Easter Sunday

Easter A 2020 (Corona Quarantine)
Matthew 28:1-10

Let’s just take a moment, right now in the middle of the most bizarre Easter Sunday I bet any of us have ever experienced, to acknowledge that this was not the Easter we expected. We did not expect an Easter without flowers, without dressing up, without all of us gathered together in person. We did not expect an Easter broadcast from my laptop in my dining room which is likely to be invaded at some point by one or maybe all of my pets. We did not expect Easter to look like this, when all of this started and we honestly hoped—at least briefly—that things would be back to normal by now.

But maybe our current situation presents the best possible way for us to think about Easter: because when the women went to the tomb on the very first Easter, not only was it nothing like what they expected, it was the fulfillment of God’s promise that things would never go back to normal. Jesus’ resurrection means that the world no longer works the way it used to, so what we expect should be anything but going back to normal.

Everything about that first Easter is unexpected: the women don’t go to worship a resurrected Jesus; they don’t even go to see the body of a dead Jesus. Matthew says they went to see the tomb. The closest they expected to get was to stand outside of the place where Jesus was buried. But then there was the earthquake, and the angel who appeared like lightning, and the stone that was rolled back from the tomb. The guards, whom we would expect to bravely keep watch, were petrified. The women, whom we would expect to run away, stood their ground to receive the angel’s message. The disciples, whom we might expect to have been the first to witness the resurrection, were still in hiding; the women became the first evangelists—the first to tell the good news of the risen Jesus. None of this was what they expected; none of this was normal.

Normally, when the state executes someone as a warning to keep the peace, their followers lose heart and lose hope. Normally death has the last word and dead men stay dead. But Easter is not normal. Easter is a new law, a new life, a new normal, because the old normal wasn’t good or righteous or just or merciful. Jesus’ resurrection assures us that the sin and death we experience as normal, inevitable parts of this world are not the end of the story. Jesus was dead and is alive—there’s no going back to normal now.

In the resurrection we find our hope that death, which we would normally think of as being final, the very worst thing that could happen to us, will not be our end. In fact, each time we worship in a Christian funeral we speak the Easter promise of new life. But that life is not only what happens after we die. In baptism, we profess that our old selves are drowned to death and our new life in Christ has already begun; it’s not only a new life that waits for us after death but a new life that claims us, now.  Since Jesus’ resurrection meant the opposite of life going back to normal, we who follow Jesus are called to stop expecting this life to go back to normal. Instead, we are invited to help re-create a life that is better than normal, a life that reflects the light and love of Christ that drives out the normal darkness of our world.

Hear me when I tell you: God did not cause this pandemic. God didn’t do it to punish us for our moral failure; God didn’t do it get our attention or to make us repent or to motivate us to better behavior or to convince nonbelievers to believe in God.  (I mean, it would be a pretty silly strategy to try to convince people that God is good and powerful and loving and merciful by killing off millions of innocent people). Remember that humanity put God to death on a cross, not the other way around. God overcame death and the grave because suffering and death that are all-too-normal in this world are not what God desires for God’s creation and God’s creatures.

On most Easters I would say that this day should change not just how we view death but also how we live life…And on most Easters I would expect any inspiration from that message to wear off relatively quickly. But on most Easters we haven’t hit the pause button on innumerable facets of our lives with the opportunity to choose how we will start over. Although God did not do this to us, God still calls us to respond as God’s faithful people in the midst of this and every situation. This crisis has made it impossible to ignore the many ways in which normal is not good and not life-giving: children who don’t have enough to eat; workers who are considered essential, even life-sustaining, who don’t make a living wage and who, even as they continue to risk their lives, are not guaranteed healthcare; influential voices that prioritize saving the economy over saving people; individualism that values personal convenience over the safety of the community. How many of us have found that this shutdown has provided the first time in a long time that we’ve had time for family, for cooking, for reading, for walking, for resting, for Sabbath? How many of us only realized in our isolation how much we took connection with others for granted? These are all parts of life as normal; but does that sound like the life that God wants for us?

This Easter, maybe more than any other, invites us to not just celebrate Jesus’ resurrection as our hope for life after death, but as our chance to restart this life in the kingdom living of Christ. Thanks be to our God who doesn’t settle for normal, who loved us even to death, and who calls us into a new life that is better than we expect.