Resurrection!

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

Easter - April 24, 2011

 

Reading:  Mark 16:1-8

^NRS Mark 16:1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. ² And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. ³ They had been saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?" ⁴ When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. ⁵ As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. ⁶ But he said to them, "Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. ⁷ But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." ⁸ So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Sermon

Leo Tolstoy wrote some of the greatest novels in the Russian language – War and Peace and Anna Karenina among others – and in translation they are treasured in many languages.  His last novel, Resurrection, published in 1899, is much less famous.  It tells the story of a young nobleman, Prince Dmitri, a pampered and wealthy do-nothing in his twenties who has no particular aim in life beyond his own pleasure. 

He is called to serve on a jury that is considering the case of a prostitute wrongfully accused of murdering a merchant.  When the prostitute is brought into the courtroom, Prince Dmitri realizes to his horror that he knows her.  She is none other than Katusha, an orphan-servant in his aunt’s home, who had been the first great love of his life.  They were both in their teens when they met and utterly innocent about sex.  Then, on Easter morning, Prince Dmitri seduced her despite her protests; embarrassed and confused, he pushed a hundred ruble note into Katusha’s hand and fled his aunt’s house the following day.  Katusha became pregnant, was dismissed from service, lost her child a few days after his birth, and became a prostitute.

Prince Dmitri is now called upon to judge her twelve years later, and indeed votes to convict her of being an accessory to murder.  Because of a misunderstanding by the jury, she is sentenced to hard labor in Siberia.  Nothing Prince Dmitri can do persuades the judge to change the sentence, and he suddenly realizes that he has ruined his own life just as he has ruined Katusha’s life.  He undergoes a profound conversion as he realizes the distance he has fallen in the years since his idyllic and innocent teenage romance with Katusha.  He determines to give his land to the peasants who till it and to marry Katusha to right the wrong he had done to her.

The remainder of the story tells how they are both resurrected to new life as Dmitri demonstrates over and over his determination to love and protect and care for Katusha in the midst of the greatest hardships imaginable.  He is able to ease her journey to Siberia, and he goes with her every mile of the way himself.  Katusha  has despaired of anyone ever helping or caring for her, and Prince Dmitri’s care restores her faith and brings hope and the possibility of love back into her life.  The end of the story does not have them falling back into each other’s arms – the Hollywood version would end that way, of course – but rather in Katusha being freed to love another man and in Prince Dmitri having learned through the hard work of being loving toward her that his life has meaning an purpose beyond the mere pursuit of pleasure.  It is through learning to experience compassion and empathy for another person that he has learned to break down the barriers of privilege behind which he has been confined; he has finally made an honest connection with another human being.

Tolstoy himself wasn’t a believer in the miracles or in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  In his own abridgement of the Gospels, he omits the accounts of the miracles, casting out of devils, walking on the sea, the raising of dead people and the resurrection of Christ himself because, as he puts it,

… they bring to the teaching of Jesus neither contradiction nor confirmation of its truth.  Their sole significance for Christianity was that they proved the divinity of Jesus Christ for him who was not persuaded of this divinity beforehand.  But they are useless to one whom stories of miracles are powerless to convince, and who, besides, doubts the divinity of Jesus as evidenced in His teaching.[i]

But Jesus Christ is risen today, as we sing on this glad morning.  My mentor in the first years of my ministry, Earl Holt, was then minister of King’s Chapel in Boston, our Unitarian Universalist Episcopal congregation.  He used to tell me that Unitarian Universalist ministers offered one of two sermons on Easter:  Jesus Christ is risen today, or Upsy-Daisy.

I have to confess that Upsy-Daisy has its attractions.  Like other Christian holidays, in particular Christmas, the place of Easter on the liturgical calendar was determined in part by its proximity to Passover but also in part by the timing of pre-Christian holidays, in this case pagan festivals of spring.  So, I find the idea that we are really just celebrating spring almost irresistible.  The power of new life returning is astonishing.  Everything wakes up and returns as if from the dead.  Jesus himself spoke of this phenomenon when he told his disciples that unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it cannot bring forth new life.

But Jesus Christ is risen today.

To understand the meaning of the resurrection for the disciples of Jesus, it is useful to consider what the idea meant among the Jews of his time.  The idea came late to their faith.  It is not a concept in the Torah, the five books of Moses.  It came to the fore at the time of persecution under the Greeks about 160 years before Jesus was born, a time when an evil ruler tried to wipe out the Jewish religion altogether, a time remembered each year in the celebration of Hanukkah.  Those martyrs, who were willing to die for their religion, believed that they would be resurrected at the end of time and live in heaven for eternity.  At the time of the gospels, we are told that the Pharisees – teachers like Rabbi Jesus – believed in the resurrection, while the Sadducees – the priests who dominated service in the temple – did not. 

The miracle of raising the dead was not unheard of in those days.  It was done by the prophet Elijah, by Jesus himself on two occasions, and by his disciple Peter after his death.  Pagan teachers were also claimed to have raised the dead.  Resurrection, though would apply to all the faithful, who would be raised in the last days with their bodies and minds restored.

Jesus died a terrible death because he chose to oppose the empire that oppressed the Jews as well as countless other nations with his teaching of another kingdom, a kingdom in which people could participate even under great oppression.  He taught that no one could dictate who you are or what you believe, that even when someone strikes you on the cheek you have a choice of how to respond.  He taught that even when you are commanded to carry a soldier’s pack for a mile you can defy the orders by choosing to go an extra mile.  He taught that you can stand up with dignity as a human being no matter how oppressed you may be or what may befall you.

When Jesus was crucified, his disciples fell into despair.  What was to become of the kingdom he had promised?  If he was indeed the messiah, the Christ, how could he, being dead, destroy the oppressors of the people?  The human need to find a reason, a cause, led to many theories about why he had died.  But something happened to his followers, something that lifted their despair and brought them back to life and hope.  We see the story emerging gradually in the gospels.  It starts with the story from Mark we read earlier, of how the women came to the tomb on Easter morning to find that the stone had been rolled away and the tomb was empty.  After the angel spoke to them, they fled in terror and amazement and told no one, because they were afraid.  A later story tells of how Jesus appeared suddenly beside two of the disciples on the road to Emmaus and expounded the prophecies that explained his death, and it tells of how they didn’t recognize him until he left them as suddenly as he had come.  That story continues with Jesus suddenly appearing in the midst of the other disciples; he proves that he is not a ghost by eating with them, and again disappears suddenly.  Some of the stories are defensive, designed to counter potential objections to the story.  Matthew tells how those who had demanded his death insisted that a guard be placed at the tomb so that the disciples couldn’t steal his body away during the night and claim that he was raised from the dead.  The soldiers were driven away by a great earthquake.  The Apostle Paul told of how Jesus had appeared to him on the road to Damascus and turned him into a follower and a great missionary.

All of his followers told the story about how Jesus Christ is risen today.  The stories don’t agree exactly, but it’s clear that something happened to the disciples.  They were transformed from despair into a dynamic group of believers who realized that it was up to them to bring about this kingdom that Jesus had taught.  They determined to follow his teachings even after he was gone.  At first they called themselves simply followers of the Way, the Way that Jesus had taught during his lifetime, a Way that demanded that they love their neighbors as themselves, that taught them to love their enemies and not to be consumed by hatred, a way that allowed them to restore others to life from despair as Prince Dmitry did for Katusha, a way of selfless love.  Just as the spring transforms the earth with new life, the disciples found themselves alive, energized, transformed by meaning and purpose.  We can be skeptical about the details, but we do know that something happened after Jesus died, something that revived the deadness of the disciples’ hearts, something that led them to spread love to all around them.

We, too, can follow the way that Jesus taught.  We too can be restored to life, to hope and to love.  The flowers are one token of that resurrection but the possibility of renewal in our own lives is surely another.

Jesus Christ is risen today, risen in our hearts, bringing hope out of despair.  Ralph Waldo Emerson reports such an epiphany of new life in his poem “The Rhodora:”

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay;

Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,

And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew:

But, in my simple ignorance, suppose

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.[ii]

In the blooming of the flowers,

We celebrate new life.

In the birth of many creatures,

We celebrate new life.

Remembering resurrection,

We celebrate new life.                                         

So may it be, and Amen.

                                                                    www.secondparish.org