Christ is Risen!
[The people respond:] He is risen indeed!
Happy Easter, everyone!
“Because I live,” Jesus said in John 14:19, “you also will live.”
I wonder: how many of you are sitting out there, festooned in your Easter Sunday best, but your fingers are slightly stained? How many of you colored Easter eggs this weekend? I do think I can see some pinks, blues, greens, and purples shining on your fingers from all the Easter eggs you colored, hid, found, cracked, or consumed.
Take comfort in this: you are not alone. Just over one billion real eggs are dipped and dyed every Easter in America. The Dudley egg dye company sells over 10 million egg dying kits every year. No wonder we are such a colorful bunch!
Yet eggs sometimes get a bad rap at Easter. Eggs are such a widely used symbolic food. Everyone from dancing druids and pagan fertility gods to — worst of all — bored kids on Halloween, have all claimed eggs as some sort of special specimen for themselves.
The Christian use of eggs at Easter probably has roots in a host of different cultures and traditions. But there are two connections that make the “Easter egg” a powerful symbol for this miraculous morning. Jesus’ final journey to Jerusalem brought him there to celebrate Pesach, Passover, in that holy city. The Last Supper was a Passover Seder. One of the ritual foods arranged on everyone’s Passover plate was a hard boiled egg, the “beitzah.”
This egg symbolized the “chagigah,” a ritual sacrifice made in the Temple. After the Temple was destroyed this egg also became a “mourner’s” reminder. The Temple sacrifice could no longer be made, because the Temple no longer existed. In Orthodox Judaism hard boiled eggs are still offered to mourners as their first food after a funeral.
For Christians on Easter Sunday — as Mark and all the gospels tell us — funeral rites were transformed. The women who came to the tomb early Sunday morning were focused on mourning. They had gone out as soon as the Sabbath was concluded and purchased the ointments and oils and spices they needed to give Jesus’ dead body a final, funereal, last anointing. But instead of mourning a death, these women were stunned by an empty tomb and instructed by angelic being(s) to spread the good news, the “gospel” of a new life: “he has been raised.” Instead of participating in a ritual funeral meal, these first tomb witnesses were shocked to hear that Jesus had broken through the shell of death and despair. He was now living a resurrected life.
Easter eggs, with their beautiful, brightly colored, decorated shells are MEANT to be broken, peeled, revealed. The constricting shell of sin and death that had held humanity captive for so long lay shattered by the power of Jesus’ resurrection. Every pink, blue, green, and purple smudge under our fingernails is a sign of Christ’s triumph over the prison of death.
In the words of the hymn written by St. John Damascene in the 8th century:
Come, ye faithful, raise the strain
Of triumphant gladness:
God hath brought his Israel
Into joy from sadness.
Tis the Spring of souls today:
Christ has burst his prison . . .
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) may be the most quotatious (without being loquacious) Christian writer in all of history. It is hard to find even one line from Lewis that isn’t quotable. But here is one of the most quotable of the quotables: “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.” What Lewis is “pecking at” here is this: we must be hatched, or we will “go bad.” We must “break out” of the death grip the world would hold us in and fly into the new life that Christ’s resurrection offers to all — however scary and strung with surprises that journey might be.
Jesus broke the mold. The resurrection was a prison break-out. Jesus made the ultimate “prison break” from hell, from the power of sin and death. The first message from the empty tomb to the women witnesses is to “break out” as well. Leave that place of death. Gather the disciples. Go to Galilee. Expect to meet the resurrected Jesus. Follow him.
When given that first directive — here was the first Easter egg — the women at the tomb flinched. Instead of proclaiming, they clammed up. Instead of throwing their eggs against the wall, they tucked them away. Instead of making an omelet, they made tracks. Jesus calls us to a resurrection life, a new life that demands we “break some eggs” so that we may live celebrating the power of life, instead of cowering before the threat of death.
Easter Sunday is a break-out day. A prison-break celebration. I don’t think it’s any accident that some of the greatest literature in the Christian tradition is prison literature: Paul’s letters like Philippians; John’s Revelation on the Alcatraz of the 1st century called Patmos; Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail;” Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison; Karl Barth’s collection of sermons he delivered in prison called Deliverance to the Captives. If you’re a fan of convict literature, then you’re a fan of Cervantes, Voltaire, Thomas More, John Donne, Daniel Defoe, Oscar Wilde, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Diderot, Jack London.
But maybe the greatest prison literature of all time is John Bunyan’s classic Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Here is a letter Bunyan wrote to a friend while in prison:
For though men keep my outward man
Within their bolts and bars,
Yet, by faith of Christ, I can
Mount higher than the stars.
We are in danger of commemorating Easter with too many plastic, reusable, resealable eggs. All these plastic, split-in-two-and-refill eggs are easy and convenient. “Breaking” them open, at their neat seams, doesn’t cost us anything. Nothing is really “broken.”
Jesus’ bride is in a crisis of discipleship because more and more Christians don’t want to truly “break-out” of their eggshells, don’t want to embrace the invitation of a radical resurrection life, don’t want to throw their safe circular eggshell against the wall. But like the virtuous women witnesses in Mark’s gospel, our faith will “go bad” if we do not “go to Galilee” instead of “going home.” We need to “hatch out” from a safe, socially acceptable life and embrace the resurrection life that our Savior offers us this Easter Sunday.
What if instead of enclosing ourselves in safe elliptical eggshells, Christians took on a new shape to offer to the world? In his novel “Winter of Our Discontent,” John Steinbeck suggested that those raised with the reality of the resurrection might turn out “differently,“
“Let’s say when I was a little baby, and all my bones soft and malleable, I was put in a small Episcopal cruciform box and so took my shape. Then, when I broke out of the box, the way a baby chick escapes an egg, is it strange that I had the shape of a cross? Have you ever noticed that chickens are roughly egg-shaped?” (John Steinbeck, Winter of Our Discontent (Viking Press, 1961), p.115.
A resurrection life, once tasted, forever transforms. Look at petrified Peter. Look at sin-seeking Saul. Look at arrogant Augustine. Look at limp-kneed Luther. If you break out of death and break into life, in the shape of the cross, nothing is ever the same. Because of the resurrection, there is a whole new way of living in the world.
The first time your child discovers that Parmesanio Reggiano is better than Velveeta, you are pleased. Until you hit the cash register. When you discovered that lobster tasted far better than chicken nuggets, it was great..until you got the bill.
Developing your taste for a resurrection life, instead of a shell-encased life, is also equally costly.
It will cost you relationships.
It will cost you “business assets.”
It will cost you “free rides.”
It will cost your “free time.”
It will cost you the “easy route.”
It will cost you worrisome nights.
It will cost you money, time, and perhaps even life itself.
But Resurrection life is worth it. Resurrection life has no down side, because there is no fear of destruction or denial or death. Resurrection life means the end of death is not a dead end. Resurrection life offers us a life with the resurrected Lord on this Easter Sunday. Jesus’ death and resurrection has given death its ultimate beating. When Jesus rolled the rock, there was a rolling away of despair, rolling away of delusion, rolling away of sin and guilt and shame.
All we have to do is throw a few eggs against the wall, and show up in Galilee to meet our Savior. Hallelujah. Christ is risen!
COMMENTARY
Although nearly all biblical scholars agree that Mark’s original manuscript concludes at 1:8, and that the so-called “longer ending” is a later addition to this gospel, it is still difficult to deal with the abrupt and apparently incomplete nature of this text. Matthew, Luke, and John add oodles of details to the Easter morning event, with as much traffic back and forth from the tomb as some Monday morning commutes. In contrast, Mark’s presentation is stark and simple. Mark focuses his reader on a very specific moment — the empty tomb is revealed and the pronouncement of its significance is announced: “he is raised.” In other words, Mark’s text is less about the disciples who will make up the community of faith, and more about the faith that will make a disciple-community possible — the faith that Christ is Risen.
Although Mark’s Easter text is a shorter version, it nevertheless provides some traditional, historical details. He begins by carefully connecting the events of Sunday morning to those of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial just before the Sabbath. Mark, who is generally stingy at naming names, reiterates in 15:40, 47, and 16:1 that the same women witnesses who were present at Jesus’ death on the cross and at his burial in the tomb, are the ones who come to the tomb site “when the Sabbath was over.” The women’s return emphasizes the continuity between Jesus’ death, burial, and the empty tomb. The careful observation of the Sabbath by these women — that they depart just before the Sabbath begins, keep the Sabbath, and return only after the Sabbath has concluded (“early on the first day of the week”) — also enables Mark to count three days between Jesus’ death and this Sunday morning discovery. Mark’s added detail that “the sun had risen” makes it clear that the women could see where they were and could easily identify the tomb where they had been in 15:47.
Although the women must have purchased ointments and spices for anointing Jesus after sundown on the Sabbath, it is not until they are on their way to the tomb that it occurs to them that they will need to fill another need in order to fulfill their mission. Having watched Joseph of Arimathea roll the disk-like stone covering over the front of the tomb before they left, the women now belatedly wonder who might be available at this early hour to roll the stone away for them. Since the whole point of sealing tombs was to keep out grave robbers, the process of sliding the stone covering into a groove was much more easily accomplished than getting the smooth, handle-free disk worked free again.
But as the women reach the tomb they could clearly see the stone itself had already been rolled away. Mark does not provide any natural or supernatural details to account for this movement (Matthew 28:2 suggests earthquakes and angels as the work crew), an omission that itself seems to imply divine activity at work. Typical Jewish tombs of that era consisted of an antechamber that led to a low doorway into the burial chamber, where the body would be laid on limestone. Somewhat surprisingly, the women do not seem to hesitate to clamber into the strangely open tomb. They then scramble back into the burial chamber itself. It is only when they reach the inner sanctum of the tomb that the women confront two astonishing realities. First, Jesus’ body is not there. Second, a white-robed figure awaits them with a message.
Although Mark does not definitively declare this presence as an “angel,” his description of this being as a “young man” and his “white robe” and the women’s response to his presence as one of “ekthambeomai” — a combination of alarm and fear, distress and amazement — leave little doubt. Furthermore, it immediately becomes clear that this white robed figure is there to offer a message from the divine, thus embodying the literal meaning of the Greek for “angel” — “messenger of God.”
The first message conveyed by this angelic emissary is one of comfort, urging the women, “Do not be alarmed.” However, the message the angel unfolds could hardly have done anything else but alarm, distress, and amaze the women all over again. The messenger carefully identifies who they have come “looking for” Jesus of Nazareth, the one who was “crucified.”
But what the women are “looking for,” a dead body to anoint, a last ritual to show their respect and mourning for their crucified master, is a wrong-headed notion. The angel denies that their early morning visit to the tomb is some sad closing chapter for a lost life. It is instead the first experience of a new miraculous reality: “He has been raised; he is not here.” The angel’s pronouncement indicates this resurrection was accomplished by God, for Jesus was raised (“egerthe”) through an intentional act by the divine.
That the tomb is truly empty is emphasized by the angel, who encourages the women to gaze upon the place where ”they laid him.” As generations of doubters have asserted, of course, an empty tomb doesn’t “prove” Jesus’ resurrection. As generations of believers assert, the angel’s revelation that Jesus “has been raised” fills the empty tomb with an opportunity for faith. It is that opportunity the angel reveals to the women in the commission he gives in verse 7. The women, who had come expecting to anoint a dead body, are now told to recall and embrace as true the words Jesus had uttered in Mark 14:28 (“But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”)
Jesus has not been “raised” as some ghostly creature to some ethereal plane. Jesus’ body was not in the tomb because he had been resurrected and was on his way to Galilee to meet up with his disciples once again.
These women, who remained loyally at the cross during Jesus’ crucifixion, who had accompanied his broken body for its hasty burial, and who had returned in daylight to offer their respects, are not told to go and find the eleven remaining disciples who fled, scattered, and hid during Jesus’ trial and execution. All of them together are to join up with Jesus in Galilee. Even Peter, whose three denials of Jesus were especially pathetic, is specifically named and included as one who is to make this first faith journey to find the risen Jesus.
What most readers find so unsettling and unsatisfying about Mark’s abrupt ending of his gospel is that instead of carrying out this commission, these three women witnesses, these first recipients of what is truly the “gospel” — “he has been raised” — now let their fear overwhelm them. The might of the religious powers (the Sanhedrin) and the might of the political powers (the soldiers) couldn’t move them from Jesus’ presence. But their fear and wonder of God’s presence and power reduces them to terrified mortals, instead of faith-filled followers. Just as the disciples had fled in fear (“ephygon”) in 14:50, these women, who had stood near Jesus during the worst, now themselves flee before the overwhelming news the angel delivers.