Richard R. Crocker
Church of Christ at Dartmouth
College
Easter Sunday
March 28, 2016
What Happened on Easter
What Happens on Easter
All of you, I am sure, are familiar
with the Easter story. Jesus, the Christ, rose from the dead. That is what we
celebrate. But what do we really know about what happened? I want to make two
assertions. First, we as Christians cannot claim to know more than we know.
And, second, we as Christians cannot claim to know less than we know.
What actually happened on
Easter? The only accounts we have about what happened on what we now call
Easter Day are in the Bible, in the Gospels. There was no news story published
in The Jerusalem Times! And although the four gospels all assert that Christ rose
from the dead, the details are quite different.
All the gospels tell us that Jesus was crucified, and that his body was put in a tomb, which was sealed with a large stone. But then, the stories differ. All four gospels say that Mary Magdalen went to the tomb early in the morning. She is the only person so mentioned in all four gospel accounts. But John says that she went alone; Mathew says she was accompanied by “the other Mary”; Mark says she was accompanied by Mary the mother of James and Salome; Luke says she was accompanied by Mary the mother of James, Joana, and other unnamed women.
What they reportedly saw
varies. John says that Mary Magdalen saw a young man, who she first thought was
the gardener, but who was in fact Jesus himself. Matthew says there was an
earthquake, and the two women saw an angel “descending from heaven”, ”whose
appearance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow”. And then they saw Jesus himself, who said
“Greetings!” Mark says ”they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting
on the right side” of the tomb. Luke says they saw “two men in dazzling
clothes.”
In each story, the woman, or the women,
received a message from the young man, or the angel, or the angels – but the
messages vary.
In Mark, the angel says: “Do
not be alarmed, you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He
has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place where they laid him.
But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee;
there you will see him, just as he told you.” And the women, afraid, fled and
told no one.
In Matthew, the risen Jesus
himself tells the women to go and tell the disciples that he will see them in
Galilee. The women delivered the message, and the disciples then left for
Galilee.
In Luke, the men in dazzling
clothes asked the women, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” and
told them, “He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he
was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be
crucified, and on the third day rise again.” So the women went and told the
disciples, who did not believe them, except for Peter, who got up and ran to
the tomb, where he saw only the cloths in which Jesus had been buried.
In John, after he called her
name, Mary Magdalen recognized that the
young man, whom she thought was the gardener, was in fact Jesus, and she heard Jesus himself say: “Do not hold
on to me, because I have not ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say
to them ‘I am ascending to my father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Which Mary Magdalen did. And the frightened disciples, except Thomas, huddled
in the upper room in Jerusalem, where we remember that Jesus himself appeared
to them on Easter night.
My point in going through
these stories is to show that we really do not know exactly what happened. The
stories vary; the details are significantly different, and the substance of the
story – that Jesus rose from the dead - is beyond comprehension. It is,
perhaps, a mark of authenticity that these stories do not agree in all details.
When everyone tells a story the same way, we know that they have probably been
coached. These stories reflect different voices. The only significant point of
agreement is that when Mary Magdalen, and possibly some other women, (and
remember that they all were women), went to the tomb early on Easter morning, they
did not find the body of Jesus, and they all reported extraordinary visions or
encounters. We don’t even know much about Mary Magdalen. Legends have grown up
about her, but the only thing the gospels tell us is that one of them, Luke, reports
that Jesus had healed her. She
apparently became very devoted to him. Matthew, Mark, and John report that she
stood by his cross while he was crucified, and they all report that she went to
the tomb on Easter morning. She is sometimes called the “apostle to the
apostles” because she carried the good news to his disciples, Some scholars
have even speculated that she was herself a disciple, even perhaps the unnamed
“disciple whom Jesus loved.” But that is all speculation. We do not know.
And so, when we talk about
what happened at Easter, we cannot claim to know more than we know. What
exactly happened is a mystery, and the point of a mystery is that we do not
know, we cannot explain it. If the writers of the gospels cannot explain it,
neither can we.
But if we as Christians cannot
claim to know more than we know, we also cannot claim to know less than we know
– because we do know a great deal. And what we know does make all the difference.
What do we know. We know that
whatever happened on Easter was so powerful that it not only transformed the lives
of his friends and disciples, but led them to be willing to die for what they
knew. We know that Jesus’s disciples - not only the 11, but his women friends,
his cousins, his family – came to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead.
They didn’t know exactly how, either, but some of them later claimed that they
had seen the risen Lord. And these claims were not made casually, as a matter
of rumor; they were made openly, definitely, and sometimes defiantly. Peter,
who had denied that he knew Jesus only three days before, later was himself
crucified for his testimony that Jesus had risen from the dead. We do not know
how many early disciples testified to the truth of their belief by giving up
their lives, but we do know that many did. And of course we have the testimony
of Paul, who encountered the risen Lord in what was surely a vision, but a vision
so powerful that it totally changed his life, and led Paul also to imprisonment
and execution. This we know. It is not a matter of speculation. It is a matter
of fact.
During the last few
centuries, some skeptics have tried to discredit these testimonies by saying
the story of the resurrection was a hoax, based either on a plot to steal the
body of Jesus and claim that he was resurrected, or on hallucinations. Such skepticism, for me, fades in the face of
the facts that we know: disciples experienced imprisonment, torture, and
execution. Would they do that to perpetuate a hoax or a delusion?
Consider the testimony of
Paul, which we read earlier, but which we should listen to more carefully now,
“For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received:
that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he
was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the
scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas (Peter), then to the twelve. The he
appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of
whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to
all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared unto me.”
Paul’s account here is
different even from the account in the gospels - but remember, Paul had not read the gospels.
They had not been written when he wrote his letters. But he had received the stories,
the stories on which some people whom
Paul himself had been persecuting were betting their lives.
So we know for certain that
what happened on Easter caused many people not only to believe it, but to bet
their lives on it, to live for its truth, and to die for its truth. That is
what we know. We cannot claim to know less than we know.
We also know that the meaning
of Easter has not yet been fully understood. We are slow disciples. We know
that, in addition to proclaiming the love of God, and the power of the risen Christ,
as one who has experienced and transcended torture and violence and death, we
know that Christians have sometimes - indeed, far too many times – have
inflicted torture and violence and death on others. This is a sad but undeniable fact. We cannot claim
to know less than we know.
But we also know, beyond
dispute, that people, many people, thousands of people, millions of people have
gathered on every Easter Day for almost 2000 years to proclaim their hope,
their faith, their belief in the mystery of Christ’s resurrection, the victory
of the crucified one. In good times and bad, wartime and peace time, in youth
and in age, among admirable people and sometimes among unadmirable people, the
faith has endured. We know this, don’t we, even if we know nothing else. That
itself is miracle.
And we are part of that
miracle today. Some of us, some of you, may be, like Thomas, doubters. You have
heard the testimony, but you cannot fully believe it. You are not like the
apostles, who saw the resurrected Christ. You are not like Paul, who was
stunned into blindness by a vision of the resurrected Christ. You are still,
however, part of the throngs who have
heard the word, and whose life is
sustained by the possibility, the hope, the faith that God has shown us that
death does not win, that power does not prevail over goodness, that our
suffering, whatever it may be, is somehow redeemed in the crucified but risen
Lord. You are among those who yearn and work for the day when, as promised in
Isaiah, there will be an end to torture and violence and disease and war, and
“they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” To the extent that
the story touches your heart and finds a place in it, you are also part of the
miracle. We do not know everything about what happened on Easter, 2000 years
ago. But we do know what happens on Easter, right now.
We cannot claim to know more
than we know. But we also cannot claim to know less than we know. And what we
do know makes all the difference in the world. Amen.
Easter Prayer March 27, 2016
Almighty God, in Jesus
Christ, the resurrected one, you have conquered the power of death, cruelty,
violence, and despair, and you have called us to follow him, in faith. We pray,
O Resurrected One, strengthen our faith:
In a world where violence and
hatred are resurgent,
we pray, O resurrected one, Strengthen our faith.
For a world in which many
live in poverty, with no access to the riches around them; and where many a,
driven from their homes, are in search of refuge;
we pray, O resurrected one, Strengthen our faith.
For those facing the trials
of loneliness, disease, and despair; for loved ones who have died, and those of
us who are approaching our own deaths,
we pray, O resurrected one, Strengthen our faith.
For our families, whose lives
we value more than our own, but whom we know we cannot completely protect.
we pray, O resurrected one, Strengthen our faith.
For those imprisoned, justly
or unjustly, and for those who are imprisoned by addiction.
we pray, O resurrected one, Strengthen our faith.
For the church, for all its
ministers and members, that we may more boldly follow in your way,
we pray, O resurrected one, Strengthen our faith.
For ourselves, in the trials we
face, the doubts that paralyze us, and the false gods in which we so often put
our trust;
we pray, O resurrected one, Strengthen our faith.
Give us grace¸ we pray, to
follow in the way of the Resurrected One, who taught us to pray:
Our Father
