Something quite inconceivable happened on Easter morn... something no preacher has ever been able fully to explain with evidence and logic, yet something so reliable that believers have entrusted their lives to its truth when faced with the lions of death. It is something that still defies all the ways we have devised to ascertain truth, yet is the truth, given us by God, which alone sets human beings free. Something quite inconceivable happened on Easter morning: He is risen! He is risen indeed!For such a morning as this, when proclamation rather than explanation is the order of the day, you and I are given the witness of many different voices to this inconceivable happening, witnesses which finally blend into a chorus proclaiming, "Hallelujah, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!" even as the earth hushes to hear the soprano strains of faith, on the heels of Handel's hallelujahs, singing, "I know that my Redeemer liveth and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth."
"It was as a young student in Scotland," recalls Czech theologian Jan Lochman, "that I first heard a performance of Handel's oratorio Messiah. What impressed me, certainly, was not simply the beauty of Handel's music, but also the response of the audience. How, I asked myself, was this response to be explained? Was it the music? So moving, almost overpowering, so undeniably impressive. That was certainly part of the answer, but not the whole, I believe.
"The words themselves play an important part here," says Lochman. "The chorus and the solo are both concerned with a single event in the messianic destiny of Jesus--his resurrection. Was it mere chance that precisely here, Handel's music should have reached a peak of majesty...? And as for the audience, is not its obvious emotion due in part, at least, to the fact that even in a largely secularized Western society, it is still not entirely forgotten that precisely here, in the credal 'rose again' beats the very heart of Christianity--and perhaps our own hearts too?"
Without this inconceivable happening, my friends, Christianity would be but a philosophical supposition or an ethical society or an aesthetic experience or an historical aside or a political party. If we have only to do with Jesus in these ways, but excuse ourselves, intellectually and personally, from having to do with him finally...as regards his resurrection from the dead...if, in the words of the apostle Paul, "Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain."
So what to do with Jesus who was raised from the dead and with the Lord God Omnipotent who reigns? What to do with Jesus finally: as the One at the center of history who is, by his resurrection, history's fulfillment?
In the first place, it needs to be said what not to do with him this morning. The resurrection was not a miraculous continuation of the life of the historical Jesus. To be sure, there was a continuity between the risen Lord and the One who had taught them and healed them and helped them. When he broke bread, they recognized him. But what the witnesses tell us, by way of their own amazement and confusion, is that the One who appeared to them, appeared not as they had seen him before. This was no resuscitated corpse: the old had passed away and the radically new had come. Or to put it more actively, in his appearances to them, the radically new "had [by God] been made possible." [Lochman]
That is to say, what has happened in the resurrection, what thus entered human history, is the reality that death finally has no dominion, the truth that sin and separation, suffering and brokenness can never again be the final word spoken over our lives. As one theologian put it, "The Easter message is the proclamation of a victory already won. The war is at an end--even though here and there troops are still shooting because they have not heard anything yet about the capitulation. The game is won, even though the player can still play a few further moves. Actually he is already mated. The clock has run down, though the pendulum still swings a few times this way and that. It is in this interim space that we are living; the old is past, behold it has all become new."
Or to say it another way, the truth about our lives in the light of the resurrection is the fulfillment of the hope within us, spoken by Isaiah in prospect. The God who, for Isaiah, was "about to create new heavens and a new earth" has done so in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The promise heard by Isaiah of a world wherein, 'The wolf and the lamb shall feed together...; but the serpent--its food shall be dust!": that promise is given reality in the resurrection, for the resurrection is God's earnest of evil's defeat and love's triumph.
Though any intelligent person, of an Easter Sunday morning, will tell you that what appears to be so is anything but a new earth...that death remains, and hurt, and destruction. Read the Easter Sunday Inquirer, and tell me of such a resurrection reality in a season when children have borne arms against children and tornadoes turned a town upside-down; when indiscretions have overtaken news of criminal injustice and cancer has invaded the lives of too many whom we love; when the religious of all stripes have voted to exclude the exceptions in God's good creation and there can be no peaceful consensus concerning the holy land on which Jesus walked. What we see still is destruction and hurt, is calamity and death. That is the truth of our days, we say.
But I tell you this, my intelligent friends: the Easter faith is the only faith I know which does business with the reality of death's destruction. For Christian people, death is not some natural next stage we need to accept or a means to some marvelous end. Death, says Paul, is the enemy...the last enemy. Therefore, it is in the face of death and of decay, of sin's brokenness and the persistence of evil, that Christ's resurrection makes possible what is inconceivable to our old eyes. What we know because of the resurrection and would know in no other way...what we inconceivably know...is that these are senseless skirmishes, for the war has been won...these are moves filled with darkness, but without the power to change the outcome of the game...these are days whose significance and meaning, despite the pain and sorrow and crying, have already been secured by God's greater purpose fulfilled. But more, for I do believe, even as we take seriously the news of death and destruction filling the front page, the resurrection already has given our old eyes a glimpse of time's fullness, such that in the interim, we may look back and see hints of what God has made possible, even before we lie to die. Without the resurrection, we would not connect the dots to the line of God's final purpose, but as news of Christ's resurrection has invaded earth's orb, these old Simeon eyes of ours have seen our salvation.
So the resurrection, in the first place, has entered the center of human history, as an inconceivable reality, to reveal what is finally true: proclaiming that death has no dominion, that sin and separation, suffering and brokenness can never again be the final word spoken over our lives, that a new reality has been made possible by the Lord God Omnipotent who reigns.
Now there only remains the question of our response to this reality. For we are that largely secularized Western audience, who has still not entirely forgotten that precisely here, in the credal "rose again" beats the very heart of Christianity--and perhaps our own hearts too? What are we to do with Jesus, and the God who raised him from the dead...finally?
Again, let me begin with what we are not to do. As we explore the consequences of the resurrection for human existence in this interim time, we cannot escape the mystery of it all. The resurrection does not address us with a social program we may enact, as to its ethics and politics. Nor is it a visible experience we may verify or revivify, as to history or aesthetics It is a mystery which surrounds human life like a parentheses ...which has entered human history like an exclamation point...and which gives meaning and purpose to this "time-between."
That said, what are we to do with the news of Jesus' resurrection...how are we to live in response...in this interim space....as the pendulum swings still and the player makes his moves and the skirmishes receive report on the nightly news? How are we to live, but as those who, by grace, says Lochman, practice the resurrection...the scales of rejoicing...the chorus of trust...knowing for sure that our Redeemer liveth, that the Lord God Omnipotent reigns.
What Lochman means by practicing the resurrection is, in part, what theologians meant a few decades ago when they talked about a "proleptic lifestyle." Prolepsis is the treating of the future event as if it had already happened, living every day as if God's reign had begun because it has. Freed from death's power over us in this interim time, freed from mere reflex which would have us tremble at the command of tyrants, cower before the doctor's diagnosis, retreat in the face of evil's power, we must live as if the Kingdom were the only reality in town. So to the world's meanness, we must live as if mercy were the reigning human reality; to the world's violence, we must live as if the only sane response were a negotiated peace; to the world's fatalism, we must live as those for whom the future is teeming with unimaginable possibility.
But we cannot live thus alone. It takes a community. In fact, the community of faith is, herself, a prolepsis: a sign and a foretaste of this new thing God has done. It is not mere chance that we are here, together, rather than walking by ourselves along the banks of the Wissahickon. For just as the disciples held on to one another for dear life that first Easter day, confused and frightened by this inconceivable happening, so too have we gathered on this morn as those who still tremble, day by day, before death's threat...as those who must walk out of these doors with our children, and into a world whose potential for destruction appears so much greater than the new life made possible in Jesus Christ.
But it was into that fearful community the risen Lord first inconceivably came. He broke bread with them and bid them touch his wounds. Then, says Luke, he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, as he would ours if we would let him, making them witnesses to the resurrection. Because of their witness, and the continuing witness of Christ's church, we have not entirely forgotten that precisely here, in the credal "rose again," beats the very heart of Christianity--and our own hearts too.
"Easter?" penned the pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from his prison cell on what was to be his last Easter before his execution by the Nazis. "We're paying more attention to dying than to death. We're more concerned to get over the act of dying than to overcome death. Socrates mastered the art of dying; Christ overcame death as the 'last enemy.' There is a real difference between the two things; the one is within the scope of human possibilities, the other means resurrection. It is not from the art of dying, but from the resurrection of Christ, that a new and purifying wind can blow through our present world....If a few people really believed that and acted on it in their daily lives, a great deal would be changed. To live in the light of the resurrection--this is what Easter means."
He is risen! He is risen indeed! Let us practice this again. He is risen! He is risen indeed! Thanks be to God for this inconceivable happening that beats at the heart of the Christian faith--and our hearts too. Amen.