Inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is a stone enclosure that is supposed to be the tomb of Jesus. Inside this place is a platform made of stone where the body of the Lord supposedly laid, beside which stands an Orthodox priest who smiles and gives you a candle when you enter. There is a place to deposit money if you so desire. The whole church is a curious affair. In one place is an altar that is a memorial to Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified; in another is an Armenian chapel, and numerous other chapels dedicated to various denominations that have arisen in Christianity, all of whom want to stake their claim on this place. I am certainly not surprised at this. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is certainly the most holy of all Christian locations. The Orthodox create a firestorm every Easter at the tomb with light flowing out of it and gigantic processions to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. There have been numerous instances of fights between clergy on Christmas and Easter as the various sects try to use their space to claim their rights in the place that they all consider to be the epitome of holiness.
What almost stunned me about this site when we visited it, is what I saw as the difference between the stone tomb and the description in the Gospels. When the women came to the tomb on that first Easter morning, they found the stone rolled away and angels guarding it, and no Jesus in evidence. “He has risen”, said the angels, “he is not here”. The response of the women and the apostles who came to the tomb was not extreme joy, but terror and what seems to be anger. In John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene asks Jesus, whom she assumes to be the gardener, Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away. You can almost hear the despair in her voice before she sees that she is talking to her Lord. In the account in the Gospel of Mark, the women go to the tomb, meet an angel who tells them that Jesus has risen and is not there, and gives them a message for the disciples to meet him in Galilee, but the women flee from the tomb and say nothing to anyone about it because they are so afraid.
None of them had ever seen a resurrection and neither have we. We gather on this great day to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who on Friday was crucified on the hill outside of Jerusalem and who was laid in the tomb that evening. Like the women, we would also be terrified if we had had their experience and we would have had no idea of what to do about it. The Easter that we celebrate is the one that has emerged from that time, after it became certain to his followers that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead and appeared to his apostles who then went and joyfully told the world.
That is how we got this festive day. We have all confronted death and loss and when it happens, we know grief. Grief is what we experienced from Good Friday through Holy Saturday until this morning. If we are going to come to an understanding of what resurrection means, we need to first experience the grief. It isn’t enough just to look forward to the joy of Easter as a kind of a given -- Easter comes, like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July. There is a particular point to Easter: it is the defeat of death by God as he promised in the 25th chapter of Isaiah:
And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud
that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread
over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.
- Isaiah 25: 6
This has been a passage frrequently chosen at funerals because it is such a wonderful statement of what God has in mind for all of us regarding our mortality in the face of our grief. That is why Easter is such an important day. What we are celebrating is the certainty of our own resurrection and our joyful reunion with all who have gone before us. That is ample reason for chocolate bunnies, Easter baskets, lamb dinners and family gatherings. May God bless our Easter celebration.
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