The Day of Resurrection: Easter Sunday 2018

The Day of Resurrection: Easter Sunday April 1, 2018 The other day, I was driving my 13 year old daughter and her two church friends after they had spent the night together, and my daughter said to one of her friends, “Tell my mom your joke!” The friend eagerly responded, “Since Easter is on April Fool’s Day this year, what if Jesus was like “Psyche! I’m not coming out this year!?” Not too long after that, I ran across an article by a Presbyterian minister named Miles Townes titled “When Easter Sunday Falls on April Fools’ Day.” (Apparently this is a very rare phenomenon; the last time this happened was in 1956.) The writer of the article talks about how often we miss the good jokes of the bible and how we misinterpret some of what Jesus is saying as witty come-backs or clever sayings, when really, he is making a good joke. Jesus’ jokes are not frivolous or false; the best jokes aren’t. Instead, he is offering truth in a humorous way, showing the gap between what is and what could be. Townes writes, “Explaining jokes ruins them, but let me point out that jokes have structure, usually a premise and a conclusion held in tension. A good joke in the functional sense depends on our ability to see the difference between the world as it is and as it could be. A good joke in the moral sense, then, depends on our ability to see the difference between is and should. A good joke can light up the dark between the two, can help us see one from the other. Not everything that is funny is a joke, and not every funny joke is a good joke, but a good joke helps us see the distance between who we are and who we should be. Who but Jesus ever saw so clearly the distance between is and should? Who else had the imagination to grasp fully the gulf between heaven and earth?” i. The resurrection is the ultimate joke, and if there is any one of the four gospels that highlights this for us, it is Mark’s gospel that we read today. I mean, just listen to it. The three women are headed to Jesus’s tomb to anoint his body, and they are really worried about how they are going to roll back the heavy stone. You can just imagine them spending all this time on the walk there fretting about it, and trying to come up with solutions for the problem. But when they get there, the stone has already been rolled back. And so they go into the tomb where they see this random “young man” dressed in a white robe and sitting on the right side, and this alarms them. But he says to them, “Do not be alarmed!” And he proceeds to tell them the good news of Jesus’s resurrection: “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” And then the gospel reading for Easter Sunday concludes triumphantly: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” (cue the disappointing noise.) The women are told by the random, mysterious man that Jesus is alive, and he tells them exactly what to do—go tell the disciples and then y’all all go on to Galilee where you’ll see him, but they are so afraid, they all go home and don’t say anything to anyone. And it’s funny because we do the exact same thing ALL THE TIME! We have a revelation of what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to live, a clear message about how to be Jesus’s disciples after his resurrection, and we go and do the exact opposite. And if you take this story at face value, then they never figure it out, but thankfully, we have the other three gospel accounts of the resurrection, and we have the book of the Acts of the Apostles. Because somewhere between the end of Mark and Pentecost, these fearful, ridiculous followers of Jesus of Nazareth are forgiven and restored by the Risen Christ, and they are transformed by the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, so that they become the impetus of the greatest, most profound movement in human history. Now, that is a really good joke! Our family are big Harry Potter fans. And I am reminded how, in the third book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, the students at Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry are taught how to fight the magical creature the boggart. Nobody knows what the boggart’s true form is; what makes them so difficult to fight is that a boggart will take the form of each individual’s deepest, darkest fears. The students learn that to vanquish the boggart, they have to use their imaginations as a part of the magic spell, transform their worst fear into something ridiculous, and then they laugh at it, and the boggart will disappear. This is exactly what Jesus has done today, on this Easter Sunday April Fools’ Day. He has taken the thing that we all fear and dread the most—death. And he has shown that death is nothing in the face of God’s love; that’s God’s love is stronger than all the worst things that humanity can throw at it. That God’s love conquers death. So we have absolutely nothing to fear. Your invitation for today, Easter Sunday April Fool’s Day, for this week, and really, your whole life in living into the revelation of Easter, the joy of the resurrection is found in a poem. It is titled Easter Exultet by James Broughton Shake out your qualms. Shake up your dreams. Deepen your roots. Extend your branches. Trust deep water and head for the open, even if your vision shipwrecks you. Quit your addiction to sneer and complain. Open a lookout. Dance on a brink. Run with your wildfire. You are closer to glory leaping an abyss than upholstering a rut. Not dawdling. Not doubting. Intrepid all the way Walk toward clarity. At every crossroad Be prepared to bump into wonder. Only love prevails. En route to disaster insist on canticles. Lift your ineffable out of the mundane. Nothing perishes; nothing survives; everything transforms! Honeymoon with Big Joy! ii When Easter Sunday falls on April Fools' Day by Miles Townes. The Christian Century. February 21, 2018 https://w ww.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/when-easter-sunday-falls-april-fools-day "Easter Exultet" by James Broughton, from Little Sermons of the Big Joy : Insight to Riot Press, 1994. Text as posted on Fresh Day (Volume 18).