March 31, 2024

Easter, Year B

Epiphany, Winnipeg

Isaiah 25:6-9

Mark 16:1-8

Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!

They look inside the tomb and what do they see? Not Jesus. Not an angel. But a young man dressed in a white robe. Now we who have received a steady diet of angels and pictures of angels who usually look, well, young, and are usually dressed in white, we might assume that this is an angel in the tomb. But it doesn’t need to be an angel. The story doesn’t say one way or another. There was just a young man dressed in a white robe.

So this is what I think happened, and I hope it’s not heresy. Or if it is, that’d be kind of fun. It wasn’t an angel. It was just a young man. Wearing a white robe. He was out walking that morning, maybe going to the market, or going to meet a friend, or just enjoying the fresh morning air, and as he walked along he passed what appeared to be a tomb – sort of a cave carved out of the rock on the hillside. And then someone came out of the tomb – it was Jesus, squinting against the sun because what you do when you step into the sun after you’ve been in the dark, right? And Jesus says to this young man who’s passing by, “Um, could you just stay here for a few minutes? I have to go – I’m going to Galilee – and I’m pretty sure some friends of mine will show up looking for me. I was, well, dead, but now I’m not. See, in there, where I was laying? When my friends come tell them I’m raised, and tell them to tell the others, and to go to Galilee to meet me. They’ll know what you’re talking about. I think.”

Then Jesus hurried on, heading north, and the young man in the white robe is too bewildered to know what to make of it all so he just sits down inside, out of the hot confusing sun, and waits. Soon enough, Mary and Mary and Salome show up, and the young man in white says, “Um, you’re looking for Jesus, right? The one who was crucified? He’s…not here. He…has been raised. He asked me to tell you to go and tell the others. And he’s going to Galilee”

Then Mary and Mary and Salome turn around and run, and the young man in the white robe sits there and wonders what just happened. And maybe he’s not an angel. He’s just a youngster in a white robe, just someone who heard the news and passed it along to the next person.

OK, I probably made up that whole thing. Well, I did. But – Think about where you first heard the news that Jesus is risen. I’m guessing it wasn’t from an angel. It might not even have been from a pastor or from a middle-aged man dressed in a white robe. You just heard it – I know I did – from someone who heard it from someone, and they heard it from someone, and so on. Maybe you first heard it when you were a few days old and someone who thought you were the most fabulous thing on earth sat you on their knee and they sang you Jesus Loves Me. Or a few weeks or months or decades later you heard it when you were baptized. Or you heard it in a way that made you notice for the first time from a Sunday School teacher. Maybe it was a friend when you were young and at school and you’d never heard anyone say that before – “What? You people believe that? Jesus is risen?” – or maybe it was a crazy person on the street with a sandwich board and a microphone, and in the midst of everything else you heard that Jesus is risen, no longer in the tomb.

However it happened and whoever it was, some normal flesh-and-blood person spoke it to you first. It changed everything for you right then, or it took awhile to sink in, or it still hasn’t quite sunk in. It’s the most comfortable news you know, it’s in our bones: Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! See, wasn’t that easy? Or it’s not so easy. Christ is risen? Indeed? That’s an honest answer too…

So who first told you? Who spoke to you from an empty tomb, who told that Jesus is risen?

However any of us heard it, and however any of us received that news, here we are, looking into the tomb again and hearing that news again that Jesus is not in the tomb. Death had swallowed up Jesus, but to borrow an image that we saw in Isaiah, Jesus has swallowed up death now and it’s done. We will still see death, we will still know it, we will still go through it ourselves. But death has been swallowed up on a cross and in an empty tomb, and whenever it seems like death has won, we hear this voice again: Jesus is not in the tomb. Jesus is risen. Death is fighting a losing battle. Jesus is risen.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed.

We heard it here for the thousandth time. Each of us heard it somewhere for the first time. And it will be spoken again and again for all the time to come. And it will be spoken by such normal people, with names like Mary, Mary, Salome, or… insert the name of whoever’s sitting next to you.

So let’s say it wasn’t an angel who spoke that first word of the resurrection to Mary and Mary and Salome; it was just someone with good news to share. So a young man in a white robe says to three women who need to hear, “There’s no more death here.”

And then they do what any normal person would do - they run away in fear, because nothing that just happened is normal. So they say nothing to anyone. But they said something some time, because we wouldn’t be here if fear and silence had won that day. It took a few minutes, or a few hours, or a few days, and then three women who are empowered by good news, collected their thoughts and said something to someone, who passed on the message to someone else, and they told someone, and then the message all ended up here too.

That’s the beauty of this Easter story: It’s everyday people who hear the story and tell the story. Mary and Mary and Salome haven’t been trained as pastors or rabbis or counsellors or anything. They just get a message that Jesus is alive, and they’re told to go tell a few more people. Sure, they’re afraid, and who hasn’t been afraid? They might not know what to say, and who hasn’t felt that way some time? They might have thought the news was too good to be true, because sometimes good news is too good to be true. But finally they just say, “Jesus is risen,” and the word gets around. And pretty soon all kinds of people come together in places like this to keep hearing the same news. And today it goes sort of like this:

“Christ is risen!” “Christ is risen indeed!”

Now you tell me, because I need to hear it too, a middle aged man in a white robe has to hear it. On three: One, two, three, (“Christ is risen”) Indeed!

And that’s what we do. We keep on saying it, and we keep on hearing it. We’ve said it a few times already today, and we’ve sung it a lot. We carry each other along with this good news. We’ll say it again when we recite the Nicene Creed together for the umpteenth time, because we need good news umpteen times: news that sometimes sounds like “on the third day he rose again,” and news that sounds like “We believe in the resurrection of the body,” because God cares about flesh and blood life and wants to raise us all, raise up all.

We’ll remind each other of the news again in a few minutes when we say “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” And right there, when we say that, we’re saying the exact same thing that a young someone in a white robe said in the tomb: “You’re looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is risen, he’s alive. And he’ll meet you again.” And the beauty of it all is that we say it together. Sometimes you or I will say it with the deepest of confidence and trust, and someone here needs to hear it. Other times you or I will say it with a question mark or with fingers crossed behind our back, but someone will say it when we need to hear it. The risen Christ makes us a community, where we share good news with each other and with the world.

We’ll hear the news again, and hold it in our hand and taste the good news, as the one who is not in the tomb any more gives us his own life so that we too will live.

We’ll leave here in a few minutes, sort of like Mary and Mary and Salome as they leave behind an empty tomb. It’s OK to call this an empty tomb, because it’s a place where death never gets the last word. We’ll leave like Mary and Mary and Salome. Or, you know, like Mary and Larry and Morgan and names that could go either way or any way. And whether we leave here filled up or still afraid, or both, we carry that news around wherever we go, and it goes with us as good news and as a reminder. And it’s simple. When the news on the screen or in the palm of your hand seems only to be news of death, we hear it again: Jesus is risen, he’s not in the tomb. This death won’t last, it has lost. When the grief is too close for me or you or the other person in the room, we hear it again, we say it again: Jesus is risen, he’s not in the tomb. When we’re afraid to face the day – Jesus is risen, he’s not in the tomb. When we need courage to speak out and to act – Jesus is risen, he’s not in the tomb. And there’s no need for explanations, or diagrams, or tricks to make sure it sinks in. The Holy Spirit knows what to do next.

It’s good news, from the mouths of the white-robed and winter-jacketed and meticulously decked out and black-leathered and ripped-jeaned and business suited and sari-d and pajama-ed all day and whatever everyday people look like in our everyday lives. Jesus in not in the tomb. He’s risen. Death is swallowed up forever.

Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed.