Our grandson, Tommy, gave this review of the movie Pursuit of Happiness! At the time he was eight years old. Reflecting upon his experience with the movie, he was concise, “Humph! Two hours of pursuit, and five minutes of happiness.”
Luke’s pursuit of Easter begins, “But on the first day of the week, at early dawn...” They went early to the tomb where they had left the dead body of Jesus. Early can feel like a long wait especially when you have been up all night, which is what people in grief tend to do—one long night of trying to accept the reality of Jesus’ death. They came to the tomb. It is somehow easier to grieve at the graveside. The Savior they love is no longer with them. In love they now return to the tomb taking spices they had prepared.
They came seeking comfort for their grief. Every waking moment had been spent fleeing the memory of this horror. When Joseph of Arimathea wrapped up the dead body of Jesus and placed him in a borrowed tomb, he must have thought they had reached the end of the story. But it was not yet over. Luke’s account is peppered with the word but. In only twelve verses—that defiant conjunction shows up six times. It’s as if Luke is grabbing us by the lapels, stopping us in our tracks and forcing us to understand that no matter what we’ve heard, we haven’t heard the whole story yet. The twenty-fourth chapter begins in a curious way, with a tenacious conjunction. What is Luke up to with this stubborn, defiant, relentless conjunction? Luke makes it clear there is another story to be told over against the story that promotes everything about our world that does not give life. Luke takes issue. “But on the first day of the week at early dawn…” It is a signal of sacred intrusion. There is still more story to be told, more life to be lived, more love to be known.
Have you ever come to a point where you thought, “That’s all; it’s over. There’s no hope?” My grandmother, Nanny, was an early riser. I can still hear the sounds coming from her kitchen while the house was quiet and dark; sounds of her pushing Post Toasties around with spoon against the glass bowl.
Everyone else is still tucked in, but she’s up and at ‘em pursuing a new day. It might have been otherwise. My grandfather died on the job in a railroad accident when my father was only four years old. How did my grandmother survive such a devastating loss? How did she provide for her two children? Her husband had died, but each morning she rose at early dawn. A young widow, nevertheless, she believed in each new day.
The powers of death have done their worst,
But Christ their legions hath dispersed;
The three sad days are quickly sped,
He rises glorious from the dead;
All glory to our risen Head;
Alleluia!
They found the stone rolled back from the entrance to the tomb. So, they went in. But once inside, they could not find the body of their Lord. They were perplexed wondering what to make of this. “Perplexed” is another word that signals a sacred intrusion. They saw two men in dazzling apparel standing beside them. They were terrified. “Terrified” is a favorite word of the Bible for God’s intrusion into life. The women fell to the ground on their faces. The two said to the women, “Why are you looking for the Living One among the dead? He is not here, but he has risen!”
We are here to celebrate love, that great beautifier of life, and pray for more of it. It is love that has moved us so consistently all of our lives, God’s love which we see in the Word made flesh, God’s love in person on earth, a love not blind but visionary, a love which, like William Cullen Bryant’s truth, if crushed to earth will rise again. We are here to rejoice in the Easter message that we may kill God’s love, but we cannot keep it dead and buried. We are here to celebrate the Lord’s love that makes it possible for us to become the persons Christ Jesus freed.
Today we simply begin the celebration of Easter. Our pursuit of Easter does not conclude at the end of this day but extends for fifty days through the Day of Pentecost. Resurrection takes more than just scant ascent; more than just “a few minutes of happiness.” The Easter Season, known as the “great fifty,” was far more important to the early church than the forty days of Lent. Augustine wrote: “These days after the Lord’s resurrection form a period, not of labor, but of peace and joy. That is why there is not fasting, and we pray standing, which is a sign of resurrection.”
We have come to claim resurrection for our lives. While we have a multitude of questions, we are not concerned with trying to prove the resurrection. Tennyson helped us there, saying, “Nothing worth proving can be proven, nor yet disproved.” We are made glad when we realize that we cannot prove the Resurrection; but we can believe in it. We can put our lives on the line and underwrite it with our lives as the only way to experience the truth of it. Christ’s disciples were dispirited at his trial, deserted him in his hour of greatest suffering, and then, after his death, became ten times the people they were before, convinced of his continued presence in their lives (from William Sloan Coffin).
We are dead in our sins, but we are made alive in Christ by his resurrection power.
W.H. Auden, in his poem For the Time Being, put it this way:
The Pilgrim has led to the Abyss.
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act?
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.
The God who raised Jesus from the dead seems not to be out of business. There is more possible in our lives than we ever imagine when we look to God and not to ourselves. Some of you have dug holes for yourselves so deep they feel like graves. How will you ever get out? Nothing can save us that is possible. We who must die demand a miracle. God’s call is for us to accept our helplessness enough to turn to God for help. Only then will we see the miracles of resurrection power God is doing among us all the time.
Fred Craddock tells about a man, a grumpy sort, a controlling kind of guy that acts like he’s in the background —“Well, I don’t know, I don’t know,”—but he’s really in charge. He controls his family, controls his kids, controls his grandkids, controls the whole family, controls the church, but acts like, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” But he did know.
One day at a meeting Craddock saw him coming, but there was nowhere to go. He shook hands with him and said, “How are you doing?”
He said, “I’m doing all right.”
He was so positive that Craddock didn’t recognize him. He asked him, “How’s the church?”
“Better than we’ve ever been.”
“Really?”
And this is what the man said, “God is at work in our church.”
Craddock said, “I’ve never heard him say anything like that; I’ve just heard him criticize.”
“God is at work in our church.”
Craddock said, “That’s wonderful.”
He said, “We’re in better shape spiritually and in every way than we’ve ever been in my memory.”
“That’s wonderful! Who’s your minister?”
“We have a woman.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I voted against her, and all my family voted against her, but we got outnumbered.”
“And?” Craddock asked befuddled by this change in him.
“I was wrong. I was wrong in my estimation of women. Brother Fred, if I was wrong about her, I was probably wrong about a lot of other stuff.”
Isn’t that great? Finally, he met the gospel, broke the pattern, and he was making a new way. Easter had pursued him.
In Easter I discover that with God even “in my end is my beginning” (T. S. Eliot). Pursuit of Easter promises more than momentary gratification. Pursue Easter. It promises a lifetime and more of happiness.
Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!