The One Who Goes First

Scriptures: I Corinthians 15:12-22, Mark 16:1-8

As I was preparing this sermon for today I re-read an article that had appeared a few years ago in The Christian Century that expressed very clearly something I feel every year around this time.  It said:

“Most clergy feel that as preachers they are never at their best on Easter Sunday, and for most of them this is true.  Why this sensation of inadequacy on the day in the church calendar that should draw forth the preacher’s finest power, the day celebrating the indispensable, pivotal event in Christian tradition – God’s raising of the crucified, dead and buried Christ?  We can blame the hectic schedule which usually precedes Easter Sunday, the difficulty of finding some new way to address a much-used theme, the depressing skepticism of the age.  But perhaps the clergyperson, spurning these excuses, should accept the sensation of unusual inadequacy on Easter as an index of fact – a fact about him or her and about Easter.  For however learned that clergyperson may be, this day’s proclamation that God raised God’s dead Son leads the clergyperson to depths and heights, mysteries and glories, where analysis, explanation, and description falter and we either affirm, praise, and give thanks or stand wistfully outside the Easter pageantry.  There are human experiences of such intensity or dimension that they reduce the most articulate person to a groan, a sigh, a gasp.  In Easter we witness no mere human experience but the mighty God engaged in a victorious act over death….. The preacher’s sense of futility about an Easter sermon rises from attempts to add to what has already been perfectly done in the resurrection.  All that is needed is that both preacher and people with glad and grateful hearts accept and proclaim the Risen Christ.”

So runs the article, and it certainly speaks to something which we all feel:  that the joy of this moment is almost incommunicable by words, or, at least, words which try to analyze, philosophize, and rationalize.  During the early centuries of Christianity, Christians when they met one another on this day would greet each other not with an “Hello, how are you?” but rather with “He has risen!”  God’s act on Easter, then, was mingled in folks’ common greeting, and the power of this event was thereby communicated through that simple greeting and through the lives it affected.  Here is where the meaning of Easter takes hold on our human consciousness – not through words from a pulpit.

But here we are and here I am – trying to use these “words from a pulpit” to express the meaning of Easter.  For there is another sense in which analysis accompanies affirmation.  The temptation down through the years has been to sentimentalize too much the day of resurrection – to make of this event a moment of relief, or a fitting climax, or ultimately to make of it just a form of God’s “niceness”.  It is almost as if we could hear two women over tea saying, “Yes, God raised Jesus after God allowed him to die on the cross; wasn’t that nice of God?  One lump or two, dearie?”  Now, admittedly, this is to overly caricature, but the feeling behind it is something we have known:  taking the joy of this moment and giving it a surface rather than an in-depth meaning.  When we say of a strong-arm ruler like, say, Idi Amin or Moammar Kadafi that “he has power over life and death”, this is not usually a cause for rejoicing but rather one for terror.  Yet, this is what God was showing in the resurrection:  God’s literal power over life and death.  So, when we rejoice and affirm the meaning of this event, it is not because a “nice thing” has happened, but it is because God has complete power over our life and our death.  To some it may seem amazing that such a realization is cause for rejoicing.

For those who first experienced Christ’s resurrection this was indeed a cause for terror.  The last verse of Mark’s gospel testifies that the women “went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”  This seems a strange way to end what is basically a very affirmative gospel, yet what better testimony could there be to the all-inclusive power of God which these women felt with its full force?  By the way, I agree with those scholars who say that Mark’s gospel did originally end with this verse eight.  The note in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible says that, “One authority concludes the book with the shorter ending; others include the shorter ending and then continue with verses 9-20.  In most authorities verses 9-20 follow immediately after verse 8, though in some of these authorities the passage is marked as being doubtful.”  The reason for adding these verses may have been an attempt to soften and sentimentalize the starkness of this sense of terror, as well as for later Christians to be able to give testimony to some of the things that happened in the days immediately following the resurrection.  Those who added these verses could not accept the blunt cutting off of the story at the place where the women were afraid.  While it may be true, as some scholars think, that Mark himself had written more which became lost quite early, I prefer to believe that this 16^th chapter of Mark gives testimony by its very bluntness to the impression that this event first made – an impression of terror, and power, and miraculous mystery.

But if this is so – if the realization that God’s power over death as well as over life results at least initially in a fascinated terror – then why is this not the last word?  Why does a sense of intense rejoicing accompany and eventually overtake the terror?  Paul, with his great insight, gets to the root of the reason when he says, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”  The realization of the resurrection turns our despair into hope because we now experience God’s power.  The resurrection was terrifying initially because it was something that could not be corrupted by human intervention.  We have lost the feeling of terror which possessed the women and the disciples, and this is really too bad in a way because it is the terror that makes the hope and the rejoicing all that much more significant.  It is a rejoicing that affirms the majestic mystery of God’s life over death and not just a surface, sentimentalized happiness.

Here’s one more reason for rejoicing to supplant terror:  Christ has gone before us.  This is what Paul is getting at when he speaks of Christ as “the first fruits of those who have died.”  This is also referred to in a less direct way when Mark has the visitor at the tomb say, “he is going ahead of you to Galilee.”  Our Christian hope does not rest on some general theory about resurrection, which some Greek and Hebrew philosophers have put before us; rather, it is based on the fact that Jesus the Christ has experienced God’s power over death.  Paul puts it quite explicitly:  “…if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.”  Christ has gone first in the resurrection, and our affirmation that he has experienced God’s power gives us a realistic basis for our own experiencing of God’s power.

But there is more to it even than this.  When the young man at the tomb tells the women, “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you,” he is affirming on our behalf that Christ continues to go first – he continues to go before us.  This is why we have hope in this life as well as in God’s power over death.

The Christ who went before the disciples into Galilee goes before us into all the Galilees of our lives.  No matter where we go, no matter what tasks we undertake, he is there first.  If we go into slum or mansion, if we go to fight war or to fight poverty, if we go to our neighbor in hatred or in reconciliation, we meet the Christ there with both his chastening and his comforting word, along with the affirmation that he has always been there.  On the streets that we physically walk and on all the symbolic streets of our lives we meet the Christ who has gone before us.  The only way we can outdistance him is to turn our backs, refusing to admit his presence.  Even then, this is not so much an outdistancing as it is a failure of acknowledgement.  The Christ who goes first is there even for our moments of denial.

Is it any wonder, then, that the impact of this particular resurrection was an immediate terror, followed by an intense hope, which crystallized into an incredible rejoicing?  The Jesus whom they had known was not just to have had a short but spectacular teaching ministry, but as the resurrected Christ he was to be going before them always.  It was this affirmation which gave the early Christian community its unity and which reaches across the centuries to give us our hope.  Were they to go into the arena to face the lions?  Christ had gone there before them.  Were they to go into the Roman and Greek marketplaces preaching the gospel?  Christ had gone there before them.  Were they to reach out helping and healing hands to the poor and the sick, the widows and orphans?  Christ had been there to reach out his hands.

And what about us?  Are we to speak out on behalf of human dignity and against oppression?  Christ has been there before us to see indignity and to mourn over our silence.  Are we to give of our riches and our comfort beyond what we deem reasonable?  Christ has gone before us giving all that he is.  Are we to bring his name and his word to those we meet and know?  Christ is there already waiting for you to offer that word.

The one who goes before you into Galilee is the one who has felt the resurrection power of God and exhibited it for all the world to see and know.  Our rejoicing can have no firmer basis than this.  Our alleluias are not shouted to testify to some whimsical “pie in the sky by and by” – which is a sentimentalized resurrection hope – but rather they testify to the Christ who is with us – our present as well as our future hope.  The women heard, “He has been raised; he is not here.”  No, he is not here in the sense that we can entomb him in a grave of our own making, but he is there – there in the streets where we walk, there in the places where we work, there in the homes where we love, there in the needs of the world which cry out to us to come and join the one who goes first.

True, God’s power in the resurrection is not communicated fully by these words.  But it is communicated by our seeking out the resurrected Christ and joining him in the places where he leads us.  To do this means continually realizing anew the terror and the hope which come from accepting the power God has demonstrated to us.  Then, we look for ways in which we can respond to that power with our lives.  To come continually to this realization takes more than words from a pulpit, more than carefully considered theology, more even than all the words that have been said or might yet be said about this event.  Perhaps the most appropriate affirmation we can make is to be silent before God, feel that power about which we have been speaking, acknowledge in the depths of our being our terror and our hope, and then rejoice and sing out our affirmation as we will at the close of the service:

Joyful, joyful, we adore you,
God of glory, God of love;
Hearts unfold like flowers before you,
Opening to the sun above.

But before we get to that final hymn I’d like to do what is becoming an Easter worship tradition, much along the lines of the final narration from W.H. Auden’s “For the Time Being” that we do at Christmas time.  P.W. Turner wrote a short, dramatic play back in the 1950s called “Christ in the Concrete City” which interweaves the characters from the Passion Week with contemporary commentary on them – and in the closing dialogue points us to what it means for Christ to “go before you into Galilee/Your Galilee”.  It begins with how the disciples receive the news as Mary runs to tell them:

Peter!  John!  He’s alive!  He’s alive!  I’ve seen the Lord.

You must be mad!  Where?  When?  What do you mean?  Mary, what are you talking about?

Just now, in the garden.  I saw Jesus.

When you were with Peter and John?  But we were with you in the garden.

It’s this business of the empty tomb coming after the strain of everything else.  She needs a good rest.

Wouldn’t you like to lie down, dear?

We ought to get her away for a holiday before she goes off her head altogether.

Not necessarily.  Perhaps she’s not mad.  Perhaps we’re just stupid.  The tombstone rolled aside.  Those graveclothes so – so – undisturbed.  Things he used to say that we never understood.  Remarks that come back after the event.  Remarks about the rising of the dead.  Mary, tell us what happened.

After you went away I stayed beside the grave.  I was crying because they wouldn’t leave him alone even after they’d killed him.  Then I turned away.  And there was – a man – standing there.  I suppose I thought he was the gardener.  And he asked me why I was crying.  And I asked him to tell me where he had taken the body.  I — I wanted to go and do what I could for him.

And then he said, “Mary”, and I realized who he was.  It was the Lord.  It was the Lord, and I’ve seen him and he isn’t dead any more.  He’s alive, and his hands and his feet bear the wounds from what they did to him.

Yes, that’s it – he said, “Mary”, didn’t he?  And he said it with the old inflection of voice, — and then – she just knew.

Yes, that is how it happened.

And how it happens.

For it happens not as the plausible end
Of a religious story,
But as God’s act
In the hideous situation.
For the Word, which is Christ.
Was made flesh,
And died,
And Christ is risen indeed, and goes before you into Galilee.

Your Galilee,
The Galilee of the modern industrial city
Of the neon lights and the multiplex.
Where you jostle Christ on the pavement
Among the plate-glass windows.

Galilee Street,
The street on which you live,
And where he waits to move in,
Fulfilling his promise to be with us.
Always.
Even to the end of the world

Arise, rejoice!
Thy light is come!
And the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee!

Amen

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
April 4, 2010