Only those who love can understand the resurrection. It is primarily love which makes any sense of this experience. Paul said that the three greatest virtues are faith, hope, and love. While everything else will pass away, love will remain constant. Here now we find a clue to our understanding the resurrection.

But it's more than just understanding it. I understand the principles of basic finance, but I'm not rich. You may understand the principles of good health, but you may eat or drink or smoke too much. Understanding alone is not enough. We need action, too, and experience.

Gabriel Marcel, the well-known French writer and religious thinker, once said, "To love someone is to say, 'You will not die.' " Why? Because love will not tolerate any limits. It won't tolerate the limits imposed by time. Nor will it allow the limts of the grave to stand. To love truly is to love forever.

The resurrection has to do with life and with love. God said to Jesus, "I love you." He was saying "You will not die." We read in the second chapter of Acts that Jesus was not abandoned in death to the grave.

Our problems with this come not so much from mental paralysis as from our inability to love freely and fully. Yet, we do have a powerful analogy. Everyone has stood, or will stand, beside a grave as a body of a loved one is lowered into that cold foreboding clay. It seems for a while so final, so complete. It seems that along with the casket go all of our hopes and dreams. Then we hear someone reading from the New Testament: I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and 13believes in me will never die. Then in some strange unexplainable way, we feel that hope and faith begin once more to flicker within our hearts. And just when we thought that love would never live again, we find it standing there on those words of Christ: I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.

So we begin to inch our way toward understanding the significance of Easter Sunday. Easter is the supreme day of celebration for us. It was a day deemed so important that the first Christians stopped worshiping on the traditional Jewish Sabbath, Saturday, and began worshiping each week on the day which brought Christ to life -- Sunday.

John 20 tells us that Mary Magdalene was encountered by the living Christ near the tomb. So great was her relief at seeing him, so great was her love, that she tried to embrace him. Jesus said, Mary, do not cling to me ... but go to the others and tell them that I am going to my Father and your Father; to my God and your God. Mary had seen him as a figure from the past -- he was Jesus, the man who had taken an interest in her as a person of worth.

All other men wanted only her favors. Tradition tells us that Mary had been a prostitute. But Jesus was different and he responded to her in a way no one had ever done before. And now she wanted him to be that accepting loving man again. But Jesus had to say to her, "Do not hold on to me." That is, "Don't cling to your memory of who I was days and years ago."

The angel at the tomb was right when he said to her, He has risen! He is not here. He is not here, here in the tomb in Palestine in A.D. 30. He is risen. He is our constant contemporary. He stalks the lonely streets and lives at our addresses. He seeks to dwell in Washington and New York, in Moscow and Mexico City. Christ wants to reign everywhere.

Luke's version of Easter had two men walking down the road to Emmaus. Two lonely disillusioned men. One said, We had hoped that Jesus would be the one who would redeem Israel. The implication was that Jesus wasn't. Two lonely men, 14 trudging down the road. Two lonely men, then, suddenly there were three men; two trudging down the road after understanding, one trudging down the road after broken hearts.

You see, only one who loves understands the resurrection.

But you still want to understand the resurrection. You want to know what happened on that first Easter. Theories abound. Let me suggest a few.

1. Jesus fainted on the cross. The cool, damp atmosphere of the tomb revived him, so he simply escaped.

2. The disciples broke in and stole the body to prove that Jesus was the Messiah.

3. The Jewish leaders had the body removed from the tomb to show everyone that Christians were crazy and therefore not to be trusted.

4. The whole thing was just mass hallucination which was passed on by word of mouth and recorded in what became the New Testament.

It is easy to punch holes in each of these theories. What is not so easy to realize is that Easter Sunday, for whatever else it may be, is a strong, clear word from God saying to us, "I LOVE YOU!"

The cross was a slap in God's face by humanity. It was the utter rejection of him by those who thought they knew more than he. But the resurrection was God turning the other cheek. It was his way of saying, "I don't care what you do to me. I still love you absolutely." Love will not tolerate the limits imposed upon it by a scourge and a crown of thorns. Love will not tolerate the limts of a cold, dark tomb. God loves all peoples even when people might try to ignore him. Good Friday and Easter Sunday show us these facts.

So now we see it. Only those who love can understand the resurrection. Only those who have given of themselves can fully appreciate Easter Sunday. Those of us who love can put our faith in a God who loves. Eugene O'Neill has a play called Lazarus Laughed. After Lazarus was restored to life, one of the Roman magistrates was extremely shake up. "But you are dead," he tells Lazarus. "No," replies Lazarus. "I am not dead. Death is dead." 15

Now Christ has risen. Now death is defeated. Now we can truly celebrate.

The tomb is empty. But an empty tomb is no more the resurrection than the shell of a cocoon is a butterfly. It isn't a proof so much as it is a sign, pointing forward to a living contemporary of ours, a friend who stands close by and whispers, "No matter what you do, I love you." 16"