Matthew 28:1-10
All Heaven Breaks Loose
James Sledge April
20, 2014 – Resurrection of the Lord
If
you’ll pardon the expression, there’s a whole lot of shaking going on in
Matthew’s account of Holy Week and the Resurrection. It started on Palm Sunday
although it’s easy to miss that in the English translation. There it says that
when Jesus had entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, but
the word more literally means “shaken,” a word most often associated with
earthquakes and the root of our word “seismic.”
The
same shaking occurs when Jesus dies on the cross, an earthquake that leads the
centurion and those with him to say, “Surely this man was God’s son.” And
now on Easter morning, the shaking continues. An angel comes down from heaven
to roll back the stone, setting off a great earthquake. This angel causes the
guards to shake as well and become like dead men. Like I said, there’s a whole
lot of shaking going on.
All this shaking is Matthew’s way of
saying that something of cosmic proportions is happening. Earthquakes and
angels are about the power of God bursting forth, about all heaven breaking
loose.
___________________________________________________________________________
A
lot of you may not know about it, but our denomination recently put out a new
hymnal. I love it. It has a lot more music than our current one, including lots
of different kinds of music, music from the Iona and Taizé communities and from
different world cultures. It’s a great hymnal, but when I was looking through
the hymns and songs it has for Easter, I was a bit surprised, maybe even disappointed,
to find one called “In the Bulb There Is a Flower.”
Some
of you may know it. It’s a nice, pleasant tune that is easy to sing, but I’m
less sure about its theology. “In the bulb there is a flower; in the seed, an
apple tree; in cocoons, a hidden promise: butterflies will soon be free! In the
cold and snow of winter there’s a spring that waits to be, unrevealed until its
season, something God alone can see.”
It
is true that bulbs turn to flowers, cocoons hold fledgling butterflies, and
winter gives way to spring, but none of that has much to do with resurrection,
to God’s power bursting forth and all heaven breaking loose. When two women
named Mary go to a graveyard early one Sunday morning, they do not find spring,
or butterflies, or daffodils, and if they had, it would not have been big news.
When
Mary Magdalene and another Mary go to the cemetery, they expect nothing more
than any of us do when we go to a cemetery to pay our respects. As Barbara
Brown Taylor says in one of her Easter sermons, “When a human being goes into
the ground, that is that. You do not wait around for the person to reappear so
you can pick up where you left off—not this side of the grave, anyway. You say
good-bye. You pay your respects and go on with your life the best you can,
knowing that the only place springtime happens in a cemetery is on the graves,
not in them.”[1]
But
as Matthew has already alerted us via earthquakes and angel, something cosmic
and unnatural is happening. God is doing something completely new and
unprecedented. This has nothing to do with natural processes, nor with eternal
souls that continue on after death. It is about heaven erupting on earth. When
Jesus bursts from the tomb, it’s not about creating an escape route from earth
for believers. It is the opening event in heaven’s invasion of earth, the first
act in the coming of God’s new day, that event we pray for each week saying,
“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
When
we gather to celebrate the resurrection today and on every Sunday, on every day
of resurrection, we proclaim so much more than life after death. We proclaim
heaven breaking loose, God’s resurrection power shaking things up. It is something
so different and new and powerful that it is more than a little frightening for
those who encounter it, which is why both the angel and Jesus must say, “Do
not be afraid.” This power can
be especially frightening to religious folks because it cannot be controlled,
and we do like things controlled.
But
God’s power that shakes things up is also a power that makes all things,
including us, new. It is God’s wild and free power to make us truly alive. It
is, writes Walter Brueggemann, “…new surging possibility, new gestures to the
lame, new ways of power in an armed, fearful world, new risk, new life,
leaping, dancing, singing, praising the power beyond all our controlled powers.”
[2]
It
is the cosmic power of heaven, of God, breaking into our lives and into our
world, and that is even more wonderful than it is frightening.
Christ
is risen! Alleluia! Thanks be to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment