Every year -- you'd think I'd be used to this by now -- I encounter the stories of Easter morning, startled awake by what these stories proclaim.
You'd imagine Easter to be the one morning on which everyone is fearless.
But Mark -- the oldest Gospel we have -- ends this way in the earliest manuscripts:
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus' body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, "Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?"It's the ending that startles me. We've (rightly, I think) come to associate Easter with joy. And yet, here at the end of the story in Mark, we encounter women who are afraid.
But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.
"Don't be alarmed," he said. "You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.'"
Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.
Why?
We encounter a similar reaction to the first proclamation to the Gospel. On Pentecost Peter ends his sermon in Jerusalem with this accusation: "Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah". Finding blood on their hands the people call out, not without some alarm: "What shall we do?"
Why is there so much fear on Easter?
I think there's fear on Easter because, if you're working on a model of moral calculus by which the world usually operates -- "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" -- after Jesus' death, lives are on the hook. Vengeance is now the order of the day.
Think about it.
Having crucified, abandoned or betrayed Jesus there is fear of retribution. The blood of Jesus, having soaked deep into the soil of Jerusalem, is crying out. Just like the blood of Abel crying out against Cain:
Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?"Easter is not Good News for the guilty. It's not Good News to find out that your victim is alive. We know what's coming. We've seen the Hollywood movies where the victim comes back from the dead to seek revenge. So if Jesus is alive, if the victim has come back, we had better hide in fear. Judgment day is coming.
"I don't know," he replied. "Am I my brother's keeper?"
The LORD said, "What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground."
If we're honest, this is how we'd expect the story to go.
Jesus is back, and he's here to crack a few skulls.
Because that seems to be exactly how these first encounters with the Risen One seemed to go.
So I get it. I understand why there's so much fear. I'm only surprised more of us don't get it. Because, let's be honest: Outside of the Jesus story, listening to the way the world operates, this is how things work. So when it comes to Jesus' resurrection from the dead, we really should be afraid.
The victim comes back, kills the bad guys and the moral calculus of the Cosmos is balanced again. This is the Hollywood Ending. And we thrill to the violence of the victim. This is justified violence. So we cheer for it. The victim has been wronged so everything the victim does to get even (and those words are telling) is right, good, and justified. In short, everything in human psychology and human moral history -- and even the Bible to this point -- suggests that Easter shouldn't be Good News for the perpetrators, the ones who betrayed, fled, stood at a distance, washed their hands, or called out for his death. All these, and you and I, are going to face the victim on judgment day. And that isn't going to go well for us. We have blood on our hands.
Yet, in ways we often fail to understand -- which is why we call this grace -- this story ends up going in a very different, unprecedented direction. The blood of Jesus doesn't cry out for vengeance. The blood of Jesus is different from the blood of Abel, the archetype of all victims. In the words of Hebrews 12, Jesus' blood "speaks a better word than the blood of Abel".
What is that "better word"? Where Abel's blood cries out, "Vengeance!", Jesus says "Peace!" When Abel's blood issues in judgment -- "Guilty!" -- Jesus' blood says "Forgiveness!"
Easter isn't the Judgment Day we're expecting. The victim returns to us and shows us the wounds we inflicted, yet brings to us no hate, blood lust, condemnation, or revenge. Only love, forgiveness, grace, and peace.
The joy of Easter, though, rolls over us first as a wave of fear.
So the joy of Easter is really the wave of relief, of forgiveness, that washes over us.
And in accepting this forgiveness, we step into a story that the world simply can't tell. Living here is so very, very different than living there. Because here we've shut down the narratives of hate and violence and revenge. The hate stops here, with us. Or, more precisely, it stops with Jesus, who is the Victim to emerge on Easter with a new story, a new way of telling things -- a New Heaven and a New Earth.
Forgiven, now we're enabled and ennobled to forgive others.
This isn't a preaching about peace that is abstract. Jesus is the one who gets the violence, at the hands of the very audience he addresses. To quote Rowan Williams:
When we make victims, when we embark on condemnation, exclusion, violence, the diminution or oppression of anyone, when we set ourselves up as judges, we are exposed to judgment (as Jesus himself asserts in Matt. 7:1-2), and we turn away from salvation. To hear the good news of salvation, to be converted, is to turn back to the condemned and rejected, acknowledging that there is hope nowhere else.Easter isn't just the shock of being forgiven by our victim. Easter is about living under the blood of Jesus rather than the blood of Abel. Easter is about learning to speak those better words -- peace, forgiveness, grace, mercy and love -- in a world trapped in reciprocal bouts of violence, from the petty to the genocidal. We learn to forgive as we have been forgiven. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians:
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors ...We are Christ's ambassadors, speaking his better words.
Today is Easter. Today Christians proclaim that our victim has come back from the dead and is now looking for us. It's news that makes us want to hide in fear or cry out, like they did at Pentecost, "What shall we do!?"
Because, if we're honest, Easter shouldn't be Good News.
But it is.
Because of Jesus.
Thanks be to God.