| March 23, 2008 - Easter Sunday
You are Welcome to Reflect on this Message Easter Sunday – March 23, 2008
When I preach I like to present something fresh and new; something the people haven’t heard before. The hard part about preaching on Easter is everybody knows how the story ends. Christ arose from the grave! Everybody knows that. Whether we believe it or not – that’s something else.
What you may not know, is the first response to the resurrection was not praise, nor paralyzing fear, or unbridled joy. Anybody care to guess? According to John, the 1st thing Jesus did on Easter was to handle the chores. He folded the grave clothes nice and neat. The KJV calls it a “napkin,” but whatever you call it, it seems kind of muted. The calmness of it, I mean. The lack of excitement at being back alive after you’ve been dead for 3 days. If it’d been me? I’d have a ripped the linen wrappings off and left them in a wad over in the corner someplace. And run out into the sunshine screaming at the top of my lungs! Hey everybody, I’m back! But Jesus is non-chalant about a little thing like death. Just take your time, fold the napkins. Leave them there for others to see. Maybe we make more out of death than we should. I mean dying is not the end of the world. At least Jesus didn’t think so. Nor apparently, did John.
The last site we visited in Jerusalem was “the garden tomb,” one of the few places that hasn’t been ruined by somebody building a church over it! I liked it because it’s how I imagine Easter. But it wasn’t all beauty. Set in juxtaposition to a craggy hill with haunting caves that looked like a skull and a tomb nearby that some claim belonged to Joseph of Arimathea. The contrast of a cross near a garden was hard to miss.
The fourth Gospel’s description of the crucifixion is different from the others. They offer graphic depictions of the darkness of brutality, inhumanity, and tragedy of Good Friday. But John saw the glory shining through the gloom...“there was a garden near the place of crucifixion.” Gardens are mentioned frequently in the Bible. The Bible begins in Genesis, in a garden: “the Lord God planted one East of Eden, and there he put the man and the woman.”
Similar to other Mid-Eastern creation stories, the Hebrew writers pictured paradise in a garden. But later it was invaded by a serpent. And the man and woman turned their idyllic utopia into a barren wilderness. The gospel stories tell of another garden that we visited, called Gethsemane, or “winepress,” at the foot of the Mount of Olives. Walking among the age-old trees is a moving experience that seems to portray the sadness and dread that Jesus felt there. He couldn’t get his disciples to “stay awake for one lousy hour.” So while Jesus prayed, they dozed.
Eden is a symbol of defeat, where the 1st Adam lost his birthright. By contrast, Gethsemane is a place of victory because there, the 2nd Adam earned it back. The hard way! Sweat and blood! Under the shadow of the gnarled olives, Jesus won a battle of the spirit, when he submitted his will to God’s: “not my will, but thine be done.” In that spot, 2 wills competed. And Jesus lost. But by the time he was abducted, he’d already won a greater victory.
So the writer of the fourth Gospel’s talking about a 3rd eternal garden, “with a cross nearby.” Signs of defeat and victory. It has a contradictory feel to it: to draw a parallel between the sorriest deed ever committed and the pristine beauty of nature’s graceful garden. But isn’t that true to life as we know it? Who of us is not a mixture of light and darkness; good and bad; right and wrong? As the Bible tells it, even the ugliness of Golgotha had some beauty not far away.
But the garden was there before the cross. Man made the cross but God created the garden. And what grows in a garden makes life out of death. So wherever crosses are planted, God can make a garden out of it. John takes the symbolism further when Mary mistook Jesus for a gardener on Sunday morning. In one sense Jesus is like a gardener, who cultivates our souls. And whenever we’re smart enough to adopt his way of life, lots of beautiful flowers spring up in our lives: roses and tulips of character and grace, exuding the fragrance of love and hope.
John’s description of “the cross and the garden” is a prophecy for the ages. Because life is hard. In everybody’s life, there’s some kind of cross to carry. The world being what it is and us being who we are. Hate, vengeance, and materialism are burdens we bear. All our “isms” leave crosses strewn all over the place. And what would life be if there weren’t some gardens nearby?
Let us note today this tiny ray of light, surrounded by deep darkness, symbolized by “the cross in the garden.” Jesus’ entire life seemed to bounce back and forth between crosses and gardens. After Good Friday he was “wrapped in linen and laid in a tomb.” Just like on Christmas, where he was “wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger.” Jesus was forever bumping into others carrying their crosses. Lazarus died in Bethany and Jesus cried. In Galilee, he was so popular they wanted to draft him as a political messiah. But Jerusalem was so taken up with unrealistic expectations about what the messiah should be that she rejected the true messiah and he “wept ... like a mother hen.”
Praising him on Sunday. Executing him on Friday. Not all good or bad, but some of both. Crucifixion in a garden. Years later, John thought that was noteworthy. And when he told about the one on the cross with real spikes in his hands and thorns on his head and a spear through his side, he knew the blossoms were real too. Who but God would think to make a nasty crucifixion to also be near a place of beauty? As a perpetual reminder that death doesn’t have the last word and life is something God never runs out of.
That’s what the chief business of life is about, is it not? Making something beautiful out of something ugly? The cross came upon Jesus, not because God sent it on him. But because human beings plotted it on him. If Jesus kept living the kind of life he lived, death was the inevitable result sooner or later. It came sooner. And Jesus transformed a cruel instrument of death into a symbol of life. And thus, the garden. That’s why we underline this oft-neglected line in John on Easter: the love of God is able create hope out of the wrecks of life we encounter.
Consider some of the flowers that came from the fragrance of Gethsemane. “Father, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless thy will be done.” Or this word of grace from Calvary, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” A bouquet extended to a dying thief who only wanted to be remembered: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” And to a brokenhearted mamma: “Woman behold your son, son your mother.” God resurrects faith and love because they can’t be destroyed by governments with hammers & nails or religious institutions with petty rules.
When we experience our crosses, like Mary we come to the graveyard downcast, only to find the tomb is empty. She came looking for a dead Jesus, but she left bearing witness to the risen Lord! Easter rolls away the stones that block our ability to hope.
Libby’s daddy was philosophical about death. He said to me once, “You know, death wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t have to stay dead so long!” The finality, of a graveyard -- that’s the rub. But God never lets it last too long for his faithful children -- in this case, 3 days. Do we have it in us to see a garden in our own crucifixion times? I endured a “death, burial, and resurrection” experience last summer, when I had dual hip surgery. I should have known better cause that was mean! They opened me up on Friday. But on Saturday the anesthetic wore off. And I felt like I was in hell. Cause if hell is any worse I want no part of it.
On the 3rd day a nurse came in with a shot of morphine. I said, “I don’t want that. Give me a dose of hope, that I’m gonna get better.” She said, “Give it time, hon I’ve had the surgery!” And that glimpse of somebody who’d endured what I was going thru did it for me. If she could do it, I could too. My what a little encouragement can do! Grief and pain and suffering can blind us to hope. Mary saw a gardener. But transformed pain and redemptive suffering are some of the beautiful flowers in the Easter garden. Major surgery colored for me John’s unique allusion to “the garden near the cross.”
What happens to us is powerful. Some never get over it. But how we respond to what happens to us is far more powerful. And courageous men and women have create gardens in the most unlikely places--like nursing homes, broken homes, unexpected tragedy, depleting illness, hurricanes. You can’t cultivate a garden and ignore your crosses.
But don’t overlook John’s symbolic word for us this Easter. It’s easily missed. I’ve never heard anybody preach on it. It doesn’t measure up to the vaunted “7 last words from the cross.” Listen to it one more time and take it with you when you leave: “In the place where Jesus died, flowers also grow.” It was there that they met the risen Lord. And this can happen today because the tomb is empty. The stone rolled away. Each day becomes an opportunity to transcend our limits, and allow Christ to infuse our lives with purpose.
Everybody knows about the senseless shootings recently taking place in our schools. It confounds the rational mind. Innocent kids dying for nothing. The media asks, “Why would somebody do such a thing?” It’s hard when we’re confronted with an untimely death; when somebody doesn’t know why they’re dying. But there are far more occasions out there of folks who don’t know why they’re living! Still stuck in Good Friday, on the wrong side of Easter. To be on the right side of it is to see death not as an ending, but a beginning, that allows us a chance to have a hopeful outlook on life. The story of Easter is about how God won’t protect us from dying, anymore than he did Jesus. But prefers to trump it by bringing us back to life again.
So early in the morning on the 3rd day, before the sun was up, Jesus is folding his linens, nice and neat. A powerful reminder to us that Christ was never afraid of a little thing like death. He came to make available to us abundant life. And the wonder of it all...is that it can also become everlasting life! Happy Easter!
Easter Prayer 2008:
We pray for those whose lot in life makes doubt easier than faith, unable to believe anyone cares; for the recently bereaved, consumed by overwhelming loss; for the agnostic, once believers in the gospel, now indifferent to it, yet not quite able to forget; even those few, who have everything going their way -- the highly successful, finally making it to the top, only to find they’re happier when they owned less and trusted more.
Through the prism of the resurrection light that streams from Joseph’s garden, illumine our church to be a magnetic place that invites rather than hinders faith: disciplined and informed; generous and compassionate; adventuresome and joyful. God forbid that Easter be wasted on us! Use us where and as you will, until the fever of life is over and our work is done and we rest in Thee. For the knowledge that “neither death nor life, things present or to come, or anything else within the whole of creation can separate us from thy love,” we give Thee our eternal thanks, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
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