St. John’s Lutheran Church
20 April 2025 + Resurrection of Our Lord
Luke 24:1-12
The Rev. Josh Evans
Maybe you remember my Christmas Eve sermon,
which I began by quoting Madeleine L’Engle’s well-known poem,
“The Risk of Birth.”
“This is no time for a child to be born…” she begins.
Four months and three liturgical seasons later,
I’m stuck in the same place, but with an Easter twist:
This is no time for a Savior to be raised,
With the earth betrayed by war & hate…
That was no time for a Savior to be raised,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome…
This is no time for a Savior to be raised,
no time to celebrate… well, much of anything…
least of all the improbability of resurrection.
This year, it feels more appropriate to linger at the Passover table next to Judas,
or on the Mount of Olives with the sleeping disciples,
or in the courtyard of the high priest alongside Peter,
warming himself by the fire,
the echo of the cock’s crow ringing loudly in his ears,
almost as loudly as the words of Jesus predicting that very moment.
This year, I’d rather linger around the cross,
with the women who had followed Jesus all the way from Galilee,
following his body to its final resting place in the tomb,
readying the spices and ointment for a funeral.
This is no time for a Savior to be raised…
no time to celebrate.
This is a time to mourn.
“You know the headlines,”
I said on Christmas Eve:
The world engulfed by ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza…
Our country plagued by deepening political hostilities…
The planet itself crying out under the devastating effects of climate change…
Four months and three liturgical seasons later,
if anything has changed, it only seems to have gotten worse,
more sinister, more fearful, more anxious.
Meanwhile, closer to home,
after six and a half years of parish ministry,
it was bound to happen, and it did:
a Holy Week funeral.
Some of you were there too.
This is no time for a Savior to be raised…
no time to celebrate.
***
Okay, but it’s Easter Sunday.
Enough of that.
“This joyful Eastertide, away with sin and sorrow!”
Except: It’s kind of difficult to tell today’s story
without the ones that came before it.
In the first place, like the good English grammarian that I am,
I can’t help but notice we run into an issue of pronoun-antecedent agreement,
right away in Luke chapter 24, verse 1:
“But on the first day of the week, at early dawn,
they went to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.”
“They” who?
For that, we have to back up to chapter 23, verses 55 and 56:
“The women who had come with him from Galilee followed,
and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid.
Then they returned and prepared spices and ointments.
On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.”
Come with who?
Saw how whose body was laid?
Obviously, we know … but you get the point:
The more we keep reading back into the story,
the more we realize how incomplete this small part is on its own.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to tell today’s story
without the ones that came before.
Sometimes, I wonder what it’s like to come to church on Easter Sunday,
to hear this resurrection gospel,
without having heard the Good Friday passion,
or the Maundy Thursday “new commandment,”
or even the Palm Sunday triumphal entry that started it all.
In seminary, I was taught that the liturgies
spanning from Maundy Thursday through the Easter Vigil—
the Great Three Days—
are really one service in three parts.
Good Friday picks up where Maundy Thursday leaves off,
in a barren, somber sanctuary;
and similarly, the Easter Vigil picks up where Good Friday leaves off,
singing “the triumph of the cross” as the liturgical rubrics put it,
halfway to proclaiming resurrection,
waiting, hoping, expectant.
The point being: We need the bigger picture.
And in fact, dare I say,
that this story today is meaningless without all those other stories before it.
We need the last supper of Maundy Thursday.
We need the betrayal, the denial, and the abandonment.
We need the cross in all its bloodied mess.
We need the seeming finality of the tomb, cold and dark.
We need all of these things
to get us to the place where we can hear,
with terror and wonder,
the startling announcement of the unnamed men in dazzling clothes:
“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen.”
The women had no reason to “look for the living”
when death was all they had come to expect:
This is no time for a Savior to be raised…have you lost your mind?
Just let us have our quiet funeral.
Which makes the resurrection all the more startling,
all the more amazing,
all the more good news:
That in the coldest, darkest, bleakest night:
Resurrection happens.
***
Remember how Madeleine L’Engle’s Christmas poem ends?
Yet Love still takes the risk … of resurrection.
Holy Week is full of risks,
as Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine writes:
“Jesus risks arrest when he enters Jerusalem to public acclaim and so brings himself to the attention of those who see his kingship as a challenge to their own political authority. He turns over tables at the Temple, and thus risks the results of righteous anger. His risks continue as he teaches in the Temple and faces challenges to his proclamation.” [1]
There is risk too for those who follow their risk-taking teacher:
for the disciples who associate themselves with someone
who has made enemies of the religious elite and the Roman State;
for the women who come to the tomb to anoint Jesus’s body,
“seeking to minister to a man put to death by Roman capital punishment.” [2]
Holy Week is full of risks—
and Easter is no different.
Resurrection is risky.
Resurrection means “Jesus is Lord.”
Which might not sound like much to our ears,
but as the late, prolific New Testament scholar Marcus Borg reminds us:
“The phrase [‘Jesus is Lord’] has depths of meaning not always seen in a tradition [like modern Christianity] in which the affirmation has become a commonplace. Jesus is Lord. Rome is not. The domination system [of the empire] is not. The lord of conventional wisdom is not. If Jesus is Lord, then all the would-be lords of our lives are not.” [3]
It’s a risky proclamation,
and quickly you begin to see why the Jesus movement that became the early church
suffered persecution under a power-hungry and self-serving empire:
If Jesus is Lord and he is alive, that’s a threat.
***
On second thought,
maybe this is the perfect time for a Savior to be raised,
a perfect time to take the risk of resurrection.
And: For as important as the stories before are for the story we tell today,
all of it is meaningless without the stories that come after:
In the beginnings and strugglings of the early church,
bearing witness to resurrection despite persecution,
devoting themselves to this teaching and sharing life together
in spite of the risk.
Far from “an idle tale,” the resurrection inaugurated a movement—
from the early church to the present day—
striving, often imperfectly, but almost always sincerely,
for a more loving, more empathetic community,
for a more just, more hopeful world.
“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples…”
If you show up on Easter morning in your extra Sunday best
for the after-worship family photo in front of the altar flowers
(as picturesque as it might be)?
No.
“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,”
Jesus tells his disciples,
just after washing their feet and giving them a new commandment,
“if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35)
By this everyone will know that we are his disciples:
if we have love for one another.
A love that compels us to speak out where love is absent,
to advocate on behalf of the vulnerable, the fearful, and the detained,
on behalf of the immigrant afraid to leave their home
for fear they might not come back from work or school,
or the refugee wondering where home even is,
or the young transgender kid just trying to figure themselves out.
A love that compels us to take seriously the call
of a rabble-rousing, dark-skinned,
first-century Jewish teacher from Palestine
who risked it all, even his life,
to decisively take sides with the poor and oppressed—
as the scope of our story widens even further
to the beginning of it all,
in his hometown synagogue in Nazareth:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)
This love takes the risk of resurrection
and proclaims that Jesus is Lord
and the power-hungry and self-serving empire is not.
This is, in fact, the perfect time for a Savior to be raised,
a perfect time to proclaim,
against all odds, and despite the risk,
in coldest, darkest, bleakest night,
when at early dawn we come with the women to the tomb,
expecting more of the same:
Resurrection is possible.
[1] Amy-Jill Levine, Entering the Passion of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Week (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2018), 15.
[2] Levine, Entering the Passion, 16.
[3] Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (New York: HarperOne, 1999), 136.
