The Resurrection of the Lord: Ryan Ford
This sermon was preached at our Sunday Evening Eucharist Service on Easter Day- April 9, 2023
Lectionary Readings:
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Jesus’ empty tomb is the womb of the Christian faith. But in our gospel reading, Mary and John and Peter don’t come into the tomb alone or all at once. Instead, they come haltingly…and by stages…and together. Our first glimpse of the empty tomb is dim and distant. In the predawn darkness, Mary Magdalene only comes close enough to the grave to discover that the stone has been rolled away from the entrance. Exploring no further, she immediately runs to Simon Peter and John and tells them (with all the certainty of a foregone conclusion) not that Christ is Risen, but that his corpse has been robbed. Without a word between them, and with all deliberate speed, Peter and John depart for the tomb to see for themselves.
No one in this reading walks anywhere: they all run. Not only do they run, they run with abandon — not bothering to pace themselves; not slowing down to keep abreast with each other; rather, they run as children in a wild, shameless footrace. John gets there first. But, whereas Mary looked from a distance, John draws near enough to stoop his head through the opening and look at “the linen burial cloths lying there.” Close as he gets, the scripture makes a point of noting that John does not cross the threshold of the tomb — having sprinted all that way he stops abruptly at the doorway. Simon Peter does not stop when he gets there. On brand as always, he barges headlong right on in. Now from within the very emptiness of the tomb itself, Peter sees what John had already seen and more — not just the burial cloths, but, specifically “the face cloth which had been on Jesus’ head not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself.” Eventually, following Peter’s lead, John walks inside the tomb and sees the same.
Jesus himself makes no actual appearance in the reading. Other than Mary’s initial report, the disciples say nothing to each other or anyone else. The scripture does say John “saw and believed,” but it’s not clear what exactly he believed at this point. Whatever John may have believed, it’s clear that none of these three disciples get it — they do not comprehend the resurrection — they cannot explain what any of the things they see in the empty tomb means. “John saw and believed, [but]” (the reading immediately goes on to add) “as yet they did not understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead.” I don’t know about you, but at first glance I find this a little deflating…or at least a bit underwhelming. At the end of the 40-day-long buildup of Lent…At the end of the assigned gospel reading for this, the first Sunday of Easter — there at Jesus’ empty tomb — here in the womb of Christianity — it seems like faith is still struggling fitfully to be born.
We know, of course, that pretty soon the disciples’ understanding is going to get a lot clearer, and pretty soon their faith is going to become quite a bit more articulate. After Peter and John have returned home, Mary Magdalene will stay behind weeping at the tomb, where, finally, Jesus will appear to her. Thereupon Jesus will send Mary to preach the good news to the rest of the disciples. By the time we get to our other reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Peter will be preaching too. By that time the apostolic community will have eaten several meals with the resurrected Jesus. When they first came to the empty tomb, the disciples did not yet understand the scriptures. But by Acts 10, the believers have learned to read the Bible in a way they didn’t know how to read it before God raised Jesus from the dead. So it is that in Acts 10, Peter is able to tell all the Gentiles gathered in Cornelius’ household confidently that “all the prophets bear witness [to Jesus of Nazareth] that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”
Nonetheless, on closer inspection, our reading from the Acts of the Apostles emphasizes Peter’s incomprehension almost as much as our reading from John does. It begins with Peter saying “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality,” but the immediate context suggests that’s a bit of an overstatement. At best Peter is only just beginning to understand: he’s only just come to the first halting glimpse of God’s missionary passion for the whole world — Gentiles and all. It took a lot of doing on God’s part to get Peter that far and it will take a whole lot more for the church to learn what to say about the inclusion of the Gentiles. Not until five chapters later in Acts will the Jewish Christians start making articulate, scriptural sense of what Peter’s about to see in the verses immediately following the ones we just read — of the gift of faith and of the Holy Spirit poured out suddenly and undeniably in a torrent among the Gentiles — of uncircumcised flesh that has nonetheless passed through the same waters of baptism by which they themselves have been saved.
Taken together these two readings remind us that the resurrection is a triumph of God rather than a triumph of human comprehension. The good news is that God has raised Jesus from the dead — not that we get it. The resurrection is a fact — it is independently real regardless of whether or not we understand or even believe it. At the end of our gospel reading, the disciples do not know what the empty tomb means, but Jesus is alive and on the loose in the world nonetheless.
If both of these stories showcase how unimportant it is for believers to comprehend what God is doing, they also both suggest that what really does matter is for believers to get sufficiently caught up in what God’s doing — caught up enough that they find themselves in the places God wants to take them…seeing what God wants them to see…talking to the people God wants them to talk to.
In frailty and responsively to one another, the disciples are drawn deeper and deeper into the mystery of the empty tomb. There they are confronted with the artifacts of the resurrection. They see that Jesus’ corpse is gone. In silence they gaze upon Jesus’ burial clothes: stained with the blood of his wounds — still fragrant with pound upon pound of myrrh and aloe and burial spice — an ironic memorial to humanity’s futile struggle against death and decay and corruption. Standing there in Jesus’ tomb — the disciples are standing in their own graves and in ours. Seeing Jesus’ burial clothes, they see the same opaque curtain that always eventually falls between the dead and the living. Looking upon the folded facial covering, they gaze upon the same horrid mask behind which every beloved person finally disappears.
They do not know what any of these things mean. But what they do mean is that God has brought an end, once for all, to the mockery of our creature-hood. The empty tomb means God has defeated death. It means that the stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone. It means that Jesus has inaugurated a new and final Passover — by offerings himself as both the spotless lamb and the slaughtered firstborn son. Jesus has carried us through the night of our mortality. God has taken our humanity into the maw of the grave and back out again. The empty tomb means that God became a human being to die a human death. The Son of God became the child of Mary in order to invade the deepest pit of our cursedness and exile — to come into death and hell — and to liberate them of all their captives. The empty tomb means God has overcome our rejection of him — all of our rejection of him — from our original rejection in the garden of Eden to our decisive rejection of him in the crucifixion and every rejection since.
The disciples don’t yet realize any of this. But they are living in the world where all of it has happened. They are at ground zero…looking upon all the artifacts of Jesus’ resurrection. And amazingly, even before they comprehend what’s happened, God has already begun enlisting them in the work of bearing witness. Before Mary knows or can say that Jesus is alive, God is using her to draw her friends into the empty tomb, so that, without knowing it, Mary is helping God draw Peter and John into the luminous darkness of the mystery of faith. Likewise, by the time Peter makes it to Cornelius’ house in Acts 10, he’s known for a good while that Jesus’ message was a message of peace. But he’s only beginning to discover that the peace of Christ means sharing life with the Gentiles.
What God has already accomplished — what God is doing now — is always way out in front of what we currently understand — way beyond we can explain or get our heads around. The good news, though, is that Christ really is risen. We live in a world where God has emptied Jesus’ tomb. In this world, Jesus has given us the gifts of brothers and sisters, spouses and children, friends and neighbors with whom we keep getting caught up in the discovery of the good news. Whether we know what to say or not, God is already sending us — he’s already making us witnesses. Jesus’ resurrection drives us along missionary frontiers we wouldn’t choose for ourselves so that we find ourselves sharing life with people who previously were unwanted, unknown, and off-limits. It does so because this good news is too good to keep it under wraps and sequestered among the people who have already heard. So we find ourselves sent — drawn and driven by the Holy Spirit into people’s living rooms and church services and kids’ birthday parties and dorm rooms…to tables at coffee shops and cafeterias …into company with people we could never have dreamed we’d meet or befriend — stammering and stuttering and sometimes managing to say the things the whole world needs to hear.
Today we celebrate the discovery together that, however frail our faith, however shaky and incomplete our understanding, nonetheless the tomb is empty. Today, by the grace of God, we’re learning to believe that Christ is risen. Amen.
Rev. W. Ryan Ford, our Wesley Director, is an alum of LA Tech and The Wesley. After completing his studies at Duke Divinity School, Ryan came back to his roots here at our ministry on Tech’s campus. Ryan is a prophet, with a passion for The Word of God, bow hunting, trout fishing, and wood working. He and his wife Holly have two children, Elias and Margot.