Imagine yourself at a wake, listening to the
conversations.
There’s the running refrain of sympathy: “I’m so
sorry for your loss.” “We’ll miss
her.”
And a persistent current of praise: “He was such
a wonderful man.”
The value of this one unique human life is very
clear in the room.
And amid those currents are a few eddies where
grief takes the form of honest, humorous commentary:
“He never did have an ounce of patience – you
can almost hear him saying now, ‘Get moving with the burial already!’”
“Think how different this would be if she were
running this show – she must hate it that she can’t be in charge.”
And in the quieter conversations – or the things
that are never said aloud – there’s the bitter taste of things left
undone. The pain of unreturned
calls or visits promised but not made.
The sharpened regrets of anger, old injuries, and misunderstandings that
never got resolved.
And sometimes there’s the sense of betrayal –
the horrible shock of having been left with so much unfinished, and not even a
word of farewell.
Now imagine that the dead woman or man walks
right into the middle of this.
Literally, just walks into the middle of the
room.
There’s a lot of silence, isn’t there?
And what an emotional roller coaster!
That’s what happened to the disciples in
Jerusalem. There they are –
gathered to begin to deal with the death of Jesus – and the dead man himself
walks into the room.
Shock and disbelief come very naturally.
After all, people who have been buried generally
stay dead --
– and “welcome back!” has never been one of
those usefully labeled stages of grief.
Resurrection is incredibly disruptive.
Maybe that’s why Jesus opens the conversation by
saying “Peace be with you.”
But that’s when the scene gets even weirder.
Because even though he’s dead, the rest of this story is all about the way it’s
always been. Everything Jesus does
in this scene is what he has done,
with the disciples, over and over and over again, already.
He eats.
He leads a bible study.
He commissions them to tell good news.
In fact, living-after-death Jesus is just about
the same as living-the-normal-human-life Jesus. As long as you can get over the complicated emotions about
his death and return, that is.
In the gospel stories of that first Easter
there’s no reconciliation and no closure.
The resurrected Jesus doesn’t seem to have time for conversations about
the way we misunderstood him in the past, apologies for being absent in a time
of need, or regret for things left undone.
He just plain doesn’t have those conversations
we imagine having when we’re
remembering a loved one at a wake or after the funeral.
Jesus sends the stunned disciples right out into
the world to preach repentance and forgiveness, without spending any time on
apologies and rebuilding relationships.
That’s the curious thing about
resurrection. It’s about the
present and the future, not the past.
It’s about taking new life to others, not repairing old injuries.
Those stunned disciples in Jerusalem found
themselves out in the street building God’s kingdom: preaching, teaching,
healing and converting, forgiving others in Christ’s name – not apologizing to
Jesus, healing their own hurts, and rebuilding their relationships.
(That might be what we want in a second chance,
but it’s not the gospel story.)
We meet Easter the way we meet death, whether we
want to or not – brought suddenly into a new world, one that’s like
the one we loved and lost, but insistently about the present and the future,
pushing and pulling us away from the past.
Imagine yourself at that wake, again.
And when the dead person walks into the room,
and all those conversations drop abruptly into silence, no one says: “I missed
you!” or “I’m sorry!”
but instead the risen one says: “The world is on fire. Help me put it out!” or “The world is hungry!
Help me feed it!”
Imagine that everyone in the room rushes right
out into the street to change the world.
That’s not like any funeral I’ve been to. But it might just be like the kingdom
of God.
There’s something we do in our worship services
in Easter that is a little like this.
All the rest of the year, when the prayers of
the people end, we confess our sins and are assured of God’s forgiveness. But for seven weeks in this season, we
don’t. We pray for God’s world,
and then right away exchange God’s peace.
Leaving out the general confession in Easter is
an ancient tradition of the church.
One that rests on the truth that as we are baptized into Christ’s death
and resurrection, we too are dead to sin and risen to new life.
But it also reminds us that resurrection is
uncomfortable, because it’s not about healing the past, and it’s ultimately not
about us.
Resurrection makes the world we change more
important than the world we’re from.
It’s about renewal, rebirth, and life abundant
for the whole wide world. The gift
of resurrection is a future more whole and healed than we could ever imagine –
a future we get to proclaim to the world,
ready or not.
Today we gather, you and I, and we do what Jesus
and his disciples did every day.
Study the scriptures. Eat. Refresh
our relationship with God and one another.
And on the day of resurrection – this day of resurrection – we are sent
out again, as witnesses of these things,
not for our own sake, but for the future of the
world.
Ready or not, resurrection comes!
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