A Sermon for Easter
Fr. Troy Beecham
What are we to make of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, and what do we think these Gospel accounts are endeavoring to teach us?
Western Christianity: Protestant, Reformed, and Roman Catholic alike, have slowly turned the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ bodily Resurrection, and the Transformed nature of his resurrected body, into the story of what we are to expect about our life after death. But if this the point of the Resurrection narratives, it is strange because at no point do they mention the future hope of the individual Christian. This is, of course, counter-intuitive to most western Christians, Catholic and Protestant, conservative and liberal. We have 1500 years of writing thousands of hymns and untold numbers of sermons, poems, icons, and liturgies, all focused on ‘winning a bodiless, spiritual life after death’ for ourselves as the defining issue which drives the entirety of the Holy Scriptures. But the Scriptures do not support this narrowed focus, narrowed by our self-obsession.
The resurrection of Jesus is certainly about us, and our future, but it is about more than just us; it has to do with the future of all of creation. Insofar as it is about all those baptized into his death and life, what does the resurrection of Jesus have to say for us, about how are we to live our lives, and what are we to believe and expect about what happens to us at our bodily death?
We are assured that upon our mortal death we will be with the Lord in Paradise, and that is admittedly a little vague, and does not present us with much to go on, hence the many bizarre ideas about what happens to us at death. But the heart of the Christian hope is that we will one day physically share in the bodily resurrection of Jesus in a new creation, when heaven and earth become one conjoined reality, rather than some ghostly existence somewhere “out there”.
Until then, we are presented with an open-ended commission within the present world: ‘Jesus is risen; therefore, you have work ahead of you.’ So, what are the Scriptures endeavoring to teach us? The story, from Genesis to the Revelation, is that God has an intended purpose and goal for his creation, a purpose that cannot be thwarted. And that goal has always been the new creation, heaven and earth made one, and the human family finally freed from sin and death through Jesus Christ. In the time between the cross and the new creation, the time in which we now live, God’s plan is for all people to be fundamentally transformed in this mortal life through the forgiveness of our sins given to us in Jesus Christ, forgiveness from our sinful, broken human and unwavering drive towards self-worship and self-destruction.
Now, our millennia long human plans for creating a new Eden have relied upon violence and war, on slavery and enforcing some human scheme upon others, and getting rid of those who will not share in our schemes. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ tells us that violence, slavery, and war, as legitimate means of shaping the world and guiding human destiny, all died with Jesus on the Cross. Jesus refused the option of violence when he told Peter to put away his sword when the mob and Temple hierarchy came to arrest him. Mounting a violent insurrection in order to liberate Jesus and his followers from the corrupt and brutal injustice of the Empire and their collaborators in the Judean aristocracy and Temple hierarchy would have been a just war — but Jesus refused to engage in any violence, much less a war, even a just war. The reason is that the kingdom of heaven will not come to be through human endeavor…and we hate that.
We desire to be in charge, to rule, and to be obeyed. Jesus chose instead to bear witness to the truth that God is love, and God is fulfilling his purposes for his creation in his own manner and timing, so that all glory and honor shall be given to God. Jesus chose to forgive those who were murdering him, and to die that we might be forgiven for our sins. Jesus took the death of our world, a world hijacked by human desire and framed by war, into his body, and he and that nightmare vision of the world both died together. Jesus was buried and with him was buried the old world devoted to sin and death.
And on the third day Jesus was raised to new life, transformed, resurrected life, the firstborn of the new creation, and a new world came into being, born in love.
Of course, the old world of death still lingers around us, but in the midst of it the world to come is being born.The first person to meet Jesus on that morning was Mary Magdalene. She thought he was the gardener. She wasn’t wrong. Jesus is a gardener — the true gardener, the gardener Adam was meant to be. John’s Gospel is, after all, about the dawning of the New Creation.
Jesus is the firstborn of the new humanity — a redeemed, transformed, resurrected humanity of gardeners turning garbage dumps into gardens, swords into plowshares, and waging peace as the children of God. The resurrection of Jesus is not just a happy ending to the Gospel story; it is the dawn of a new creation.
G. K. Chesterton, that brilliant writer, wrote in the close of part one of his classic works, The Everlasting Man, “On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place, found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways, they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener, God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.”
So what does all this mean for you and for me? On what course and towards what destination is Jesus ever working to set us on our earthly pilgrimage?
It begins with trust, that God is indeed working out his good purposes for our human family and for all creation. If we will but trust in God, we can live without fear, fear of anything, neither death nor life, powers and principalities, nothing in all creation. That’s what the Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus is offering to us, a life so filled with loving trust in our Heavenly Father, that we will courageously begin to live as gardeners in a violent, divided, and broken human world.
Jesus commanded us all as he was ascending to the right hand of the Father, “As you go into all the world…this frightening, war torn, burning, polluted, dangerous world…make disciples of Jesus of all peoples, baptizing them and teaching them to obey all these things which I have commanded you, beginning first in our own back yard in over the fence conversations, at the check-out line, at work, in our towns, cities, and throughout the whole world, and baptize them in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And behold, I will be with you the the end of the ages.”
God is preparing to walk amongst us again in the garden of his new creation, and is calling each and every one of us to be renewed today by the power of the Holy Spirit through receiving Jesus, first by faith and Holy Baptism, and in the most Blessed Sacrament of his Body and Blood, that we, being transformed by grace, may take up our cross, God’s supreme gardening tool, and participate as joyful, fearless, Jesus loving and Jesus proclaiming gardeners in this new creation that was born on a morning like this so long ago.
Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord’s resurrection, may be raised from the death of sin by your life-giving Spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for
ever. Amen.
Amen.
