Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 8, 2007

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.

I don’t know about you, but when I think of Easter the image that first comes to my mind is a vision of the risen Christ. He is dressed in radiant garments, and he himself sort of glows. He looks something like the Christ in the window over our front door. He has his hand raised in blessing, and he is saying: “Fear not.” He is beatific, serene, rather other-worldly, as I guess you’d expect of someone who has just gotten up out of his grave. That’s my personal Easter icon. Perhaps your is like that, or perhaps it’s different. Either way, I suspect that your primary Easter image, like mine, is a vision of the risen Christ.

But here’s the thing: In all four Gospels Easter doesn’t begin with a vision of the risen Christ. If he appears at all—which in the original version of the Gospel of Mark he doesn’t—he appears later. The first image the Gospels give us is not the risen Christ but an empty tomb. The first witnesses—all of them women—see an empty grave before they see Jesus risen from it. Our passage this morning from Luke tells it so simply: “They found the stone rolled away, but when they went in they did not find the body.” Luke 24:2-3 NRSV A few verses later Peter too sees not the risen Christ but an empty tomb. And here’s an interesting fact. In the Gospels no one denies that Jesus’ tomb was empty. Some opponents of the Christians deny that Christ rose from the tomb, saying that it was empty because the Christians removed Jesus’ body, but no one denies that the tomb was empty. The empty tomb is the first reality of Easter. The risen Christ comes later.

Now, a vision of Christ risen from the dead would be a powerful, life changing experience. There’s no doubt about that. It would be overwhelming, awesome, which means frightening and inspiring at the same time. Yet even just an empty tomb is a powerful image in its own right, at least if you reject the slander that Jesus’ tomb was empty because the disciples removed Jesus’ body. What could the empty of tomb of Jesus possibly mean? Let’s start with what a tomb means. A tomb means death. It is a lifeless place, a place for bodies from which the life has gone out, leaving them cold and decaying. A tomb represents an ending. It says this person’s life is over. Her journey has come to its end. She is gone from her world, her home, her family. All that she used to do is finished. She will do it no more. A tomb is cold and dark, all the warmth and light of life having departed from the one buried in it. A tomb says this person has no more future, no more hope, no more life.

Jesus was in that place, that place of death, of ending, of finality. The Romans had killed him as a threat to public order, and he was really and truly dead. So his friends put his body in a tomb according to the custom of the time. It was a tomb like any other, and it signified all the things that any other tomb signifies. It was over for him. He was done. Like everyone else buried in a tomb, he had no more future, no more hope, no more life. That’s how it was, and that’s how his friends and family knew it would stay. It had stayed that way for everyone else they had known who had died, and they knew it would stay that way with Jesus too. So on the morning after the Sabbath following the day of his death, the went to his tomb to do for him what custom demanded, to put spices on his body, then leave it to decay as all human bodies decay. A year later they would come and put his bones in a little stone box and put the box on a shelf in the tomb. Perhaps they would scratch his name on the outside of the box, or perhaps not. Either way, they would do for him what they did for all the dead in those days.

Only when they got there, it turned out that they couldn’t do those customary things in Jesus’ tomb because, to their shock, horror, and amazement, his body wasn’t in the tomb. Luke doesn’t tell us much about their reaction other than to say they were “perplexed.” Luke 24:4 John’s story gives us a detail that rings a bit truer about their reaction. In John’s version Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb and sees two angels. Mary says to them: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Then she turns to someone she takes to be the gardener and says: “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” John 20:13-15 NRSV Mary is making the very human assumption that if Jesus’ body is not in the tomb where it had been laid someone must have removed it. Yet we know that it was really empty because Jesus had been raised from the dead, as Mary Magdalene quickly discovers in John’s account when the one she thought to be the gardener turns out to be Jesus himself risen from the grave. This tomb isn’t empty because someone removed Jesus’ body, it is empty because God raised Jesus from the dead.

And so we ask: If a tomb means death and finality, what does Jesus’ empty tomb mean? That answer depends in large part on who we say Jesus was and what we say he was all about. We say that he is Emmanuel, God with us. We say that he was God Incarnate, the Son of God become human. And we say that as the Son of God Incarnate he demonstrated to us God’s will and God’s nature to the fullest extent that we mortals are capable of grasping it. If his life and his death were, as we confess, a full demonstration of God’s relationship with humanity, then his Resurrection, his empty tomb, must also demonstrate something about how God relates to us. What does Jesus’ empty tomb say about how God relates to us? It says: God does not accept death. Our deaths may truly be our deaths to us and our loved ones, but they are not death to God. To us, our tombs may be full, but to God they are empty. God is not going to be stopped by a little thing like death. God isn’t about to let a little thing like death interfere with God’s love for us. Jesus’ empty tomb says: Death may separate us from our loved ones, but it will never separate either us or our loved ones from God. Jesus’ empty tomb shows us that for God tombs simply aren’t tombs. No matter how much they may mean the end to us, they do not mean the end to God. For God, our tombs are empty too.

Now, the Easter story is about a literal tomb and a literal dead body; and it says that death does not separate us from God. That part of the story’s meaning deals with the end of our physical lives and what they mean for our relationship with God. But I think Jesus’ empty tomb has even more meaning than that. We all die a physical death of course, but our lives are filled with other deaths, with little deaths, with metaphorical deaths. We experience so many of them. We experience the end of relationships as the death of something that was. We suffer burn out and depression, and any of us who have been in that tomb can tell you truly that it feels very much like a little death. Our lives head into dead ends, the dead end of addiction, or despair, hopelessness or helplessness. We suffer the death of our faculties and our abilities through age or illness. If we are as fortunate as most of us here have been, our lives are filled with life; but our lives are also filled with little deaths as well.

The empty tomb of Jesus tells us that God does not accept those little deaths any more than God accepts the big death at the end of our lives. We believe that God leads us to new life in a new plane of being after our deaths. We also believe that God works always to lead us out of the little deaths of our lives into newness of life in this lifetime. God is always there to help mend broken relationships, or to lead us to new ones if the old ones can’t be fixed. God is there to lead us out of depression, despair, hopelessness, and helplessness toward newness and wholeness of life. God is there to help us cope with our addictions when we turn our lives over to God and admit that we can’t do it alone. As we lose some of our strength with age God is there to help us along, to be everything we can be, and to assure us that a loss of capacities does not mean a loss of worth. We may accept all these little deaths, but God doesn’t. To us the little tombs of our lives may seem very full, but to God they are completely empty, as empty as Jesus’ tomb was on that miraculous Easter morning in Jerusalem so long ago.

So when you think of Easter, think of the risen Christ to be sure; but think also of the empty tomb. That empty tomb speaks volumes about God and about God’s will for us. It says: God simply does not accept death. To God all our tombs are empty, the one at the end of our lives and the ones during our lives. So when a loved one dies, when your face your own mortality, when you’re feeling one of those little deaths of which life can be so full, remember Jesus’ empty tomb, and know that with God, all of our tombs are empty too. Amen.