Gravy

Text: Luke 24:1-11 Easter, April 8, 2007

What do you supposed the other ten did that night? The ten out of eleven who dismissed the news of excited Mary Magdalene and Joanna and the Mary the mother of James, and some other women, too. The ten who were not Peter. Because Peter being Peter ran to the tomb to see for himself.

But the other ten thought that Mary and Joanna and Mary were telling an idle tale. An idle tale: It is hard to know exactly what that word means since it appears only here in all the new testament. It probably means they thought the story was made up, a yarn. A little hokum. Hogwash, if they were not so polite. Perhaps you know what it is like to feel the presence—a physical presence near you—of someone you love who has died. Perhaps the other ten thought that that was what happened to Mary and Joanna and the other Mary and their friends. A kind of extreme wish fulfillment that they, the other ten, were somehow immune to.

They all must have been disappointed to say the least when Jesus was executed on the cross. Where was God in all this? Some people in the crowd wanted to know why Jesus had not saved himself. And in another Gospel, the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus himself calls on God: why have you forsaken me? Had God abandoned Jesus?

So no one expected what they found. What they found was nothing, which was not what you’d expect to find in a grave. The men there (not described as angels, but maybe they were) berate Mary and Joanna and Mary, asking them why they seek the living among the dead. But the men are not being fair, for the women did not come to seek the living. They had come to care for the body of the dead. They had seen the dead body of Jesus in the tomb, just two verses before. They had come to complete the story of the life of Jesus.

But evidently—that is, the evidence showed—the story was not over. They found that perplexing, it says. I’m sure they did. More believable is, as it then says, they found it terrifying. When something impossible and world-changing happens, it is right to be terrified.

Maybe the other ten did not believe in impossible and world-changing things. At least at that moment—later on they must have changed their minds, since they later risked their lives to preach the story of the risen Christ. But at the moment they were in denial. What they denied was the power of God to alter the forces of the universe, to be grand about it. As we should be today, on Easter Sunday.

Mary and Joanna and Mary, it says, told “this to the apostles.” What exactly did they say? Did they talk about the men in dazzling white, the empty tomb? Or did they talk about their own fear and confusion. Did they mention that they were advised to recall Jesus’ own earlier words about how he would rise? Did they mention that they remembered those words? And did they say whether that memory help them understand what had just happened?

The other ten did not believe a word of it. But we don’t know what anyone at this moment believed. Belief is not the issue of this passage. The women might or might not have believed what the dazzling men told them. Peter, who only sees an empty tomb is simply amazed. So he goes home, presumably to think about it a bit.

What is it that God can do? Can the world be changed by God? Is that what the other ten are thinking?

Isaiah features so strongly during Holy Week and Easter because the prophet writes so strongly about the change from despair to joy. Which is at the heart of Easter. About the stingy past and the abundant future. About hopelessness and hope renewed. There is no question in the prophet’s mind that God can change the world, that God in fact is the source of change for the good. “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth,” God says in Isaiah. What could be more radical than that? New everything.

In the past there has been sorrow and struggle. And mostly, at least in this passage we just heard, mostly futility. The seeds we have planted—our projects, our ideas, our imagined future—have not yielded the fruit we hoped for. Others have received the benefit of our labor, of our ideas, of our energy. Others have reaped what we have sown. The houses we have built—our security, our safety, our comfort, our provisions, our establishments—have been inhabited by others, denied to us. What we have done has not worked out. Children, our hopes, die from illnesses or hunger or abuse or inattention. And the old do not live out their allotted lives.

Isaiah writes of the time of the Babylonian exile. Yet, now, the exiles return home. The former things shall not be remembered, God says. Not to forget them, but to let them go, to look forward. “Be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating,” God says. A new world is coming, where “one who dies at a hundred will be considered a youth,” when men and women will not labor in vain. When instead of futility, there will be satisfaction. When instead of scarcity, there will be abundance.

A friend was badly burned at his high-school graduation party (he was trying to re-start a fire by throwing gasoline on it). No one thought he would live. His mom later said he looked like a piece of charcoal. Imagine a mother seeing that. Yet he recovered, and lived, and just now is thinking about retirement, having raised a family and started a business or two. My friend says about this experience that the whole of his life after that stupid party is gravy. Gravy, meaning extra, undeserved. We might say: gravy, meaning grace.

So much of what we do is based on fear of one thing or another. And what those things or the other things boil down to in the end is fear of death. All our deepest anxieties, and a lot of our trivial ones, are anchored in the fear of death. If the knot that ties us to death is cut, then we are free to wander where we will.

This tiny and crucial episode in the Gospel of Luke ends in uncertainty. In the moment of the discovery that Jesus is no longer dead in the tomb, there is no conclusion. The story sits on the cusp. Things could go either way. Mary and Joanna and the other Mary and Peter could all go home and ponder things forever and dither about, and the other ten could sit around and mourn and talk about the good old days. But that’s not what happens.

What does happen is that they all change their lives, and tell people about Jesus and his life and crucifixion and resurrection, and they heal people, and they start communities, and they write books of the Bible, and they spread the story.

What does happen is that all realize that in the Resurrection of Jesus they have seen a glimpse of where God stands and how God works. The passage does not end with belief but with a way of seeing God and God’s power. Something impossible and world-changing can happen.

They see that God is willing to disrupt the laws of the universe to change things. God is willing to interfere in human affairs. And God, against the power of death, stands on the side of Isaiah and on the side of gravy.