This morning, though, as I sat down to begin preparing for my Easter sermon - even as the thought ran through my mind that there's only so many ways to preach that Jesus is alive - I looked at my sermon planner and the text I had selected many months ago for this Easter. In fact, the series I am preaching this year is one that I put together while at Indiana Wesleyan, so I selected this text closer to two years ago. I open up my Bible to Luke 24.13-34 without thinking about it, getting ready to read familiar words about women going to anoint a body that wasn't there, angelic visitors and the like. Then I started reading and realized that, instead of a traditional resurrection text, I had selected the story of the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus. I kid you not, my first thought was, "At least I'll be able to come up with something creative."
I began my preparation by glancing over a book by Frederick Buechner titled The Faces of Jesus (GREAT, GREAT BOOK!!!!!!). In the section where he talks about the resurrection, I ran across the following quote:
If we are to believe in his resurrection in a way that really matters, we must somehow see him for ourselves. And wherever we have so believed, it is because in some sense we have seen him. Now as then, it is not his absence form the empty tomb that convinces men but the shadow at least of his presence in their empty lives.
About ten seconds after reading that, a realization hit me that instantly and dramatically changed my approach to Easter:
The empty tomb is irrelevant.
We Christians are too obsessed with the empty tomb. We talk about it all the time, we send out Easter cards to people with pictures of the empty tomb on them. We arrange our Easter celebrations around it. I can even recall several Easters as a child where the stage at the church was almost covered with an empty tomb backdrop from our Passion play - complete with movable stone.
Perhaps our obsession with the empty tomb is understandable. After all, it is the only tangible, physically real aspect of resurrection that we can hang onto. The empty tomb and the empty grave clothes are the only pieces of real "evidence" of what happened on the first Easter Morning. The problem, though, is that an empty tomb and empty grave clothes only convey one message - they are about absence. When we talk about the tomb, it is in the context of the absence of Jesus' body. The words of the women who first visited Jesus' tomb ring in our ears, "They have taken his body and we do not know where he is." An empty tomb sends a message of absence - "He is not here."
Easter, though, is not about absence. It is about presence. It is about the risen Jesus meeting Mary near the tomb. It is about the Jesus that appeared to the disciples, the Jesus who allowed Thomas to place his hands in the wounds of the cross. It is about the Jesus who walks down a road with two sad and confused disciples as they head for home. Easter is not about the absence of Jesus' body from the tomb - it is about the presence of the resurrected Jesus in the lives of his disciples. To wit, Buechner also writes:
But the fact of the matter is that in a way it hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced the people that he had risen from the dead was no the absence of his corpse but his living presence. And so it has been ever since.
The question the angels asked the women who came to anoint Jesus is our question as well:
Why do look for the living among the dead?
2 comments:
Wow, Joe. Thanks for getting me in the Easter spirit this week. I've been struggling with it as well. Your message was awesome. Thanks for sharing it! You have a great way with words, my friend. I'll be thinking presence instead of absence this week! :-)
Joe I don't get all your talk about abscesses and presents. Must be the Ozarks getting to you.
On a serious note, what you said, you said very well. This Sunday, our first in our new building, I'm preaching on Jesus' appearance to Mary. My take on it is the "personal" aspect of His appearance--I believe it's the personal/relational nature of God as found in Christ and Christianity that sets it apart and validates it as truth. We are undeniably hard-wired for relationship. God, throughout history and scripture, has revealed himself in profoundly relational ways. In fact, the Trinity itself speaks solely of relationship and perfect love. The relationship He offers is personal and as such can either be accepted or rejected. It's difficult to get our minds around the fact that a God who needs nothing to be complete in himself, seeks our loving response to himself.
He is risen. He is risen indeed.
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