The cross and the resurrection are the centerpiece of Christian faith and practice.
Absent from the gospel accounts is any real mention of a reality everyone in the early church knew personally, the rule of Caesar in Judea, one that had corrupted the religious and civil leaders of the Jewish people, and impoverished much of its population.
When Jesus began shouting about the kingdom of God, everyone heard his unspoken parenthesis: the kingdom of God (and not of Caesar) has come near. It was a revolutionary war cry.
He sought out the most desperate, the sick, the hungry, the morally bankrupt. He sought them because they were desperate enough to welcome his presence and, in some cases, embrace his radical teaching.
And that truth was that God had come near to his desperate people. This is the gospel, and this is the good news of Easter.
Jesus proved himself a true king, the true Messiah, with spotless and plentiful bona fides. He evaded all the traps the authorities laid for him, and in that final week in the temple of Jerusalem, he was the main attraction. Jews from all over the empire were in the city for the festival gathered with his greasy Galileans in thrall to his message and his power.
Jesus was true Messiah, because he rejected the title. He was a true king, because he made himself a servant of the least in his kingdom. He was powerful because he gave up his power to God’s. He was invulnerable because he made himself vulnerable, trusting God to come through for him, leaving vengeance, if vengeance there would be, to God.
In the cross, he staged a prophetic demonstration meant to reveal the sin of the leaders of the people and those who followed them, and to simultaneously show the way back to God, a path to joy and peace, no matter the circumstance.
Jesus knew the authorities would turn him over to be crucified. He counted on it. In doing so, they would be revealed for the hypocrites they were, fearing Caesar more than they loved God.
Such terrible people, we think, those corrupt religious authorities. Surely we would have made a different, more courageous choices.
But that only shows we don’t know the Romans, who were famous for their brutality. Rebellion was a constant problem, and the response from Caesar was always the same: total destruction of the enemy, and if possible, his whole nation.
So you’re the leader of the Jewish people, and a prophet is drawing big crowds teaching about the kingdom of God (and not of Caesar). The Romans expect you to control the people, and it sure looks like a rebellion is brewing.
What would you do? Caiaphas laid it out: if they didn’t stop Jesus, the Romans would destroy the city and the temple, and kill thousands. He actually said, “You don’t understand that it is better for one man to die for the many.” We make more of this comment than we should and lose its original meaning: Jesus actually gave up his life in order to save his people from the vengeance of the Romans.
Jesus went through his arrest and trial quite passively. Did nothing to defend himself. His supporters fled immediately. Suddenly the man everyone was cheering just yesterday was in front of the Roman governor, on trial for insurrection.
All the gospels attest that the Jewish authorities stirred up the crowd, spreading misinformation, deliberately misquoting Jesus to make him sound threatening, and so on.
It’s hard to say if the crowd truly turned on Jesus or whether they did the bidding of their leaders out of fear they’d end up joining Jesus on a cross. In fact, as the story of Peter’s three denials demonstrates, it seems some were eager to turn in Jesus’ followers to the Romans. “Hey, you were with him, right?” People kept asking him.
Caesar may be gone, but there are not many powers and principalities in the world that we don’t respect, admire or fear more than we do God. Our culture is therefore awash with spiritual disease: depression, anxiety, addiction, violent rage. Most of us move through our life largely unconsciously, acting and reacting, and nearly constantly justifying ourselves and judging others. We are far more easily manipulated than we think we are, mostly because we don’t think we can be. Our culture makes virtues of boasting, selfishness and dishonest cunning. We are like sheep without a shepherd, harassed and helpless, as Matthew 9:6 says.
To have the faith that Jesus had, sufficient for him to completely let down all his defenses and trust God to defend him, even unto death by torture, seems impossible for a mere human being, and so we elevate Jesus to a superior height, high enough that he cannot make demands on us. If we worship him, we don’t have to follow him. How do you follow a god?
But Jesus rejected honorifics like Messiah or king, and chose to call himself “the son of man”, a Hebrew and Aramaic expression meaning, simply, “ordinary human being” or perhaps “everyman.” Jesus wanted to make clear that he had no more special gifts than any other human being. He promised that anyone at all could follow his example and find the same invulnerable, abundant and miraculous resurrection life.
But, upon his crucifixion, his disciples concluded that he was a failure. The whole movement was dead, its leader publicly humiliated and slain, now with the Romans hunting down his followers. Terrified, the male disciples hid.
Women were not regarded as threats by the Romans, so they were able to openly go to the tomb to perform the appropriate rites for Jesus’ body. But they believed, just as the disciples did, that the story of Jesus and the kingdom of God was over.
The empty tomb and the mysterious men. The particular way the shroud had been folded, the head-wrapping rolled up, as if his body had risen, freed itself from his shroud, unrolled the wrapping from his face, rolling it up in the process, then neatly folded the shroud.
I’ve only experienced one thing that might come close to approaching the shock those women experienced. It was when a tornado blew through my neighborhood leaving all my neighbor’s houses nothing but piles of matchsticks.
The earliest copies of Mark end with the women running from the tomb, terrified, and telling no one. It was so abrupt that later copyists added material from the other gospels about resurrection appearances.
Why were they terrified? Well, think of it, all the disciples abandoned him, everyone had given up on him, the crowds screamed for his crucifixion, and the religious leaders were culpable.
The resurrection was a testament from God: the one you crucified, God confirmed, was indeed the Messiah, the Son of God.
What would the risen Lord say to them, who had failed him so miserably? Who ran like rabbits rather than trusting God? Had he come back to punish them?
No, he had not. Not only did he refrain from admonishing them, he forgave them. Not only did he forgive them, but he imbued them with his own spirit, his own consciousness, his own faith and righteousness. And not only that, but he commissioned them to testify to his resurrection and teach his way.
They became his resurrection, his flesh and blood presence in the world.
The clueless disciples, those illiterate and poverty-stricken fishermen, had been slain by grace, and had been resurrected to become children of light.
This is our testimony, an announcement that anyone, anyone at all, can have the joy of resurrection life. We testify to our experience, just as Mark testified to the experience of the disciples.
Cross and resurrection. Give up your power and receive the power of God. Give up trying to control yourself and others and let God take over. Give up your defenses, and God will be your defender. Destroy your ego and God will honor you. Become weak, and receive God’s strength. Die to yourself, and rise to God.
This is the way to a faith that works.
The Lord invites us to take up our crosses and follow him, through death to a new life of peace and joy. He is closest to the desperate, for whom life is baffling and difficult, be it because of family strife, addictions of any kind, grief, anxiety, or loneliness, resentment, bitterness. The desperate are most likely to embrace his way, the well-heeled and self-satisfied the least. This is one of the many paradoxes of the way of Jesus, who famously said, “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.”
It all begins with the leap of faith. We’ve offered you our testimony, that Christ rose from the dead, and raised us from a walking death. We join millions of living witnesses all around the world, and many millions more that rejoice in heaven. We took the leap of faith, to believe the testimony of the apostles, to believe that God was not far away, but very near us all, ready and willing to heal, to save, to raise into resurrection life. And found out for ourselves that their witness was true.
Even if you don’t completely understand, you can take that leap today. You can confess with your lips, even if you are only beginning to believe, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, the Savior of the world.
And as you deepen that faith, you will gain the courage to follow Christ and rise to the joy of resurrection life.
Amen.
Sermon based on:
Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Mark 16:1-8
