Happy Easter! Today everybody has access to the audio and of course you can read the text if you prefer.
One of my seminary professors loved attending worship services at different denominations each week. Since we were in Sewanee, Tennessee, he mostly visited small, rural congregations.
One Easter he came back beaming about the sermon he had heard at a little Baptist church out in the middle of nowhere. The preacher had peppered his sermon with a refrain: “He ain’t here.” It was his paraphrase of what the angel had said at the empty tomb.
I don’t know which Gospel the preacher had been using that day, but I’m going to be dwelling on Mark here. (Mark 16:1-8) So, let’s step back and unfold how Mark’s Gospel tells us about the resurrection. Then we’ll see why I love that refrain as much as my professor did.
Three women—Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome—go to the tomb just after the sun rises and brings the Sabbath to an end. They’ve brought spices for anointing Jesus’ lifeless body. Their biggest concern was the massive stone sealing the tomb. How would they move it?
When they arrive, the stone has already been rolled back. Upon entering the tomb, they find a young man in a white robe, a sort of angelic figure. He says, you guessed it, “He ain’t here.”
Well, actually, he says, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here.”
In Mark’s narrative, the risen Jesus himself does not appear. So, the empty tomb serves as the story’s focal point. That makes the message straightforward. Like the great stone, death is for us mere humans an immovable object. But death could not contain Jesus. He ain’t here.
Jesus’ resurrection has dismantled death once and for all. For all of us. Because of Jesus, death is not an ending. It is a transition. The stone has been rolled away by a power greater than any of us. By the power of God’s relentless love.
As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:54b-55)
And again, Paul said to the Romans:
In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Roman 8:37-39)
I’m comforted by the thought that, when my EEG goes flat, life is changed, not ended. A greater, more intimate union with my Maker awaits me. My loved ones will greet me on that far shore. A peace and joy that exceeds even my wildest imaginings await me and everyone I love.
But there’s more.
You see, I’ve managed to tumble into, and at times dig for myself, all sorts of little graves along the way. And chances are that I will fall into more such graves before I draw my last earthly breath.
Most of us know a bit, maybe more than a bit, about anxiety, loneliness, self-loathing, fear, rage, or resentment. Feelings of failure, regret, abandonment, or betrayal. It’s like being sealed in a dark and airless tomb with a stone too large and too heavy for us to roll back on our own.
Now remember that Jesus had no tomb of his own. He had been laid in a borrowed tomb. My tomb and your tomb. He precedes us into our final grave, but also into each and every one of our earthly, time-bound graves.
No tomb can hold Jesus. So, when he meets us in the dark places of our lives, he takes us by the hand, rolls away our stone, and leads us into the open so we can breathe the fresh air of new life.
It’s like Nadia Bolz-Weber says: “God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life, in ways both dramatic and small.”
He ain’t here. The tomb is empty. And so is yours and mine.
Beautiful! Happy Easter to you!
Happy Easter, Bishop Jake! Thank you for the light.