“Easter’s
Mountain”
Matthew
28:1-10, 16-20
Easter Sunday
Today we celebrate the pinnacle event of our faith, an event so
wonderful, so amazing, so incredible, that the actual
moment of the event itself still remains a mystery not intended for human
eyes. Today we celebrate the
resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, when God raised Jesus from the dead,
vindicated his life, ministry and mission,
and defeated death’s power in one brilliant moment of divine glory. The resurrection is the shining moment of
God’s drama of salvation history, the linchpin that holds the past and the
future together. It is the resurrection
that stands as the single greatest testimony to God’s fundamental act of divine
intervention in the world and for the world.
Once again, God has acted in cosmic proportions. Once again, God has done something earth
shattering by taking up the work of creation in such a way that this day for
us, can only truly be spoken of as the eighth day of creation. This is the conviction of the Christian faith
and the confession of all those faithful witnesses who have gone before us,
those faithful witnesses who have passed on to us from generation to generation
that Jesus died on the cross for the forgiveness of sins and three days later was
raised from the dead so that we may have life everlasting.
So,
on this great day, we come together to do more than just celebrate, we come to
together to join our voices to the chorus of voices of the great cloud of
witnesses in every time and place in the proclamation of the good news of the
Gospel, that Jesus Christ is risen, and that he alone is the living Lord of
life. To say Jesus is the living Lord of
life is to make a radical confession about what we believe. The resurrection is the great reminder that
Jesus is more than just a historical figure of a bygone era, more than just a
great person who did great things, more than just a prophet who spoke about
God’s kingdom, but that this Jesus is alive in the here and now, that he truly
is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, our Lord and our
God. This radical confession means that
the resurrection is more than just about a past event,
it is a declaration about the present.
If
all Easter Sunday is for us is a remembrance of a past event, then we will have
missed a much deeper and fuller truth of the good news of Jesus Christ, a much
deeper and fuller truth of what it means to be God’s people of faith, a much
deeper and fuller truth of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the
reminder to all who confess Jesus is the living Lord that the good news of this
event is more than just about Easter Sunday and the discovery of the empty
tomb; it’s about the on-going implications of the living Christ for our lives
of faith.
The
resurrection of Jesus Christ may have been a moment in time, a moment in human
history, but the significance of the resurrection can never be confined to a
single point in history. Like an
earthquake that sends out seismic shock waves from the epicenter, the implications of the resurrection continues to expand out in
all directions. If Easter Sunday is only
for us a day to hear the story again and make sure that we are okay for another
year, then we will have missed the true significance of what this day means for
believers. This day means that believers
are called to live in the new way of being and doing that is kingdom oriented
and God-centered. This day means that
believers are called to go to where the living Christ is at work, to go and
hear his teachings and commandments, and to go and be his witnesses in the
world.
It
doesn’t matter which resurrection story you read, whether it be Matthew, Mark,
Luke, or John, the message is still the same.
It was not the empty tomb that changed the disciples into messengers and
witnesses of the good news of the Gospel, it was their
encounter with the risen and living Christ.
When the two women went to the cemetery in the early morning dawn of
that Sunday morning, they went expecting to see Jesus in the tomb, a tomb that
would forever be a monument to the grief and sadness they felt deep within
them, a monument to the harsh realities and cruel truth of a world in which
they lived, a world that beat humility, mercy, compassion, and righteousness to
death.
The
world in which they lived had taken the Son of God, the One who had been sent
as a humble servant, born in human flesh, to reconcile the world to God’s self,
and rejected him. They rejected him,
mocked him, despised him, and finally conspired to destroy him. But something happens on the path to the
cemetery. Somehow they left one world
and entered another. Without even
knowing it, they had crossed over the threshold between the world in which they
lived and the kingdom of God, they had left the old world behind, where hope is
in constant danger, and might makes right, and peace has little chance, and the
weak all eventually suffer under Pontius Pilate or some other tyrant on a
throne, where people hatch murderous plots, and dead people stay dead, and they
entered the startling and breathtaking new world of resurrection and life.
But it was not the empty tomb that made them realize they
had entered into this startling and breathtaking new world, it was their
encounter with the risen Christ. Only
then did they first realize the significance of what had happened. But he tells them to go tell his brothers to
go to
No, it would not be from Easter’s empty tomb where the
disciples would meet the living Lord, it would be from Easter’s mountain, as a
continual reminder to all who would be Christ’s disciples, that Easter Sunday
cannot be separated from what it means to be Christ’s disciples, from our
on-going ministry and mission in the world, that it cannot be separated from
our continual embodying of Jesus’ commandments and teachings, that it cannot be
separated from our persistent call to work for justice, liberation, and peace,
that it cannot be separated from always being God’s people in fellowship and
relationship with one another. The empty
tomb without the encounter of the living Christ is nothing more than just that
- an empty tomb. It is the encounter
with the living Christ upon Easter’s mountain that would become the beginning
point from which the disciples would embark on their journey of faith in the
world, the beginning point from which Christ’s disciples would continue his
ministry to all nations and all people.
And it is the same for us.
To
experience the risen and living Christ is to be called and sent out as Christ’s loving servants and faithful witnesses. To experience the risen and living Christ is
to be encouraged and challenged to rethink everything we have come to believe
and expect about the God in whom we worship, this world we live in, and the
future in which we are heading. The
resurrection is the great reminder for believers that today
is to be different from yesterday.
To experience the presence of the living Lord means that come Monday morning
we cannot be the same people we were Saturday evening. To experience the presence of the living Lord
means that the resurrection is not to be the end of the story, but a new
beginning to the unfolding story of salvation history.
Maybe
this poem by Annie Johnson Flint says it best,
Some of us stay at the cross,
some of us wait at the tomb,
Quickened and raised with Christ
yet lingering still in the gloom.
Some of us 'bide at the Passover feast
with Pentecost all unknown,
The triumphs of grace in the heavenly place
that our Lord has made His own.
If the Christ who died had stopped at the cross,
His work had been incomplete.
If the Christ who was buried had stayed in the tomb,
He had only known defeat,
But the way of the cross never stops at the cross
and the way of the tomb leads on
To victorious grace in the heavenly place
where the risen Lord has gone.
To encounter the living Christ means that we cannot stay
at the cross anymore than we can wait at the empty tomb, because the living
Lord of life is in neither place. The
living Lord of life continues to lead on to the places where he is needed the
most, to those who most desperately need his grace and love and peace, to those
who are society’s least, lost and left out, to those who have never heard the
good news of his gospel. He continues to
lead on as the living Lord of life and humble servant proclaiming and showing
the