Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 16, 2006

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.

They’d won, or so they thought. This guy Jesus of Nazareth was a troublemaker. He was a threat to both the Jewish Temple authorities and to the Roman occupiers. He was stirring up the people. He was telling them that God loves all of them. He was telling them that the poor, the rabble, the nobodies were God’s special favorites. He was telling them that the ones the Temple authorities said were unclean and unfit to come into the presence of God weren’t unclean at all and that God loves them more than the ones they called righteous. He was a blasphemer. He claimed the power to forgive sin, and everyone knows that only God can forgive sin. He was seditious. He told the people that their allegiance was to God and not to Caesar. He told them to resist Roman oppression; but he told them to do it in a way the Romans couldn’t do anything about, with creative nonviolence and not with a knife in the ribs or an armed revolt. This guy had to go. He threatened to undermine both the political and the religious domination systems of his time, and domination systems, empires, don’t take well to threats to their domination.

So they did what empires always do when faced with a threat to their domination. They resorted to violence. The Gospels say that the Jewish Temple authorities turned Jesus over to the Romans to be crucified. As an historical matter maybe they did, or maybe the Romans didn’t wait for them. After all, they hardly needed the permission of the Jewish religious leaders to execute a political troublemaker. They did it all the time. They crucified them by the thousands all over the Empire. So it was no problem for them to deal with this presumptuous bumpkin from some two bit town in some backwater province up north somewhere. Arrest him. Crucify him. Nothing to it. Problem solved. Or so they thought.

And they did. They nailed him to a cross. Two beams of wood lashed together. A very simple device. Force him down onto it. Drive spikes through his wrists and feet. Hoist the thing up in the air and plant it. Job done. Sure it was brutal. Sure it was torture. The Romans didn’t care. Empire never does. True, the condemned man didn’t die right away. Sometimes it took days, but that just made the spectacle more gruesome and therefore, as they thought, more effective as a deterrent to others who would challenge the power of the divine Caesar. The Romans did their job. The soldiers did their duty. They dealt with one more upstart who didn’t know his place. He died on that cross just like they all did. Mission accomplished. End of story. Or so they thought.

The problem--a problem from the Romans’ perspective of course--was that they didn’t know who they were dealing with. They didn’t know who Jesus really was. According to Mark one Roman centurion did. As Jesus died this centurion said: "Truly this man was God’s Son." Mark 16:39 But most of them didn’t. They didn’t know that they were dealing with the Word of God made flesh. They didn’t recognize his message for what it was--and is. It was the Word of God too. Jesus was the Word of God and he preached the Word of God, and God wasn’t about to let God’s Word die. The Romans could kill the man Jesus, but they couldn’t kill the Word of God. Not in the end. Not ultimately.

God had a big surprise in store for those smug Romans who thought they had killed off just one more threat to their power. The surprise came on the third day, by the ancient way of counting. The accounts in the four Gospels of the New Testament vary some, but they all agree that on the Sunday after the Friday on which Jesus was crucified some women went to his tomb. When they got there they found that the stone that had sealed it had been rolled away. The tomb was empty. Jesus’ body wasn’t there. They surely thought at first that grave robbers had broken in and stolen it, but it quickly became clear that that wasn’t what had happened. In John’s account that we just heard the first clue was Jesus’ grave clothes. They were probably the only thing of monetary value in that tomb, and they were still there. Very soon, in all four Gospels, the women learn, either from an angel as in Mark or from the risen Christ himself as in the other three, that the impossible had happened. Jesus had risen from the dead! It couldn’t be! There was no way! And that of course is true. It couldn’t be. There was no way. Only problem is, it was. God found a way. Jesus Christ rose from the dead. The grave couldn’t hold him. Death couldn’t stop him. Not in the end. Not ultimately. Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Halleluiah! Praise be to God!

Way back then, nearly two thousand years ago, the Word of God would not die. Try as they might, the powers of the world could not kill Him or silence his message. That’s an amazing thing, the most amazing thing ever; but here’s another one. Like all good Bible stories--and this is the best Bible story of them all--the story of Jesus’ unjust death at the hands of empire and his glorious Resurrection from the grave on the third day is not just a story about something that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. The story of the world’s efforts to kill the Word of God and their ultimate inability to do it isn’t just about the ancient Roman world. It is about our world too, and about every world that has ever existed.

You see, the powers of the world always try to kill the World of God. The powers of the world, be they secular or religious, cannot tolerate the true Gospel of Jesus Christ, the true Word of God. Here’s why. The powers of the world rule basically in two ways. First, they divide the people against themselves. They create and get the people to accept systems of us vs. them, the righteous vs. the unclean, the good vs. the evil, the ins vs. the outs. They create nations and sell the people on the superiority of their nation over all others. They legitimize prejudice against other nations, other religions, other sexual orientations. They tell us the scope of our concern for others is limited to those like us. They pit us against one another by creating a culture in which our only value is as consumers and greed is called good. Divide and conquer is ever the way of empire. And they rule by force. Empires enforce their will and react to threats with violence. They teach us that killing is justified to further the ends of the nation. They convince us that killing in the name of the nation isn’t wrong. Violence is the way of the world’s powers. They can’t exist without it.

And that’s why the powers of the world always try to kill the Word of God. You see, the Word of God that Jesus was and that Jesus taught subjects the world’s divisions between people and all the world’s violent ways to the judgment of God. The Word of God transcends all of our artificial divisions among people and calls us to do the same. The risen Christ calls us to reject the artificial distinctions between righteous and unrighteous, citizen and alien, men and women, gay and straight, Christian and non-Christian, and all the other divisions the world creates among us.

And the Word of God that Jesus was and that Jesus taught condemns the violence that so characterizes the ways of the world. Jesus said love you enemies; and to quote a bumper sticker that the Church of the Brethren (one of the historic peace churches) puts out, when Jesus said love your enemies, I think he meant don’t kill them. Jesus taught that violence is not God’s way. It is never God’s way. Jesus wasn’t passive in the face of evil. He spoke truth to power and challenged injustice wherever he saw it, but he was always nonviolent. God’s way is always nonviolent.

And the world can’t stand it. So the world tries to kill the Word of God. It kills the messengers of justice and peace. It killed Jesus. It killed Gandhi, and it killed King and so many others. It kills the Word of God in more subtle ways too. It blunts and distorts the Word. It perverts the Word into justification for power, violence, and oppression. In the past it perverted the Word into justification for absolute monarchy and slavery. Today it perverts the Word into justification for the oppression of women and sexual minorities. It blunts the Word of nonviolence into "just war" theory, or it totally perverts it into justification for any war the nation happens to be fighting at the moment. The world, directly or indirectly, always tries to kill the Word of God.

But here’s the great good news of Easter. The world can’t do it. The Word of God will not die! The Word of God that Jesus was rose from the grave that first Easter morning so long ago. The Romans couldn’t kill Him. Not ultimately. Not in the end. Death couldn’t hold him. The tomb could not contain him. The Word of God could not stay dead. The Word of God can never stay dead. The world always tries to kill it, but today it is still alive. It is a minority voice in the world, but then it always was. The Word is alive, and God is still speaking.

That is true today, and we know that it will always be true. It will always be true because Jesus rose again on Easter day. Jesus’ Resurrection is God’s sign and seal on his life and on his teaching. It is God’s promise to us that the Word of God will never, ever die. That, my friends, is the best news there ever was or ever could be--for you, for me, for the whole world. Easter is our assurance that God loves all people. Easter is God’s promise that God’s grace is for all people. Easter is God’s guarantee that God will never desert us. Easter is God’s warrant that in Christ Jesus we are saved. Easter is God’s revelation that in Christ Jesus the whole world is saved, and that God’s Word will never, ever die.. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Halleluiah! Amen.