Alleluia! He is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
That is the most amazing claim that anyone has ever made in the history of the world. It has been translated into every language on earth and written in millions of books in every country. And, because of a strange quirk in the Julian and Gregorian calendars, all of the churches in the world – Orthodox, Protestant, Anglican and Catholic – are actually celebrating Easter on the same day for the first time in 200 years. What must it sound like to God today to hear God's people all shouting these same amazing words. A shout of joy. A shout of faith. A shout that is totally unbelievable.
What makes a room full of intelligent people shout such an amazing, impossible, incredible thing?
When the women got up early that morning and walked to the tomb, carrying the spices, they were going to anoint a dead man. They fully expected to find the body of Jesus. Jesus was dead. They had seen him crucified. They watched him die. And they were there when Joseph of Arimathea put him in the tomb on Friday afternoon just before sundown. Because it was Passover, they didn't have time to give him a proper burial, and so they were going back to anoint the body of someone they loved.
Now these were solid women, respectable women. They were not groupies. They knew the way of the world – that power conquers love; that the poor will always suffer; and that the dead stay dead. After all, that's how the world works, right?
And so when they got to the tomb and looked inside and found that it was empty, Luke tells us that they were PERPLEXED. (Now the last time that Luke used the word "perplexed" was when Gabriel is telling Mary that she will bear a son, Jesus.)
They were perplexed when they saw the empty tomb because, after all, the dead stay dead.
But then they remembered something that Jesus said back in Galilee – about his suffering and dying and rising again. So they went back to the others and told them what they saw.
But the others didn't believe them either. They were no fools. They knew how the world worked – that power conquers love; that the poor will always suffer; and that the dead stay dead.
They knew Jesus was a great teacher, of course. And they knew that he was an amazing healer. They knew that he could feed thousands of people with a few fish and a couple of loaves of bread.
But to rise from the dead? That was just an "idle tale". It was foolish talk, utter nonsense, a silly story. They were spinning a yarn, an old wives tale.
After all, the women didn't actually see Jesus there. In fact, he's not even mentioned in this story at all. All they had to go on was what the strangers told them, and what they remembered about Jesus. In other words, one by one, they began to connect the dots.
We hear stories like these all the time – about some woman whose cancer miraculously disappears. About how a guy falls out of an airplane and his chute doesn't open, and he survives. About how a family walks away from a car crash that nobody should have survived. We hear the stories, and we're quick to dismiss them as idle tales. This that are interesting to consider, but fly in the face of how we know the world works.
How often, when we are confronted with facts that don't fit our view of reality, we just call them just stuff and nonsense. An idle tale.
That's the logical response when things don't fit what we know about the world. There's no shame in that. After all, we are rational creatures. God gave us a brain. And we know that life follows a pretty predictable path. Our experience tells us that power conquers love; that the poor will always suffer; and that the dead stay dead.
Right?
But the Easter message is different. It runs counter to what our brains tell us. it says that death is real, but it is not the final word on our existence.
The story the women told was so incredible that Peter wondered, "what if it's true?" And he began to connect the dots.
He remembered about how Jesus said that came to bring us eternal life – not some dull, boring, life ad infinitum when every day looks just the last one. But a life of fullness and richness. A life of abundant and eternal love. A life in which we live as children God worthy to stand face to face with one who created us.
And he thought about how, by his resurrection, Jesus does not just delay death, he transforms it – transforms it from the end of everything, to just the end of everything as we know it.
The end of death as we know it changes our lives. From "get it while you can", to "take what you need, there's plenty more." From "the hope for power" to the "power of hope." From "fear of dying" to "the death of fear."
We came into this tomb today for the same reason that Peter ran to the tomb that day. Because we have heard an idle tale that we just can't help but wonder:
What if it's true?
Alleluia! He is risen!
The Lord has risen indeed. Alleluia!
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