Easter Day

“Happy Easter. They told the story without me again. I was there before the dawn, before the certainty, before the men found their voices. I saw what they now preach. Yet still, my witness is softened, edited, doubted. This Easter, remember: resurrection was not announced from power, but from the margins. From Mary Magdalene, a woman they tried to forget.” 

Esther Mombo, Chancellor, School of Theology, St. Paul’s University, Limuru, Kenya

 First Sermon

           After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.  The women arrive at the tomb, discover it’s empty, and everything is changed. So why did the women discover that Jesus rose from the dead? It’s like that in each of the four gospels, with the women carrying the news of the empty tomb back to the eleven remaining disciples. The disciples, for their part, respond in various levels of disbelief and even disregard. Homiletics professor Tom Long identifies the women’s astonishing Easter morning announcement as the first Christian sermon ever preached. This Easter news is the starting point of all Christian preaching. 

           I have to say that the disciples’ response is not very reassuring to a preacher, and particularly a woman preacher — particularly to me. Did the disciples leap to their feet with the women’s news that the tomb was empty? Did they shout alleluia, and run as fast as they could to Joseph of Aramathea’s rock cut tomb where Jesus had been laid? They did not, of course — except (in Luke’s account) for Peter, who’s never afraid to go all in for the gospel, even if he might look a little foolish doing it. Luke’s gospel also gives us the disciples’ dismissal of the good news, and while English translations vary, the theme is consistent: The women’s good news seemed to them like "an idle tale," "empty talk," "a silly story," "a foolish yarn," "utter nonsense," "sheer humbug." 

           Why is this first Christian sermon so quickly dismissed, even by the disciples — Jesus’ closest friends and followers — whom you’d think would be overjoyed to accept it? Do the disciples reject the message because it’s carried by women? That’s a possibility, but I think it’s way too simple an answer. I think that the women have definitely been identified and set apart, but for reasons much more nuanced and subtle than sexism. First, preparing bodies for burial in many times and cultures is tender, loving, motherly, and achingly sad work, even more difficult after witnessing the loved one’s brutal, unjust, and intentional killing. So, especially in that time and place, the women would have been the expected actors in the scene. Also, there’s something specifically important about women’s connection with building and teaching faith, the role that women are given as the first preachers of the good news in each of the four gospels. 

           In her excellent book Band of Angels, New Testament scholar Kate Cooper thinks beyond gender to the almost universal role of women, specifically and particularly in the first few centuries of the Common Era. Women shaped community, culture, belief, and civilization itself by rearing families, which included moral and ethical development and forming individual and community belief through teaching and storytelling — forming humanity from birth. What if the women found the empty tomb — and preached the first sermon of the resurrection to the disbelieving disciples — to separate clearly the gospel message from politics and power, instead weaving it into the very fabric of families and communities through nurturing, feeding, supporting, and storytelling? 

           During Eastertide, we’ll see many women in the Book of Acts — Lydia, the seller of purple cloth, Dorcas, Mary, Rhoda, Prisca, and others. Women were the heads of large households — even households that were leaders in commerce, like small businesses. Early Christians worshiped in house churches, made up of extended families and all the domestic, craft, and trade workers that supported the life of the household. When the head of the household converted, the whole household converted along with her. Just for context here in our lives, Emmanuel has its own roots in house church, with domestic workers, tradespeople, and craftsmen meeting in the kitchens of Newport’s big houses until donors from Trinity formed the trust that built and holds Emmanuel Church today. Notice how many of the Apostle Paul’s letters begin with greetings to women, and to their households. 

           The gospel of love is a tender and powerful message, raised up from the grassroots in families, households, and communities, and not legislated or enforced top down through empire. When the gospel message is co-opted by power, its essential nature changes. The Crusades, colonialism, many wars, and slavery are just a few examples of how Christianity is distorted when it is appropriated and deployed by power, rather than held and nurtured in the bosom of the community. And while ancient Jewish texts prohibited accepting evidence from women because of the “levity and temerity of their sex,” I think there’s more to the disciples’ dismissal of the women’s news of the empty tomb than either gender discrimination or the separation of Jesus’ gospel of love from politics and power. 

           Isn’t that just how many of us respond? We don’t listen, we disregard, we try to tame, domesticate, or rationalize the news, because the resurrection is a really bold claim, and taking it seriously is risky business. Putting our trust in Mary Magdalene’s and the other Mary’s first Christian sermon — or any sermon ever preached from the core message of the empty tomb — means taking the risk of letting the gospel affect our lives. This is terrifying — risky business indeed. We heard this morning the guards shook and became like dead men at the sight of the angel, before they had even noticed the empty tomb. And Mary Magdalene and the other Mary hear the angel’s message and run to find the risen Jesus with BOTH fear and great joy.

           As Wheaton College New Testament professor Esau McCaulley wrote, they are afraid because they recognize that God’s power is on the loose and might very well unsettle the world. Author Annie Dillard also wondered whether modern Christians really understood the unbridled power of the gospel of love.

The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT [on…] Sunday morning[s]. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.

I’m not saying you’re not safe here at church, any more than the women preaching the first ever Easter sermon were saying the empty tomb was not good news. I’m saying the good news is powerful, and our response to it can be powerful too. It’s easy to miss among the Alleluias, but the Marys’ fear was reasonable.  They had gone to the tomb to bury Jesus. They knew the rituals of grief. But they had no idea how to be leaders in God’s great plan of salvation.

           Is that us today? We know how to grieve. We know how to name the things that wound us: aging, loss, illness, unemployment, food insecurity, housing scarcity, war, fractures in our common life. But to partner with the living God in reconciling ourselves to one another, to the stranger, to our political life, and even to those who disagree with us — that is another matter. I have to say that I totally get that the Marys were both joyful AND terrified. What if — just what if — we leave here today like we’ve just heard the women’s Easter sermon for the first time? Not like it’s old hat, or "an idle tale," or "a foolish yarn,” but instead the mind-bending news that love, not death, has the last word? What if we leave here today in fear and great joy (after a lovely coffee hour and Easter egg hunt of course!) and hightail it back home to our own Galilees, away from the death of the cross and the tomb and back into life in the world, healing the sick, casting out demons, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger. Alleluia and Amen.