Jackie Twedell, "Weeping Mary"
When I saw that Easter Sunday fell on April first, I couldn't resist using "April Fools!" as the title for my sermon. On Easter Sunday, we considered two different accounts of Easter morning, as presented in the Gospels of Mark and John.
Sermon
He is risen! (He is risen, indeed!)
What a great morning this is! Today is the day we remember
the resurrection of our Lord; today is the day that we proclaim the empty tomb!
Thanks be to God! He is risen! He is risen, indeed!
I usually put a lot of time and thought into my sermon
titles, but not today. When I looked at the calendar and saw that Easter Sunday
fell on April Fools’ Day, well, I knew that I wanted to the title of the
message to be April Fools!
I spent a lot of time wondering if I should actually go
through with it. I wondered if I was being too flippant. I wondered if you
folks would think I wasn’t taking the resurrection seriously enough, or maybe
you’d think I was working too hard to get a laugh. Then I checked to see the
next time Easter would fall on April 1st. This happens again in
twenty-two years. I hope I’m still alive then, but I’ll probably be retired.
There’s no guarantee that I’ll be preaching on April 1, 2040, so this is my
shot: April Fools!
Reading through John’s account of the resurrection, April
Fools! may be a fitting title. If I squint my eyes, just a little bit, I can
almost see a gleam in Jesus’ eye when he asks, “Woman, why are you weeping?
Whom are you looking for?” Mary doesn’t recognize the risen Jesus, not at
first. She thinks he’s the gardener. She says, “Sir, if you have carried him
away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
I hope you can see the comedy in this. This is called
dramatic irony. We know how the story turns out, but Mary doesn’t. Jesus has
the punchline when he calls Mary by her name; it’s almost like he’s saying,
“April Fools!” I think there is some humor in this story as it appears in the
Gospel of John.
There is no humor, no laughter in Mark’s account of the
resurrection; there’s only terror and amazement. The women can’t believe what
they have witnessed. They’re not overcome with joy, they’re terrified! They’re
not happy or excited. They’re not merely afraid. They’re terrified.
What do we do with all that terror? How do we reconcile the
two accounts?
My standard response is to get academic and talk about the
history of each Gospel, when each one was composed, and the differences between
the communities in which they were composed. Those are important distinctions
and they go a long way toward giving us an intellectual understanding of the
two stories. But sometimes that approach isn’t what we need.
When we work too hard to explain a Gospel story, we can
fall into a trap. The trap is trying to prove something that is unprovable.
There is no cell phone video of Jesus rising from the tomb. Mary didn’t record
any video of the empty tomb—we don’t even know where the tomb was! Yes, there
is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which sits on the purported location of
Jesus’ tomb, but the original church structure was built some 300 years after
Jesus’ death. It might be the right place, but nobody really knows. In the same
way, nobody really knows if Mark’s account of Easter morning is more accurate
that John’s account.
Let’s face it, the story of the resurrection is hard to
take at face value. Most of us have been raised in the Church, so we’ve
internalized this story. We already believe it. But imagine if you weren’t
raised in the Church. Would you be able to believe the Easter story? I’d
probably get hung up on the different versions of the story in each Gospel. How
can the story of the resurrection possibly be true if the Gospels of Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John don’t agree on the details?
To those people who have been raised outside of the Church,
we must seem like a bunch of April Fools for believing these stories. As for
the people who left the Church, I’m not sure if we look like fools or just
quaint relics of the way things used to be. And you know what? I’m okay with
that. In fact, today, I’m good with being thought a fool. As the Apostle Paul
says:
18 For the message about
the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being
saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,
“I will destroy the
wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
20 Where is the one who is
wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made
foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in
the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided,
through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.
So, yeah, I’m gonna
embrace the foolishness of the cross and the empty tomb. And I could end the
sermon right here. I could give you a nice, short sermon, but—wait for it—April
Fools!
Seriously, though, I can’t end the sermon with the
foolishness of the cross or the empty tomb because that’s not where the story
ends. The story continues beyond Sunday morning and I think we miss that,
sometimes. We get bogged down in debating the story or trying to prove that God
is alive and we forget that the story continues.
In Mark’s version of the story, the angel tells Mary that
Jesus has risen and he’s gone ahead to Galilee, and he also charges Mary with
telling the story—because the story doesn’t end with the resurrection. The
story continues with the ascension, with Jesus the Son being reunited with God
the Father. The story continues with Jesus reconciling us to God the Father,
too!
That’s where we come in. It’s also our job to tell the
story, even at the risk of appearing foolish. To paraphrase the great writer
Jonathan Swift, we can’t reason people out of something they weren’t reasoned
into in the first place. When we leave this sanctuary, we can’t just tell
people about the resurrection and the ascension and the promise of
reconciliation.
No. We have to show them the love and joy and hope that
come from knowing Christ and believing in the resurrection. We have to live
like we believe in the resurrection and we have to show that to the people who
aren’t here in the pews. If we don’t do that, if we keep this story to
ourselves, then the cross is nothing more than foolishness. If we don’t do
that, we’re not just April Fools, we’re fools in all the other months, too. But
I believe in the love and the joy and the hope. I believe in reconciliation and
resurrection, and I’m gonna say that in here, and out there, too! Will you join
me? Thanks be to God. Amen.
Benediction
Now, beloved, as you depart from this place, remember that
we are called to be the Church, the body of Christ in the world today. Go forth
and be instruments of God’s love and peace and reconciliation. Do not return
evil for evil to any person, but know that we are all loved by God, and that we
are called to reflect that love to everyone we meet. Go forth and be the salt
of the earth and the light of the world. Go forth and live the truth of the
resurrection. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, Let all God’s children
say, Amen!
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