Sermon Title: "A World Turned Upside Down"
Date:   April 24, 2011
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  Matthew 28:1-10

It was not at all as they expected.  They were observant Jews, and they knew that proper burial procedures had not been followed.  Jesus’ body had been taken down from the cross so late on Friday that sunset and the beginning of the Sabbath was upon them.  So Joseph of Arimathea, a sympathizer of Jesus, only had time to wrap the body in a linen shroud and hastily place it in his own new tomb.  A large stone was rolled across the entrance to block the tomb.

In the early dawn hours of Sunday, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, the same two who witnessed Joseph place Jesus’ body in the tomb, came to the tomb expecting to anoint Jesus’ body with spices and ointments, following the proper Jewish ritual for the burial of the dead.  As they approached the tomb, a great earthquake occurred and an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and rolled back the stone from the tomb entrance.

Of the four Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, only Matthew reports an earthquake.  Similarly, at the moment of Jesus’ death on the cross, he reports “the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.  The earth shook, and the rocks were split.” (27:51)  We cannot know for certain what the evangelist hoped to communicate by relating the story this way, but one likely possibility is that he wanted to forge Jesus’ death and resurrection into a singular event.  What happened at the moment of death is actually the moment when God was already at work bringing about the surest sign that the messianic age itself was dawning, beginning with Christ’s resurrection.

We, living here in California, especially on the edge of the Newport-Inglewood fault running through just a mile or two to the north, are accustomed to earthquakes.  With the advent of sophisticated readings from the Richter scale and scientists probing the location of fault lines, we accept them as part of the natural shifting of Teutonic plates beneath the earth’s surface. 

A survey released last month revealed that only one-third of mainline Protestants and Catholics believe that earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters are a sign from God.  Yet 59 percent of Evangelicals believe that God can use natural disasters to send messages.  Two thousand years before such polls were taken, it is hard to know the origin of those two earthquakes occurring both on Good Friday and Easter morning.  Again, only Matthew reports them, and we could speculate whether they are linked to Jesus’ death and resurrection.

The women at the tomb were doubtless shocked by the unexpected earthquake, the angel in dazzling white, and the stone being rolled away.  It is reported that the guards sent by Pilate to keep the tomb sealed were terrified and became stiff as corpses.

Even more unexpectedly, if the two Marys thought they were going to peer into the tomb and see the body of Jesus lying there, still clad in the linen burial shroud, they were wrong.  He was gone!  Their world was turned upside down!

All four Gospels, written over a period of some fifty years, are consistent on the fact that the tomb was already empty when the stone was rolled away.  The resurrection had already occurred.  The angel says to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified.  He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said.  Come, see the place where he lay.” 

There is one other detail that’s common to the New Testament witness about the resurrection and is too often lost in its subtlety on modern Christians.  In every instance when the act of resurrection is mentioned, in the original Greek the verb appears in the passive tense.  Matthew, Mark and Luke all report the angel or angels saying, “He has risen.”  God has already made it happen.

The New Testament throughout is consistent in both its insistence that God raised Jesus and its refusal to describe the resurrection itself.  That has to be a great relief to preachers on Easter Sunday who thus are relieved of the responsibility of trying to explain how God did it.  The means whereby God raised Jesus remains a mystery.  His resurrection isn’t something directly witnessed, but rather witnessed to because of its effects.

And what happened beyond?  In the various Gospels, Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, to the disciples behind closed doors, to “doubting” Thomas next Sunday and to the walkers on the road to Emmaus on the following Sunday.  He appears and reappears to his disciples, not in Jerusalem but back in Galilee where his ministry began when he walked along the shore of the Sea of Galilee and said to these simple fishermen, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”  And at his ascension into heaven at the end of today’s chapter, he charges the twelve to “go make disciples of all nations…” (28:19)

“That bright light of resurrection didn’t stay in the tomb.  That light-giving light didn’t stay in one place but spread to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary.  ‘Jesus is not here, for he has been raised,’ the angel told them.  ‘Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee.’  The resurrection light transformed them and overcame whatever fear was in their hearts.  They couldn’t stay at the tomb even though they might have wanted to reassure themselves by seeing that Jesus’ body wasn’t there.  Resurrection couldn’t contain Jesus’ body.  The women ran from the tomb with resurrection in their hearts.  They couldn’t keep the news to themselves.”  (Barbara K. Lundblad, Lutheran Women Today, April 2008, 25-6)

Two thousand years have come and gone, and the very same is true today.  The resurrection is still being reported by people who have caught a glimpse of the risen Jesus in the middle of human life.  Such sightings aren’t face to face, and they don’t include Easter morning encounters with the risen Jesus.  But eyewitnesses still report that Jesus is alive and active, in the lives of both individuals and communities.

The risen Jesus works through individuals in surprising and life-changing ways, and maybe that’s where we best experience the power of resurrection on this Easter morning and every day.  There are several members of our church who have undergone severe medical crises in the past year.  You know who they are, for we as a community of faith have prayed for them repeatedly, here in worship, on our prayer chain, in small groups and at their bedsides.  And each of them has survived, come through their medical crisis, and is on the road to recovery.  Every one has spoken to me of how their own Christian faith in that journey and the power of prayer saw them through their ordeal.  One such person wrote this, and it could echo the sentiments of them all:  “I appreciate all the prayers and support you gave me.  I was at peace with myself and God [the day of surgery] in case things didn’t work out as expected, but God obviously still has a plan for me here on Earth.”

There is nothing I can say to you from this pulpit today that will add any more detail to the resurrection of Jesus than what the four Gospels report, and which Paul, even before the Gospels were written, attested to himself.  But just as the bodily Jesus was changed by the resurrection, just as his followers came to believe that he was raised from the dead, I can testify that many people live lives that are turned upside down by their belief in him. 

Let us not attempt fully to understand this story, or to debate its possible validity.  Let us too obey the risen Christ:  “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”  If we obey, if we overcome our fears of seeming irrational, or antiquated in our beliefs, or against the dominant ideology of the age, if we go and tell, whether in Galilee or wherever we find ourselves, then we will see the risen Christ, raised so that he might return to us, encourage us in our times of need, reveal himself to us.

Then we too—like the Marys and the others who saw and came to believe—will find ourselves living in a world turned upside down.