A Sermon on Matthew 28:1-10

Preached Easter Sunday, March 31, 2002

By Donald M. Tuttle

First Christian Church, Corpus Christi, Texas

Don’t you love Easter?

It is such a special day. As a child, our churchgoing was spotty, to say the least. But we made quite a few Easters. Those were the days when "Easter" meant a new dress, hat and maybe even gloves for my sister. For me it meant new blue pants, a white shirt and a clip on tie.

Of course, it was more than new clothes that made Easter special. Like here today, there would be a larger than usual crowd, special music from the choir, a sanctuary filled with Easter lilies, and a rousing rendition of "Christ the Lord is Risen Today,’ sung heartily even by those of us who can’t follow the notes on the "Alleluia" parts. Easter was always a very special time.

Yet a few years ago, a bit of my innocence about Easter was taken away. I read the story of a pastor—a minister in a Unitarian Universalist congregation—who peeked through the door at the back of the sanctuary on Easter morning and saw the huge crowd there to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Turning to the choir, all lined up ready for the procession, he said, "Let’s go celebrate what virtually no one here really believes."

Ouch! What an unthinkable thing to say. It was Easter—the most important day of the Christian year and he was seemingly dismissing the very people who had come to celebrate it. Why would he say such a thing? Was he a heretic? Had he lost his mind or his faith? Was he desperately in need of some time off? It was none of these. He knew his congregation well. They were well-educated members of the upper socio-economic classes. They were people who were well rooted in modern thought, shaped by an allegiance to science and a devotion to "facts." They had been told for years that miracles like the resurrection don’t happen—that the dead are dead and they stay that way. They had even read popular scholars—biblical scholars like Bishop Spong, Marcus Borg and the Jesus Seminar—who dismissed the resurrection as a "spiritual experience" or a mass hallucination. He knew that filling the pews on Easter Sunday were a lot of people who found it hard to believe that Jesus was actually raised from the dead.

And I would dare say his congregation is not alone. How often have you or I in our private thoughts entertained the idea that Jesus was just in a coma and woke up? How often have we thought that just maybe his disciples had a mystical experience that "seemed to them" like he was alive? How often has science trumped our faith, doubts displaced our confidence in what we celebrate on Easter?

No, that pastor and those congregants are not alone. I suspect their name is legion.

Yet God doesn’t allow us to be agnostics about Easter. We cannot put one foot in the "Christ is risen" camp and the other among those who say, "Jesus is dead." We cannot sit on the fence, hoping to jump to the "right" side at the last moment. Easter demands choice. Easter demands that we choose between denying that Christ is raised from dead or proclaiming it for all the world to hear. There is no middle ground—and the choice we make fundamentally changes our lives forever.

That is what we see in what took place on that morning long ago. On that day, two groups of people found themselves outside Jesus’ tomb. Some were soldiers, sent there by Pilate to guard the tomb. They were there to make sure that nothing happened to Jesus’ body. The other were women—Mary Magdalene and the other Mary—followers of Jesus who had come to gaze and to grieve. As they stood there, men next to women, authority next to humility, strength next to sadness, the earth began to shake. Suddenly an angel appeared and the stone was rolled away. And the soldiers began to tremble and every last one of these pillars of Roman power fainted dead away.

But not the women for the angel said to them, "Fear not." He told them he knew they had come looking for Jesus, but that Jesus was not there, that he had been raised from the dead. "Look," he said, "the tomb is empty." And in fact, it was.

But it was at this point that the people who had been at the tomb made the choices that would forever shape their lives. The soldiers, when they awakened, found the empty tomb. They raced back to the city, back to the chief priests, and told them everything that had happened. The priests and the elders dug deep into their pockets. They pulled out cash and gave it to the soldiers. They commanded them to say they had failed in their duty to guard the body, that they had fallen asleep, and that the disciples had stolen Jesus. And the soldiers, they agreed.

On that first Easter morning they chose to deny the resurrection—to spend their lives living as if there had been no earthquake, no angel, no empty tomb, no Risen Lord. They chose to spend the rest of their lives denying the very truth they had witnessed at the tomb.

But then there were the women. Filled with awe and joy, they too raced back toward the city. Even before they ran smack-dab into Jesus, they wanted to go to the disciples, to tell them about the angel and the news that he had shared. They wanted to go to the disciples and tell them about the empty tomb. They wanted to go and tell the disciples that Jesus Christ was alive.

On that first Easter morning, they chose to proclaim the resurrection. They chose to spend the rest of their lives telling the world that the tomb was empty and Jesus was alive. They spent the rest of their lives proclaiming in their words and actions the truth that Jesus Christ had been raised, that death had been defeated, and that evil had been overcome.

And every disciple after them made the same choice.

Gary Habermas has studied the resurrection extensively. He notes that the resurrection of Jesus wasn’t some Johnny-come-lately idea that the disciples eventually came up with. It was, he says, "the central proclamation of the early church from the very beginning." From day one, the followers of Jesus were not recounting a spiritual experience, recalling a mass hallucination, talking about a grief-inspired dream, but they were telling the world that the tomb was empty, Jesus was alive, sin was forgiven, death was defeated, evil overcome.

How much we believe what we celebrate on Easter will not be measured simply by our presence here today. It will be measured by what we do when we leave here. Will we treat our families as if the stone were never rolled away? Will we go to work tomorrow and conduct business as usual, pretend that the tomb was not empty? Will we close our eyes and purses to the suffering, as if the angel never spoke? Will we withhold the Good News from those mired in sin and guilt, as if Jesus were not raised?

Or will we spend the rest of our lives living in the light of the empty tomb, filled with the joy that is salvation, proclaiming in the words we speak and the deeds we do that Christ is risen?

The choice is ours.