WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert 4/16/06

Easter Sunday

Luke 24:36-49 “Witnesses”

1) The Women

When the time came, it was the women who were there – at the cross, at the burial, and early in the morning at the empty tomb. Were they more faithful than the men? Or was it that in that moment, nobody took seriously a group of women? They were not, it seems, likely to be arrested for being supporters of the troublemaker Jesus.

After all, what could they do? They were regarded as inferior in every way, as second-class citizens, in Jewish as well as Greco-Roman culture. When there was a census, they were not counted; When there was a legal dispute, they could not give evidence. They were said to have no moral conscience, they were the source of most sin – especially of exposing men to sexual temptation! Women were either mothers or they were trouble, and the pious Jewish male of the 1^st C. is reputed to have prayed three benedictions each day, one of which thanked God that he was not born a woman. So what did it matter if some of them were around the cross and the tomb that Passover weekend?

How wrong can you be? The women were the first and crucial witnesses to the Resurrection. They found the tomb empty. Angels told them that Jesus was risen, and that they should go and tell the men. One of them was the first to see the Lord. These unimportant women would acquire a status in the new Christian church that over time would start a cultural revolution. By the time the written Gospel accounts appeared, 25 or more years after the events of Jesus’ life, the women’s names would be honored and recorded as essential parts of the Christian story.

There were at least four Marys there: one was Jesus’ mother, another the mother of James and Joses and possibly his mother’s sister - that is, Jesus’ “aunt Mary” - another from the town of Magdala from whom Jesus had “cast out seven demons,” and one who was “the wife of Clopas.” In the group were Susanna, Joanna (who was married to a steward in the court of Herod Antipas), and Salome (who may have been the wife of Zebedee and the mother of James and John); maybe 8-10 women in all, most of them named.

It is a remarkable list, and only in Christianity would such a list of women “witnesses” be preserved from this period. It was not always regarded as helpful: Paul seems to ignore women when he describes the Resurrection, perhaps because he knew their witness would be totally discounted in the Greek culture he was evangelizing. A century later, a Roman critic would say that the Christian movement was based on “the hallucination of a hysterical woman.”

But so God chose it to be: that a very unlikely group of people, from a rural backwater of a small province the Roman Empire, would be the witnesses of an event that proved to be the hinge of history.

2) The Stories

Of course nobody believed the women at first. It took Jesus to appear in person, more than once, to convince skeptical men that he was indeed alive, and not a ghost; that he could eat and walk and talk, and still bore the scars of his crucifixion. So the men too became “witnesses.”

But not everyone was convinced. Stories arose, and still circulate today, about what “really happened.” Did the confused women go to the wrong tomb? Hard to believe, as they had seen his burial. Did nobody ever produce the body, still rotting in “the right tomb”? Perhaps Jesus had fainted in the heat, was not dead, and revived in the cool of the tomb? Nobody who knows anything about flogging or crucifixion could possible believe that! Maybe the witnesses “hallucinated”? That many? Over months? Perhaps the authorities stole the body? But why start the very story they would spend years trying to put down? Why did they not produce the body when Peter started preaching that “this Jesus, whom you killed, God raised from the dead”? So perhaps the disciples stole the body? – this was a favorite from the start, as John’s Gospel records. But not one of them ever admitted it, despite all the persecution, the imprisonments, the floggings? Finally, did they all just imagine that Jesus was still with them, because they still felt his presence among them?

For this they died? Because the price they paid for this fabrication or hallucination or imagination, if that’s what it was, was high indeed. This was the era in which the word “witness” – martys in Greek – took on the meaning of someone who died for their faith – a martyr. Stephen was the first to be stoned to death; then came James, the head of the Jerusalem church and Jesus’ brother; Peter and Andrew were both crucified - Peter head downward. James was beheaded, Simon, Matthew, Thaddeus, Philip, Bartholomew were all martyred. Thomas was said to have been killed in India. Of the Twelve, John alone survived to an old age, which he spent in exile on a remote Greek island. Paul met his death in Rome under Nero, as did hundreds of other Christians of the 60s AD who entertained the Romans with animals in the arena or as flaming torches to illuminate Nero’s palace grounds.

It certainly sounds like a grand conspiracy! To be asked to believe that “the church,” a generation after the events of Jesus’ life, invented words that he never said, and named implausible witnesses to a resurrection that did not happen – to be asked to believe that is to ask for more faith than to believe what the Gospels report!

3) The Church

What is plain is that something totally unexpected and mysterious happened that Passover, and it transformed a rag-tag bunch of Galileans into powerful proclaimers that God had done a new thing; that the Age to Come had arrived in Jesus. So affected were they that they formed new communities marked by the remarkable care they took of each other, and by the remarkable leveling of old barriers between Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slave and free.

So powerful was their preaching that inside a generation, groups of Christians sprang up in every major Mediterranean city, and reached into the heart of imperial Rome. So well did they “love one another” and suffer martyrdom for their faith that they began a movement in the heart of the Empire that would one day bring the Emperor to declare himself a Christian, and before the fall of the Empire, the Christian gospel would be carried along Rome’s straight roads to the furthest corners of Europe. The rest, as they say, is history.

We would not be here today, as Americans, as Congregationalists, as Christians, had that gospel of the risen Jesus not changed the hearts and minds of that first generation of witnesses. The Church is a fact of history, and there has to be an adequate cause for its 1^st C. beginning. If the early Christians only imagined that Jesus was alive, or if the early church invented stories about his resurrection, we are at a loss to answer how the church came about.

4) Alive Today

What of us? Do we sense the truth of these stories? Have we encountered, as so many others claim to have done, the presence of the resurrected Christ among us even now?

Or are we all just confused, misled, whistling in the dark, hoping that it might be true that someone somewhere has overcome death? Why are we here today? To celebrate something that changed the world and changed us, or just because it’s what you do with your family on a Spring Sunday?

Are we skeptics, or are we people of faith? Does what we hear and say and sing today mean something in our lives that will still be there by the middle of next week? Is Christ still alive? If he is, then there are many consequences. This world is not as it seems, there is another life beyond this, we are not left alone to stumble about in a meaningless universe. If Christ is alive, history is going somewhere, and we live in a world where everything we do matters and is leading somewhere.

If Christ is alive, even our dark moments have value and meaning. If Christ is alive, then our prayers are not just words that bounce off the ceiling without changing anyone or anything. If Christ is alive, we too shall live with him some day. If Christ is alive, our work “in his name” is never wasted. If Christ is alive, it matters how we treat other people, because we may spend eternity with them. If Christ is alive, it matters what kind of person I am becoming, because I may have to live with that for a very long time!

If Christ is alive, we are now his witnesses, in this place and to this generation. We are now called to live and to speak in ways that reflect that we are his disciples, his children, his ambassadors. What kind of people we are, and what we do with our lives and our opportunities and our money and our talents and our relationships, reflect on our family name. We are called Christians, followers of the risen Christ, and so we commend (or not) his story in all we do.

That is a huge responsibility, and a huge privilege. On our own, we shrink from it, knowing ourselves as we do from the inside. We are not good enough, not strong enough, not true enough, to be ambassadors for Christ. But we do not have to do it alone: Jesus promised that wherever his people gather, even 2 or 3 of them, he would be with them. He is here among us now, and he will be with us every day and in every way if we are willing to have his help and his company. And even if we are less than willing, he will still be close by, so that in reality we will never be alone or out of his presence.

But the living Lord calls us to be his disciples and his witnesses, to be his hands and feet in this generation, to bring to other people – especially our children and grandchildren – the news that he is alive, to bring to needy people the help they will never find elsewhere, to use our gifts to make this a better world in every way because it is his world, he loved it and died for it, and we love it and we love him.

May the risen Jesus be real to every one of us today, and may we make him real to other people wherever we go tomorrow. He is risen!

Happy Easter!

Let us pray...