Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 27, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! That is the Easter proclamation. It is the joyous good news that we celebrate today. Easter is the happiest day of the Christian year. That God raised Jesus from the dead is the core of the Christian faith. Without that we’d have nothing else, for as Paul says, if Christ has not been raised, our faith is in vain. 1 Corinthians 15:13 That Christ is risen is exceedingly good news. Because God raised Jesus from the grave, we know that death does not have the last word. Because God raised Jesus from the dead we know that nothing separates us from God except our own stubbornness in believing that anything does. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! That is the best news ever, news that brings new life out of death not just for Jesus but for us and for all creation. Today is a day for celebration, a day for singing and dancing and laughing and crying our loud for joy! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

So why does Matthew’s account of the Resurrection and his story of the first eye witnesses to the Resurrection-Mary Magdalene and another woman Matthew identified only as "the other Mary"-talk so much about fear? Those ten short verses use the word joy only once, but they use the words fear or afraid four times. Matthew clearly wants us to know that the principal emotion the first witnesses to the Resurrection felt wasn’t so much joy as it was fear. The first reference to fear says specifically that the guards Matthew tells us had been posted by the tomb were afraid, but it pretty clearly refers to the two women as well. The very next line has the angel of the Lord who had appeared saying not to the guards but to the women: "Do not be afraid." Clearly the angel thought the women were afraid, and who are we to argue with an angel of the Lord? The women were afraid.

Then the angel told them that Jesus had been raised and the them-the Greek word for "to send" is apostelein, the root of our word apostle-these two women were the first Apostles-to tell the other disciples the great good news. And what was their reaction? Fear. Oh to be sure their fear, we are told, was now combined with "great joy,"-more about that later-but the emotion Matthew mentions first isn’t joy but fear. So, still afraid but also excited they start to run off to tell the others the great good news.

Whereupon they ran smack into the risen Lord himself. He says: "Greetings!" That’s pretty casual, don’t you think? I mean, it sounds like the women just ran into a friend who says "Hi." Problem is, this friend had been dead and buried, only now he wasn’t. And what was the women’s reaction? Fear. Matthew again doesn’t tell us directly that they were afraid, but in the story the first thing Jesus says to them after his casual "Greetings" is: "Do not be afraid." Clearly, the risen Christ thought the women were afraid, and who are we to argue with the risen Christ? The women were afraid.

What’s going on here? Why is the women’s first reaction to the Resurrection fear? The explanation has to start, surely, with the fact that what they were experiencing was so extraordinary, so beyond the realm of their life experience. It was so unexpected, so unknown; and of course all of us are at least a little bit afraid of the unknown. I mean, the unknown is so, well, unknown. It could be anything. Anything at all could happen. Anything at all could come out of it. Remember those old European maps you may have seen drawn before the Europeans had a clear picture of the rest of the world? When the map makers got to the part of the world they didn’t know anything about they would draw a fearsome sea serpent and write: "Here Be Dragons." Dragons lurk in the unknown, and that is surely a big part of why the women were afraid.

And yet I think that there’s more to it than that, and I think maybe Matthew is trying to convey more than that with his emphasis on fear in his Resurrection narrative. The "more" that I think there is to this fear has to do with the fact that we aren’t dealing here with just another run of the mill unknown. We aren’t dealing here with darkness hiding things from us, or a forest so thick we can’t see where the grizzly bears are. Here we’re dealing with something of a different order altogether. We’re dealing with resurrection. Specifically we’re dealing with the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. We’re dealing with an unexpected, unheard of, impossible yet real breaking in of God into our world. And that impossible yet real breaking in of God into our world changes everything. After the Resurrection, nothing can ever be the same again. Everything is made new. In other words, everything becomes unknown. We have entered a new and unknown world. Here Be Dragons.

A commentator names Thomas Long has written beautifully and powerfully about the new the new world of the Resurrection. Speaking about the two Marys of Matthew’s Gospel account, he wrote:

Without even knowing that they had crossed the border, they left the old world, where hope is in constant danger, and might makes right, and peace has little chance, and the rich get richer, and the weak all eventually suffer under some Pontius Pilate or other, and people hatch murderous plots, and dead people stay dead, and they entered the startling and breathtaking world of resurrection and life. (Westminster Bible Companion, Westminster John Know Press, p. 322, quoted from www.ucc.org.)

The resurrection world was, and is, new, unexplored territory; and yet it isn’t quite true that the two Marys knew-or that we know-nothing at all about it. If we stop to think about it, we can know at least some things about that world; and if anything those things that we can know about it only make it even scarier, at least at first. Because you see, we aren’t talking about just any old resurrection here. The One whom God raised from the dead was precisely Jesus of Nazareth, and Jesus of Nazareth isn’t a blank slate on which we can write anything we want. Jesus preached a Gospel. Jesus preached a Gospel of God’s unconditional love for all people. Jesus lived a Gospel of respecting the value and dignity of every person and especially of the poor, the disabled, the ill, the outcast, the ones society and religion say are unworthy and unlovable. And more than that: Jesus preached and lived and died for God’s Gospel of peace and nonviolence, of creative, assertive, but always nonviolent resistance to evil. That is all really scary stuff. It can get you killed. It was, after all, what God Jesus killed.

And another thing that we can and do know about God’s resurrection world that makes it even scarier is that it demands of us that we live that way too. Believing in Jesus is important, but in three of the four Gospels-all of them except John-Jesus doesn’t say believe in me, he says follow me. We really don’t get to just sit back and say Alleluia, I believe! Our Christian faith makes demands on us, demands on how we think and how we live; and it demands that we think and live in ways that can put us at odds with the majority voices in our society and even in the church. If you’ve been reading the Everett Herald this last week ( Herald Letters, March 9, Local News, March 21, Letters, March 23, Letters, March 28 ) you know that on at least one issue this church has done that. That’s scary. It can even be dangerous. It is living in the place of dragons; but it is what the risen Christ calls us to do. It is what living in his "startling and breathtaking world of resurrection and life," as Long calls it, is all about.

Resurrection calls us to a scary life of discipleship; but, fortunately, that’s not all it does. There’s one more thing we can know about it. Christ calls us to the place of dragons, but he does not call us to go there alone. In Matthew’s account of the Resurrection, the risen Christ tells the two Marys to tell the other disciples to go to Galilee and that he will meet them there. We can take that as a model of the promise the risen Christ makes to us and to all his disciples. He sends us to the place of dragons, and he promises to meet us there. Jesus lived his life in solidarity with his disciples and with ordinary people like us. The power of Empire killed him because his solidarity with the people was a threat to its power. God raised him from the death Empire inflicted on him. God thereby revealed to us that Jesus was right. God in Christ, now the risen Christ, is always in solidarity with us when we try to live as Christ’s disciples. Here Be Dragons, but more importantly, here be Jesus. Because of the Resurrection we know that when we go, God goes with us. We can slay the dragons because we do not face them alone. The risen Christ is with us every step of the way.

And that’s why today is a day of joy despite the fear. Matthew got it just right when he said that the two Marys went when the angel sent them "with fear and great joy." That’s the life of Christian discipleship-fear of the place of dragons to which Jesus sends us and great joy too. Joy that God raised Jesus from the dead. Joy that the risen Christ goes with us, in solidarity with us, wherever we go.

Christ is risen. He is risen indeed! Thanks be to God! Amen.