they could comprehend. Peter checked out the tomb for himself and he still didn’t get it.

The women did get it though. The women did understand. Once the angels reminded them of what Jesus had taught about his death, they put it all together. The women had been there as a part of Jesus’ entourage as Jesus explained that his job description as Messiah would not involve a violent military or political overthrow of Rome. Jesus would fulfill the scriptures by loving us so much that he would never give up on that love, even when the price was death on a cross. Jesus laid it all out for them. They hadn’t understood it at the time, but when the women saw the empty tomb and heard the angels say “Why do you look for the living among the dead. He is not here. He is risen.” Then they understood.

We too can encounter Jesus in the scripture and then can’t make sense of it. Sometimes you hear a sermon or read something in the Bible and it sounds like nonsense. Then later when the you-know-what really hits the fan, that scripture comes back to us and we remember and experience what it means for us in our lives. Sometimes things have to fall apart before it makes sense and helps us put all the pieces back together again.

But often, we can be like the apostles who did not go to the tomb that morning. The whole Christian thing can seem like a bit too much to believe. “Sure Jesus is a great teacher, perhaps the greatest moral teacher who ever lived, but risen from the dead? Oh, come on.”

The Apostles needed a real in-the-risen-flesh encounter with Jesus to believe. What about us? What are we to do? How can we place our faith in an empty tomb without encountering the risen Lord who vacated it? I don’t think we can and we don’t have to. Jesus said that he would send the Holy Spirit to us as a gift. The Holy Spirit is the gift of God’s own self. The Holy Spirit is here now in this place. It is through God’s spirit that we can encounter the risen Jesus in our own lives. We encounter God’s Spirit here in church, but we can encounter the Spirit in our daily lives as well.

Look at the angel’s Easter words from a different angle. They said “Why do you look for the living among the dead. He is not here.” The women did not find Jesus because they were looking for him among the dead. But those of us gathered here this Easter morning are the living. Jesus is present with us here through the Holy Spirit. Jesus is not there in a tomb in Jerusalem. Jesus is here. We can change the angels words to fit our own situation and say, “He is here. He is risen!” Because Jesus was raised from the dead to die no more, he is present here working among and in us to transform our lives. We are an Easter people transformed by a God who raises us to a new life. We encounter the risen Jesus in our own lives and can proclaim our own Easter message: “He is here. Alleluia, Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

Amen.