Easter According to Luke

Easter According to Luke

Luke 24:1-12

So, let’s start with a basic timeline.  For the first thirty years of Jesus’ life, he lived with his family in Nazareth, leading what seems to have been a pretty normal life.  From approximately age thirty until he was thirty-three, Jesus was an itinerant healer, teacher, and preacher.  At the end of that three year ministry, he was crucified and died.  As of what we call Easter morning, the risen Christ, for a few weeks appears to a cross-section of people:  the faithful women, his disciples—several times in several locations—and to two people who were walking home after the Passover feast.  Then, Jesus no longer appeared.  What followed was the arrival of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost which we will get to this year in June.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I want us to explore these appearances of the risen Jesus.  Each of the Gospels tells a different version of Easter morning.  Each presents variations on the appearances of the risen Christ.  The point isn’t to decide which one is true.  The point is to hear how each might speak to our own lives.

 A lot of people who’ve been through intense grief are familiar with the sense that the person they are grieving is still near.  They appear in our dreams.  We think we see them in a crowd but it’s only someone who looks like them.  For a second, we hear something—like it was their voice calling our name.  We think of them constantly.  As a grief counselor, people share these experiences all the time.  Then, there is the bittersweet realization that this person is no longer present in the same way. 

I’m not saying that this is what was going on with Jesus during this interlude time.  In fact, I would argue that what is going on either in Jesus’ case of in our own grief remains a mystery. We shouldn’t dismiss what we feel.  Rather, we should sit on the edge that mystery and just take it in.  As I’ve said before, most of the really important, deeply meaningful things in this life can be experienced but not explained or proved.  Think about genuine friendship.  Think of unconditional love.  In the end, we listen to our ancestor’s encounters with mystery and bring those experiences into conversation with our own.

So, we have four Gospels.  Last week, we spent time on Matthew’s account, with the two Mary’s making their way to the tomb only to be met by an angel who rolls away the stone, shows them the empty tomb, and reminds them of what Jesus had taught them.  Then, they meet the risen Christ.  In contrast, Mark, the first Gospel written, in its original form had no appearance of the risen Jesus on Easter morning at all.  (Someone seems to have added an account of Easter later that fits so poorly that they might has well have written it on a post-it note and stuck it on!). 

In Luke’s portrait of Easter morning, it is not two women but “the women,” the whole group of faithful women who had been following Jesus all along, who make it to the empty tomb.  In Luke, these women are going because there is a job to do.  They are bringing spices to give Jesus’ body a decent burial.  

Let’s stop here for a moment.  I have mentioned many times before that in Jesus’ day, a great many religious and cultural practices had to do with purity, being clean rather than unclean.  If you ate the wrong thing or did the wrong thing on the Sabbath, ordid any number of other things, you were thought to be unclean.  You could become clean again by visiting the temple and going through the purity rituals.  As a desert people, food laws probably saved lives.  At the same time, laws that made people “untouchable” destroyed lives.  

In this culture, women were considered unclean.  Women menstruated which was thought to be the curse that all women had born since Eve.  Women had been made scapegoats for men’s impulse control issues and viewed as “temptresses.”  Women weren’t considered reliable witnesses in court and were not allowed to speak in public.  In short, women were scapegoats.

All of this makes it incredibly important to see the central role that women play in Jesus’ ministry.  Jesus talks to women.  Women touch him.  He is anointed by a faithful woman before his death.  And without question, the group of faithful women are the only people who never abandon Jesus.  They just keep doing the next loving thing.  Luke makes sure we know that.

What’s interesting is that the loving thing that they are doing is the one thing that was considered the most unclean work of all:  touching a dead body.  In fact, this job was considered so unclean that the only people who could do it were…women!  No man would have done this work which is why Jesus’ willingness to touch Jairus’ daughter who was thought to be dead or to touch Lazarus who was definitely dead would have been so shocking.  So, this group of women—second class citizens at best—go out to do the worst job around…and this is the most faithful moment imaginable!  

In Luke, the stone is already rolled away when they get there.  The women walk into the tomb and see that there is no body.  In John’s account, the women immediately think the body has been stolen.  In Luke, the women are just puzzled and stunned.  Then, two men, bathed in dazzling light, appear.  The women are now awestruck.  They drop to their knees and begin to worship.  (One could do worse than learn the mantra, “When in doubt…pray.)

The two men—angels—God’s messengers with a message to deliver—speak:  “Why are you looking for the Living One in a cemetery?”  (In the more common translation, “Why are you looking for the living among the dead?”)  Let’s pause for another moment.

Does “looking for the living among the dead” ring any bells for you?  It makes me think about perhaps the strangest healing story in the Gospels, the story of the Gerasene demoniac.  Here’s a quick summary.  Jesus and the disciples are on the “foreign” side of the Sea of Galilee, ministering to Gentiles.  Again, in a world in which foreigners were treated as suspects, just the thought of Jesus doing this would have been disturbing.  Of all things, though, in this unclean land Jesus goes to the most unclean place—a cemetery—to care for the most unclean person around—a crazy guy who was possessed by an army of demons.  We would have thought of him as mentally ill but we would have been equally frightened.  Jesus wades straight into this awful place in order to find the man that everyone wanted to avoid.  Jesus find him and heals him.  The demons that had been in the man “land” in a herd of pigs who throw themselves off a cliff.  The crowd gets mad and chases Jesus out of town.

It’s a strange story but at it’s heart it is about Jesus going into the worst places and doing the most despised things for the sake of healing and love.  He’ll do whatever it takes.  And often, when he does, the “reward” is being rejected.  There are things you do—hard things, uncomfortable things—that you do simply because they are the right and loving things to do.  This is an essential part of “the way” that Jesus taught us to live.

This is precisely what the women are doing.  In this sense, I don’t think that the angels/messengers are chewing the women out when they ask, “Why are you looking for the living among the dead?” Rather, I think they are inviting the women to make the connection between what Jesus did and what they are now doing themselves.  The angels urge the women to remember that what has happened is exactly what Jesus had told them would happen.  

Actually, though, at another level, what happened to Jesus is also what is about to happen to these women.  They have a truth to tell and they run to the disciples to tell it.  Luke goes out of his way to point out that this group is no longer “the twelve” but is now “the eleven,” reminding us all of the death of Judas.  He also goes out of his way to name names of at least a few of the women:  Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the mother of Joseph (and Jesus, since Joseph was Jesus’ brother.) (Again, we have to pause and realize that naming these women was an extraordinary choice by Luke.) 

Here’s the thing, though.  All of these women share the good news with the disciples.  “We went to the tomb.  There was no body.  We met two men who seemed like angels who told us that Jesus wasn’t there.  They reminded us that what happened was exactly what Jesus had told us would happen.” And yet…not one of those disciples can rise to the moment the way the women did.  Having heard what the women found and having been reminded of what Jesus taught them, not one of the disciples believes the women.  “These women aren’t reliable witnesses.  They can’t be trusted.  You know women, after all…” They think it’s an idle tale.  They think the women are making this stuff up.

Peter goes to see for himself.  He runs to the tomb.  He stoops down and looks in and sees some of the fabric that had been wrapped around Jesus’ body.  He stands there for a little while.  Then, not knowing what else to do, he just heads home for the night.  Even “seeing” didn’t guarantee “believing.”

Here’s what is fascinating:  in the Gospel of Luke, there is no appearance by the risen Jesus on Easter morning.  Instead, there is something very human and very familiar.  Almost all of us have looked loss in the face.  We look at the body of a loved one and realize, “He is not here or she is not here.”  We ask ourselves, “Why am I looking for the living among the dead.”  We are stunned and puzzled.  We try to remember what it is that we believe about the something more, about the God who loves us beyond this life.   

Maybe we’ve been like the women, just trying to do the final loving thing and been caught off guard by a glimpse of something powerful.  Maybe we’ve been like the disciples, unable to do anything other than doubt and belittle the strange stories that someone else tells.  Maybe we’ve been Peter and stared at something powerful, the kind of thing that might change us, and then tried to just go home.  

Whoever we’ve been, Luke seems to whisper, “Stay with me.  Keep looking.  Keep your heart and your mind open.  Trust me…there’s more to this story!