A few years ago, Tom Long visited South Africa, and while he was there he met a young Johannesburg physician whose specialty was the AIDS virus. The physician worked in a dingy inner city hospital where the beds of the sufferers spilled out of the wards and into the narrow hallways. Taking a few minutes' break from his weary and hurried rounds, he sat behind his desk, massaging his temples. He said, "The numbers are growing at a fearful rate. In some areas, over half the population is infected, and we do not have enough to help them. We don't have enough medicine or enough beds or enough staff or enough knowledge."
Professor Long listened as the physician described the desperate situation, and then asked, "What keeps you going?"
The physician replied, "My faith." He stared out the window at the steel gray sky and then said, "I am holding on to the possibility of hope."
The "possibility of hope." This young physician said it just right. There was no bravado, no smiley faced optimism, no blind faith, no naive sentiment such as "I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows." To have said such a thing would have been a callous disregard for the terrible human suffering all around him. There was nothing in his circumstances to produce any optimism. The facts had to be faced: the virus was sure to spread, his patients would continue to die despite his best efforts, the surge of suffering would flow beyond all human power to contain it. What kept this man at work in the wretched wards of pain was the faith that the full truth about these circumstances was not evident. What allowed him to face the facts and to keep forging ahead was the hope that God would in some way redeem the situation. The pain and death which surrounded him challenged him to struggle against them, and what gave him the strength to continue working was his hopeful faith that pain and death were not the last words on the subject. God still had something to say about the ultimate outcome.(1)
Easter Sunday is the preeminent day on the Christian calendar. Without Easter, there would be no Christian faith, and without Easter, there would be little genuine hope for our lives.
This morning we look at the story of the resurrection of Christ as told in the Gospel of John. The main character in the story is Mary Magdalene. We imagine that she has been crying since Friday, when Jesus was brutally beaten, nailed to the cross, and hoisted up in the air as a sign of warning to any others who might attempt to challenge the ruling authorities. Tears have been streaming down her cheeks until her eyes have become swollen and her vision blurry. She's having great difficulty sleeping, so on Sunday morning she rises very early. It's still dark as she makes her way through the quiet streets. She walks to the garden tomb where they have laid the body of her Master.
Nothing had turned out the way she expected. Up to the very end, she just knew that somehow Jesus would be rescued. Surely God would not let him die! And to die like that, naked and exposed with sweat and blood running down. It was more then she could bear. She kept believing that somehow, someone would come to rescue him. There would be a last minute reprieve, and they could all breath a sigh of relief and go back to Galilee and be happy. But on Friday as she stood there watching him writhe and moan she began to realize that there would be no rescue. Her prayers changed. She began to pray that his suffering would not last long and that he would die quickly. And then, after several hours, it was finally over. His body was taken down and laid in a tomb. Mary was numb and wandered back home. As she walked, the tears began to flow. They continued through the night and through the next day.
Unable to sleep, she rises early on Sunday morning and makes her way to the tomb. She cannot have him back, but she wants to be close to him. She is drawn to this place as anyone is drawn to a cemetery where a loved one is buried. But, again, nothing turns out the way she expects. The tomb is empty; the body is gone. She is frightened and confused, she starts running as hard as she can. She runs to the house where two of the disciples are staying and between breaths she blurts out: "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him." Mary is feeling desperate and abandoned. Jesus is gone and she doesn't know where he is. She doesn't know where to find his body. Is she still hoping for a rescue?
It's a natural human desire to yearn for a rescue when things look ominous. If one of our loved ones is ill and facing the prospect of death, we yearn for a rescue. We want the doctor or God or somebody to cure them. We want the situation fixed and back like it used to be.
The ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are hoping to be rescued. Serbian troops force them out of their homes at gunpoint, they murder their young men, they burn their villages. The people are terrified and they pray that NATO forces will stop the Serbian military and rescue them. They want to be spared death. They want their lives back.
Three American soldiers now have the same prayer. They pray that they may be rescued. Most of us have prayed such prayers. We have prayed to be rescued from a dire situation or we have prayed that a loved one be rescued. And when it doesn't happen. When the problem doesn't get fixed, and the calvary doesn't come riding over the hill, our hopes and dreams die.
But in that garden on the first Easter morning, Mary and the disciples learned that something else comes into play when there is no rescue. They learned about resurrection.
Resurrection is very different than rescue. It is an entirely different kind of hope. Rescue means being delivered from the crisis, being freed from the pain, being snatched from the jaws of death. But resurrection means that we find new life on the other side of the struggle. Resurrection means that things aren't back the way they used to be, but rather are transformed into something new. Even when rescue fails, resurrection is still possible. Resurrection means that the story is not over when the stone is rolled across the entrance to the tomb. Resurrection means that even though we have to pass through the valley of the shadow of sickness or grief or divorce or loss or death itself, that is not the end. God gives us new life.(2)
A colleague tells of visiting an old friend the weekend before Christmas. As he drove down the block where his friend lived, he could not help but notice the gaudy trappings of the holiday. Frosty the Snowman winked from a doorway, a jolly Santa waved from a rooftop, a string of reindeer stretched across a front lawn. Finally, he reached his friend's house and walked up to the front door.
Once inside he was ushered upstairs to a bedroom where the man was being cared for by a couple of friends and a hospice worker. Everyone left the room and let the two of them spend some time alone. This would be his last Christmas and they both knew it. There was so much to say, and yet, there was so little to say. They sat, mostly silent, a word passing between them only now and then. It was not an awkward silence, but more the stillness of old friends content to sit and to say farewell with quietness.
But all of a sudden, they started hearing a lot of movement downstairs - the sounds of muffled voices and the shuffling of feet. It was a choir from the church who had come to do some caroling - to sing songs about the hope which had been born into the world in the Christ child.
They were whispering to one another trying to figure out what would be best to sing. Indeed, what do you sing to someone who is dying? Their voices began, "Lo, how a rose e'er blooming," and as they sang, they slowly climbed the stairs toward the bedroom. The choir kept singing as they stood in the doorway. The man, just weeks from his death, turned his head away from them so they would not see his tears as they sang, "She bore for us a savior, when half spent was the night."(3)
It was the sound of God's song, of divine joy coming from a promised future. It was the sound of resurrection, of hope for a new life beyond this life. The man's tears were tears of both sadness and joy. Sad that he would soon be leaving this world, joy that a new life free of pain and suffering was about to begin.
This is why we are here today. It's not because we are naive optimists or because we place blind faith in the future. But rather because we believe that there is nothing in life and nothing in death that can separate us from the love of God. Christ has risen and because he lives, we too will live again.
NOTES
1. Tom Long, "When Half Spent Was the Night: Preaching Hope in the New Millennium," in the Journal for Preachers (Easter, 1999), p.14.
2. The material about rescue is from Joan Gray, "Beyond Rescue," in the Journal for Preachers (Easter, 1999), p.51.
3. Long, "When Half Spent Was the Night: Preaching Hope in the New Millennium," p.20.
© 1999 Dr. Gregory Knox Jones, all rights reserved
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