I’m not sure when or where this Easter Vigil sermon was preached, although Blanche said she thought Jens gave it in St Louis sometime in the late nineties or early oughts. Regardless, it is vintage stuff—especially that call for the big Amen at the end. I try to make it a point to read this sermon at least once a year, to prepare for Easter. When you read it, let me encourage you to read it aloud. Emphases are original.
We have said it: Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! So what am I supposed to say now? That cry is all there is to say—about everything! About our lives and sorrows and hopes, about the destiny of the universe, about ancient and current and future human history. If that cry is true, then literally everything is utterly different than we would have thought. It is a sad thing for a preacher to come tagging after it with whatever little thoughts he or she may have put together. Tomorrow morning, at the first Thanksgiving after the Resurrection, preaching will be again in place. But tonight, at the very moment of the event…
Even the Gospels have little to say about the Resurrection except that it happened, that Christ is risen, risen indeed. The Gospels have no description of of what someone hiding in the tomb might have seen, no explanation of how the thing was possible, no interpretations of what it “really” means. The Gospels present only those angelic figures at the tomb in the morning, saying “He is risen,” just as we have done. Then they recount the stories of how people came to know about the Resurrection and to believe it had happened, by unexpectedly meeting with the Lord they knew had died. And that is all even the Gospels do.
The church’s art has imitated the powerful silence of the Gospels, and has refused to portray the Resurrection, only showing the immediate before or after, the women coming with their spices, or Mary Magdalene meeting the newly risen One, or the tomb-guards bowled over on the ground—but never the event itself.
So—where the Gospels are silenced and Giotto’s brush is stilled, what am I to say or portray? The only hope I can see for preaching this night, is that adverb which appears when the cry is repeated: “He is risen. He is risen indeed.”
Why do we need it? We need it because no sooner have we heard the tremendous claim—Someone is risen! Death is beaten! Death is beaten, and by the friend of publicans and sinners! By our friend! And perhaps even begun to believe it—than we are undone by the sheer size of the thing. Between the address and the response, between the angelic “He is risen” and our responding “He is risen,” we already find it too much to handle, and need the reminder of that “indeed.”
Between the first and second “His is risen” the suggestion already presents itself—and has done from the very first days—that maybe all “He is risen” really means is something a little less wondrous and so a little less alarming than what it first sounds like saying. Maybe all it means is that his influence has continued after his death, or that his teachings are really great and should be followed even now, or that the resurrection is a symbol of something or other, perhaps of the general renewal of life out of death, or on and on through two millennia’s accumulation of bowdlerized versions that we can handle. We may even, somewhere in our hearts, a little hope it is something like that. We know how to deal with things like continuing influences and symbols of this or that and wonderful insights. It would be a relief if the resurrection were something so trivial.
And then there is the further wonder of it being a specific human individual, a male Galilean Jew of the time of Tiberius, whom God raised. Particularly in contemporary America, this also is almost too much for us to handle. Why would God be so exclusive? If he is going to raise somebody why not all of us at once? Or at least one for each class and gender and ethnicity and so on? If this business about a resurrection of someone back there in Judea were perhaps a symbol of how we can all find new life if only we find the right self-help method—or whatever—that would be more sensible and easy to believe.
One of the half-dozen greatest theologians of the past century, Rudolf Bultmann, made the most sophisticated effort on these lines. What happened, he said, was that faith in God was born in the hearts of Jesus’ dispirited disciples, faith of which the only possible expression was “Our Lord lives!” Faith, he said, is a sufficient miracle. Now there is something in that, and we will come back to it.
But against all such cop-outs, including those of great thinkers, stands the adverb we have just confessed: He is risen—indeed! In a deed, in a fact, in an actuality, something happened and happened to Jesus. Not in the first instance to us or our faith in him, and not to his teachings or his influence, or to our obedience to them, but to him. A deed has been done by someone to someone; the resurrection was done to Jesus, and by the only one who could do such a thing, the God of life and death. That, and not one whit less is what the gospel claims and what the church, when she is even vestigially faithful, teaches.
Jesus actually—in-deed—lived, then actually died and was dead, and now actually lives. So he was not resuscitated, to die again later. Rather, he now looks back on his own death, not ahead to it as we still must do. There is one for whom death is over and done with, for whom death is an item in his biography, for whom death is not the future.
God has brought it to pass that death is not the universal end, since there is now one who has death behind him and quite another end before him, who looks back to death and forward to something very different, to that explosion of universal love which the New Testament calls the Kingdom of God.
To us, apart from this claim about Jesus, it surely looks as though death wins. To us, it looks as if the chief thing to be said about ourselves, about each and all of us is, “Tomorrow we die,” from which course the obvious conclusion is, “So eat and drink, there is nothing else.” To us, it looks as if the very universe were bound to entropy, as if its future were to be a sort of endlessly prolonged death, in which at every moment there are fewer stirrings. To us, it must look as though all the history of human striving is truly but a history of slaughter.
It all looks that way to us—unless we consider this one decisive thing that has indeed happened: that one has been killed, and now lives with that killing behind him. Death cannot be evaded, but God beats it. We know, because God has indeed done it once, on Jesus.
And it is—indeed—Jesus who has been raised by the Father. Not yet Peter or Paul, not yet you or me, not yet one of the great saints or gurus, but the particular person Jesus. Which is what makes the whole matter decisive for us. The particularity is a good thing. For simply that resurrection happened to someone, simply that someone had death behind and God before, might after all leave us out, might leave us staring at a great event that did not include us. It might have been that someone beat death, and so what?
It is whom God raised that makes his resurrection be an event that includes us. For he is one who did not just die, but died for someone, for us, for all of us. The specific person who is indeed risen lived a life that the New Testament can sum up as sheer love for all, love indeed unto death.
The great ancient teacher of the Western church, St. Augustine, liked to speak of “the whole Christ,” meaning Christ together with us, Christ as head of a body called the church. This Jesus refuses to go forward to the end for which he was raised, refuses to enter the Kingdom of God, without bringing us along. Indeed he cannot; he is not whole without us. As Paul once argued at length, if Christ does not carry us with him, he is not in fact raised himself.
Finally, because he is indeed risen, and because it is indeed this one and not someone else who is risen, we can believe—which is indeed, as Bultmann said, a great miracle. By ourselves we may wish that death not be the last word, but if we try to believe it, if we try to live by that vision of triumphant life, our resources fail us. But since indeed Jesus is risen, our doubts and difficulties are finally irrelevant. He lives whether I believe it or not, and just so I can begin a little to believe it.
By myself I may sort of hope that whatever future there is will be something like love and include me, but if I can depend only on my own hope, that is a frail defense against contagion of the world’s despair. But the one who is risen is the one who loved us to the death. It is indeed he who is the risen one and therefore I am included, whether I can always bring myself to believe it or not. Just so I can actually believe it. Just so we can keep our hope when all around are losing theirs.
This has been only a long appendix to the cry that is the heart of our faith. Please help me out of the appendix by joining once more in the cry itself, with a big Amen to cap it…