“Not Here”
Easter Sunday
Luke 24:1-11
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We gather this morning to celebrate this central proclamation of our faith – Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! And yet isn’t it odd that not one of us knows what actually happened that resurrection morning? This is the defining story. Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised. The Gospels tell us all about his crucifixion. They show us his burial. But his resurrection? Nothing. God only knows what happened in the tomb. The Gospels have no words for it. From Friday afternoon until Sunday morning, what we get is one long silence. Hope has been silenced. Jesus has been silenced. God has gone silent.
And then early Sunday morning the silence is broken. Not by God, Jesus, or angels, but by the sound of footsteps, women hastening to the tomb, on their way to tend to his body. Only when they get there, what they find is a huge yawning emptiness. The stone has been rolled away. The mouth of the tomb gapes open. They go in, and – nothing. His body is gone.
Instead of scenes of a resurrection, what we get is an absence. There is emptiness where a body was supposed to be. Of course this is no surprise to us, because we know how the story goes, but for the women this is a devastation. Suddenly two men in dazzling clothes appear beside them. The women are terrified, and bow down, faces in the dirt of the tomb, silent in their terror and their awe.
“Why do you look for the living among the dead?” the shimmering strangers ask. And who of us hasn’t done the same? We, too, tend the corpses of dead dreams and buried hopes. We cling to old attitudes and deadly habits. We clutch at people we love, refusing to let them grow and change. We hang on to relationships that are killing us. Too often we stay with what we’re familiar with, even when we know it’s dead, because it’s safer that way. It doesn’t demand as much. We can nurture our nostalgia rather than be challenged to change. We can mourn our losses rather than muster the courage to hope. It’s easier, and safer, to look backwards at what has been than to look forwards at what could be.
“Why do you look for the living among the dead?” the angels ask. And then the seven words[i] that change the world: “He is not here, he has risen.”
Not here. On Friday, Jesus cried out of his sense of abandonment, his horror at an absent God. Absence has been flipped now. On Friday, it was the worst news imaginable. On Sunday, absence becomes the best news we know. Absence then meant abandonment, absence now means a new and more powerful kind of presence than we could previously know. He is not here. He has been raised. He is out in the world, he has been set the loose.
Isn’t it interesting that at the center of our faith is an emptiness? It is like there is this hole, right at the core of what we say we believe. An empty tomb. We can’t explain this central story, not rationally. We have no details of how it came to be. We can’t prove anything about it. Some of the time, we find it difficult to believe ourselves. An empty tomb is a hard place to hang our faith.
But the empty tomb isn’t really the point. It is not meant to be the object of our faith. It is a portal. An opening. The doorway into a mystery. It is an invitation towards an encounter with the risen Christ. An invitation into a new world and a new life. The women don’t stay in the tomb, just like Jesus didn’t. Just like we mustn’t. The women move, like he did, out of the grave.
They get up from the ground, and step through the door of that tomb into morning light. They run from the grave, rushing to their friends to announce, “Christ is risen!” And on that first morning no one answers back, “He is risen indeed! Halleluia!” Nope. The women say, “He is risen!” And the men say, “Nonsense.”
Our translations euphemize it for us. The version we read a few moments ago says, “These words seemed to them an idle tale.” The word there, that we translate as “idle tale” or “nonsense” is leros. It’s the only time in Scripture that word is used. It’s medical language, for the ravings of a crazy person. It’s where we get our word delirious.
Once upon a time, Mary Magdalene really did rant and rave. She was out of her mind. She had seven demons, until she met Jesus and he cured her. Now she is speaking the sanest word she has ever said, and the men treat it as the delirious ravings of a woman gone mad. She is crazy from grief, they must think. Delirious from the pain of loss. Or maybe Jesus’ healing of her has worn off now that he’s dead.
There are other ways the word leros has been used. Leros can be what a farmer might use to fertilize his soil. Manure. The women come breathless, announcing to their friends, “He is risen!” And the men respond with, “That’s a load of … nonsense.”
Some have assumed that the men didn’t believe them because they were women. The first century Jewish historian Josephus famously wrote, “From women let not evidence be accepted because of the levity and temerity of their sex.” Is that what’s going on here? Men disbelieving the witness of women who cannot be trusted simply because they are women?
Or is it just that these words are impossible to believe, no matter who says them? Don’t you find the report a bit difficult to accept, too? Our central proclamation is unbelievable. It is so far outside the realm of normal, of reasonable, of rational. It sounds like crazy talk! It sounds like nonsense! And it’s okay to say that. The disciples sure did.
Here we are on Easter morning, the highest holy day of the year. We feel a lot of pressure to feel extra spiritual, extra joyful, extra faithful. And maybe instead it all sounds like a bunch of nonsense to you. Those words the angels said, “Not here!” maybe they feel truer this morning than you’d like – He’s not here. He seems to be nowhere to you. Maybe you don’t feel all kinds of hope and faith. Maybe instead you feel disturbed, or suspicious, or confused, or dismissive. Maybe you just feel empty. You are in good company. Those first Christians felt all the same things.
And they did not feel otherwise until they had their own encounters with the risen Christ. The story of the empty tomb alone is not enough. Not even on that first day. And not now, either. What those followers needed was their own encounter with the risen Christ. And that’s what they got, soon enough. Luke will go on to tell of how Jesus started showing up all over the place – he talked with them, he broke bread with them, he ate fish with them, he showed them his wounds. It was not his absence from the tomb that convinced them, it was his new presence in their lives that did it. It was the way he kept showing up, the way he kept meeting them where they were, the way he became present when they were with each other, especially when they gathered around a table, or moved into the world to serve in his name.
Faith comes from having our own experience with him. And we can’t manufacture that. We can only open ourselves to it. We can’t make ourselves feel what we think we’re supposed to feel. We can only let him in. God’s power rolled the stone away from the tomb; it can roll away whatever blocks us from faith, too. What stones in your life do you need rolled away? What is dead that you need to mourn and then move on from? In what ways do you need to take a step forward into the dawning possibility of new light and new life?
When the disciples finally did get their encounters with him, it did more than merely convince them he had been raised. It raised them, too, and set them free. Free from their old fears. Free from guilt and shame. Free from the power of sin and death. Free now to live as Jesus had lived – loving enemies, offering healing to the hopeless, challenging the structures of power, seizing victory over all forms of death and deadliness. From then on, they would keep finding themselves filled with his resurrection power – the power of love to overcome hatred, the power of peace to subvert violence, the power of compassion to break down alienation, the power of grace to trump all.
We are meant to be raised like that, too. Why are you looking for the living among the dead? The graveyard of our old longings and dead dreams and deadly habits and dull-minded doubts and too little living – that graveyard is empty now. He is not here; he has been raised. And he will meet us where we are, and he will raise us too.
He is risen!
He is risen indeed!
Alleluia.
Amen.
[i] Five in Greek.