EASTER SUNDAY 2003

ACTS 10:34-43

PSALM 118:14-29

COLOSSIANS 3:1-4

MARK 16:1-8

Sermon – April 20, 2003

As long as human beings have been aware of our own mortality, we have sought ways to escape being bound by it.

For thousands of years, people sought escape through magic and ritual. Egypt in the days of the Pharaohs invested huge sums in glittering public works projects designed to ensure and improve the afterlife of Pharaoh and his elite inner circle – but without any hope for the thousands of workers who built them.

In the age of European expansion the 16^th Century Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon’s search throughout Florida for the fabled “fountain of youth” represented the emergence of another elite: the explorer/conqueror who could try to seize secret sources of life for himself and anyone else he might allow to come near. I wonder what is built over the site of his grave; perhaps a center for cosmetic surgery?

Hollywood took the theme of the search for eternal life, wrapped it with semi-Christian trappings, and sent Indiana Jones on his “Last Crusade” to find the Holy Grail – the cup Christ had used at the Last Supper – which the searchers believed would give eternal life to anyone who drank from it. This, of course, is magical thinking unconnected to faith in any sense. The movie memorably depicts the fate of someone who sought the Grail and “did not choose wisely”, and ultimately the chalice slips out of reach, yet in a satisfying way.

More recently, some people have sought for eternal life in ways no movie studio, I suspect, would find credible. One such group is the Raelian cult, which claims that people can perpetuate “themselves” indefinitely through serial cloning. (The cult made headlines when it claimed to have cloned a human baby, for which no evidence, of course, has ever been produced.)

The fact that cloning has worked, in some sense, with sheep (the first one of which has already died) is not evidence that it is a good idea even on non-religious grounds: there is some evidence that cloning can produce a creature which combines the inexperience of youth with the frailty of age, rather the opposite of what most people would seek. Moreover, the latest truly scientific studies indicate that primates cannot be cloned – almost as though they weren’t supposed to be, as one scientist remarked.

Right up there with the Raelians in their desire to replace both religion and science with pseudo-science are those who believe in eternal life through freezing the bodies of the deceased. The “value” of this depends on several propositions: first, that a human body can truly be preserved in this way so as to be able to be revived in the future, second that science will be able to reverse the cause of death of these people who have died, third that if the first two come true someone will indeed correctly thaw out the bodies that have been frozen, and fourth that these companies which are in charge of doing all this will still be in existence. I leave it to you which of these is the most dubious proposition, but I suggest that if you believe them all you also buy a certain bridge in Brooklyn at the same time. Personally, I think the son of baseball legend Ted Williams forever besmirched his name by participating in this lunacy.

As fanciful as human efforts at do-it-yourself eternal life have been, the yearning in the human heart for life-beyond-this-life is real, and deserving of some response on which people can base real hope, real hope through which human lives can be transformed in this life. We certainly are faced with the reality of death today with war and its aftermath in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the outbreak of the new disease SARS, and with other grim reminders which have been with humanity for longer.

In response to the poignant reality of death and the human yearning for new life, the Christian faith has for centuries proclaimed the reality of the death of a Jew named Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee, in a gruesome manner at the hands of Roman executioners on a hillside outside Jerusalem about 1,975 years ago. He alone was sinless, his believers declare, yet he was tortured and put to death as the one who took the punishment on behalf of humanity for all the sins of everyone everywhere in every era.

That message alone might produce depression, guilt or cynicism: if that’s what happens to a good man, the best person ever, what’s the point of anything?

So indeed no one proclaimed that message until the Christ event was completed: until, his believers declared, he rose again from the dead, fully alive and tangible (leaving no body behind in the tomb), yet more alive than anyone had ever been: not merely revived, but resurrected, raised to new life of unlimited quality as well as unlimited quantity.

O.K., so what’s the evidence? We are used to vast amounts of hype for far more trivial claims than this.

If the author of the Gospel of Mark were trying to convince the world of something as spectacular and important as the resurrection of Jesus using ordinary means of persuasion, he would have claimed distinguished witnesses – someone like Nicodemus, say, a learned and well-respected man who also was probably dead (and thus unable to be cross-examined) by the time Mark wrote his gospel about 30 years after the event.

Such an account might have included a description of the actual resurrection itself (maybe with a technical explanation of it), perhaps from an “embedded reporter” who had spent all the hours since Good Friday in or near the tomb. Then, the report would have been followed with an interview with Jesus in which he explained what being dead was like and what resurrection felt like from the inside. Then, his grave clothes would have been submitted for an episode of “CSI – Jerusalem” long before the people in Turin knew about any shroud. And finally, all four of the Gospel writers would have made sure that their accounts agreed in every detail.

This approach, or something like it in First Century Palestinian style, also certainly would have been used if the writers knew it was all made up.

Instead, what we have in Mark’s Gospel – the earliest one to be written, most scholars believe – is this. Three women – who in First Century Palestine could not even have their evidence used in traffic court if all of their testimony was contradicted by that of one man – came to Jesus’ grave. They came only with the hope that they could anoint his body (36 hours after death, that was an unappealing and somewhat unlikely task) but with no plan as to how they would roll away the large stone over the entrance to the grave (carved into the side of a hill).

These women then testify that the stone had already been rolled back – without explanation – and that they saw and heard “a young man in a white robe” telling them that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised, was not here, and that they were commissioned to tell his disciples “and Peter” (the one who denied him). Then the women testify that they ran away, overcome by “terror and amazement” and “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Is this the kind of story a Gospel writer would make up to convince a skeptical, analytical, pagan, male-dominated world? Hardly.

Is this a story the women themselves would make up to make themselves look good? No way.

If it seems highly unlikely that people would make up a story like this for any of the usual reasons, the only alternative we are left with is that this, or something like it, is what happened. Indeed the variations among the four Gospels increase their believability; anyone who has worked with eyewitness testimony can tell you that if several different witnesses tell you exactly the same story in all detail, collusion is indicated. That is not the case in the Gospel accounts of Easter and the days that followed.

This is underlined by the fact that, by the time the Gospel of Mark was written down, the message of Jesus Christ crucified-and-risen-from-the-dead had spread like wildfire hundreds of miles from Jerusalem. Paul’s letters all pre-date Mark’s Gospel. People’s lives had been dramatically changed by the message, and increasingly people were not only willing to live by their faith in Christ, but also to die for their faith in Christ. By the time the final canonical Gospel was completed, the list of martyrs for the faith was long and growing longer – and included both Peter (the disciple who had denied Christ three times) and Paul (who readily confessed to have persecuted Christians before his life was changed 180° by Christ).

People do not fearlessly and joyfully die for an idea they know is made up. The very earliest followers of Jesus, who candidly described themselves as depressed and terrified, were spectacularly transformed into people who had indestructible joy, hope and dedication. Their lives were radically different, filled with energy, purpose, sacrificial giving and love, and with a serenity anchored in hope for life beyond this life. After all, Jesus had told them at the Last Supper, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also.” And Jesus had also told Martha before he raised her brother Lazarus from the dead, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live...”

The gospels were not written in the rush of a 24 hour-long enthusiasm on the day after Easter; they were written based on vivid oral accounts after a generation or more of the experience of the Easter Life in the communities which, often at great peril, called Jesus “Lord”.

And the best Good News of all to us today and to all people is that the Easter Life is still available today to all who turn to Jesus Christ as the source of eternal life. The same energy, joy, purpose, generosity and love which so transformed Jesus’ depressed and terrified followers is available today, not by magic or exploration or pseudo-science but by the gift of God. And the same hope for eternal life both in quality and quantity is available today, also by the grace of God received through faith.

This is possible because we celebrate today the wondrous reality that Jesus is alive, and we cannot merely know about him, but know him, and be transformed by his new life, and by his power bring to a broken and suffering world what it needs so much: love, energy, joy, purpose, generosity and hope for new life here and now, and forever.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church