Luke 24:1-11
On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.
Today is Easter – the day of the Resurrection. After all the drama and grief of the latter days of Holy Week, today there is an empty tomb, and angelic messengers, and finally, a risen Lord. And perhaps even more importantly for those who had followed Jesus all along, those who lived with him and shared meals with him — there is a risen friend.
Because Jesus wasn’t just a character in a holy story, or even the Promised One they knew from scripture. Jesus was the man they had traveled with, eaten with, surely occasionally joked with – Jesus was their friend – someone they loved as a person, not just as “Lord”.
And the people around him were not just stock characters thrown in to fill out the storyline. They were real-life humans, with feelings – worries and hopes, joys and griefs. And they were Jesus’ friends in return.
Human beings, just like any of us – and like any group of us today, they had reacted to his death in different ways – all of them grieving, but some crept away to hide themselves in fear while others stayed as close to him as they could manage.
According to the gospel accounts, it was the men who hide themselves and the women who followed as close to Jesus as they could get. The women who followed him to Golgotha. The women who stood at the foot of the cross to the last minute, And the women who came the next morning to tend to his broken body.
Now, in all fairness to the men, there was a reason it fell out this way. Jesus had been executed on a count of sedition – stirring the people up to rebel against the Romans. This was a lie concocted by the Jewish authorities, but the Romans didn’t care. They would have wanted to stamp out any possibility of any Jesus followers who might have still felt the same way.
And in that time, and that place that would only have meant the men. The women would most likely have been over-looked as harmless. As long as they kept quiet and out of the way, it would have been relatively safe for them to stay close to Jesus – as safe as anyone could be when the Romans were thumping their chests and showing off their power.
They were only women weeping, after all. They could follow him and watch him die, and they could even show up publicly in the morning to prepare him for burial, but the men would have been in grave danger to publicly associate themselves with the accused seditionist.
So the men hid out in a room with locked doors and the women went to the gravesite – Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary, the mother of James. And because of this, they were the first to find Jesus missing – the first to speak to angels – and, in Mary Magdalene’s case, the first to actually see and speak with the Risen Lord.
They were also, the first to tell the Good News to others – the first evangelists. We know that Mary Magdalene is called that because she ran back to tell the men, but Luke’s reading today tells us that ALL the women ran back to tell the men.
The men may have scoffed at the women’s story, but I would be very hard put to accept that it stopped there. I’m pretty sure the women then immediately told the other women of their households – who in turn, told others. Why would you keep such wonderful news to yourself?
It is interesting that the four gospels do not all give the women the same names. Women tend to be nameless scripture so it’s interesting that they are given names at all. Mary Magdalene is always there, but the others vary, as if all women are interchangeable. Sometimes there is a Salome listed instead of Joanna, sometimes other Marys, identified by their relationships. But there are always three.
A whole body of folklore has risen up around these three – Las Tres Marias. In certain Latin American countries they are said to have been the original girlfriends of the Three Magi. Other places, the three stars that form the belt of the constellation, Orion, are called Las Tres Marias. Somehow these three women, whichever three they were, have found a place in human consciousness.
Out of this larger cast of characters it is, of course, the men with whom we are the most familiar. Again, in all fairness, these same men, once the Risen One appeared to them, found their courage – found a new meaning for their lives – and they left that locked room and they went out into the world and spoke their truth and changed the world forever.
They spoke freely about the things Jesus had told them. Some stayed near Jerusalem, others traveled far and told their stories to people who had never heard of Jesus. There are wonderful folk-tales of some of them ending up in distant lands – India, and Spain, and Joseph of Arimathea, a follower, if not a disciple, went as far as the land that would be England, carrying the Holy Grail. While these may sound fantastic, and quite likely they are, we do know of Paul’s travels through the near East and southern Europe with the others who traveled with him.
But it was not just the men who did this work. We know their names because their names were given and recorded. The women – being just women – often were not named – but they were there. When the men spoke in a new location, new communities of Jesus people formed and these were often led by the unnamed women.
It's Easter Sunday and I have hardly mentioned Jesus here so far, which seems odd, I know. Because on Easter Sunday, Jesus rose. Through his love and his faithfulness, and his trust in the God he called Abba, Jesus rose from that grave and lives among us still. Whether we read that story as literal fact or metaphor, Christ lives with us still.
I have spent time today discussing this extended cast of supporting players – the men and women of the early church – because the story of Easter is actually less a story about Jesus than it is a story about them. Just ordinary men and women – sometimes getting it right, often wrong. Just human people, beloved of God.
Yes, Jesus rose, but when he rose from that grave all those humans who loved him and believed in him, rose with him – all of those there that day and in the days to come, down through the centuries – all the way down to us.
We rose from fear and we rose from slavery and we rose from death itself because Jesus showed it could be done. Jesus, leaving that tomb, was the catalyst for what really matters about Easter – that we rose with him, and we still rise today. And that was always the reason he came to be with us. We are the reason for Easter.
Jesus didn’t just come and live and die and live again to show us that he could do it. He did it to show that we can do it. Not that we are “saved” from an angry God by his rising, but that we have been lifted into being the fully realized creation that God sees when God looks at us.
We are risen, just as Jesus is. We must look at that and accept it for the reality it is. Stop just trying to make it a nice story shoved into the pages of our bibles. We are a Risen people. We do not need to live in fear or guilt or subservience. Instead, we can live freely, in love and caring and hope for all of us – not fighting for scraps of God’s love, but accepting that it is all ours and always has been.
Christ is Risen ..... and so are we. Alleluia. Amen.
Because Jesus wasn’t just a character in a holy story, or even the Promised One they knew from scripture. Jesus was the man they had traveled with, eaten with, surely occasionally joked with – Jesus was their friend – someone they loved as a person, not just as “Lord”.
And the people around him were not just stock characters thrown in to fill out the storyline. They were real-life humans, with feelings – worries and hopes, joys and griefs. And they were Jesus’ friends in return.
Human beings, just like any of us – and like any group of us today, they had reacted to his death in different ways – all of them grieving, but some crept away to hide themselves in fear while others stayed as close to him as they could manage.
According to the gospel accounts, it was the men who hide themselves and the women who followed as close to Jesus as they could get. The women who followed him to Golgotha. The women who stood at the foot of the cross to the last minute, And the women who came the next morning to tend to his broken body.
Now, in all fairness to the men, there was a reason it fell out this way. Jesus had been executed on a count of sedition – stirring the people up to rebel against the Romans. This was a lie concocted by the Jewish authorities, but the Romans didn’t care. They would have wanted to stamp out any possibility of any Jesus followers who might have still felt the same way.
And in that time, and that place that would only have meant the men. The women would most likely have been over-looked as harmless. As long as they kept quiet and out of the way, it would have been relatively safe for them to stay close to Jesus – as safe as anyone could be when the Romans were thumping their chests and showing off their power.
They were only women weeping, after all. They could follow him and watch him die, and they could even show up publicly in the morning to prepare him for burial, but the men would have been in grave danger to publicly associate themselves with the accused seditionist.
So the men hid out in a room with locked doors and the women went to the gravesite – Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary, the mother of James. And because of this, they were the first to find Jesus missing – the first to speak to angels – and, in Mary Magdalene’s case, the first to actually see and speak with the Risen Lord.
They were also, the first to tell the Good News to others – the first evangelists. We know that Mary Magdalene is called that because she ran back to tell the men, but Luke’s reading today tells us that ALL the women ran back to tell the men.
The men may have scoffed at the women’s story, but I would be very hard put to accept that it stopped there. I’m pretty sure the women then immediately told the other women of their households – who in turn, told others. Why would you keep such wonderful news to yourself?
It is interesting that the four gospels do not all give the women the same names. Women tend to be nameless scripture so it’s interesting that they are given names at all. Mary Magdalene is always there, but the others vary, as if all women are interchangeable. Sometimes there is a Salome listed instead of Joanna, sometimes other Marys, identified by their relationships. But there are always three.
A whole body of folklore has risen up around these three – Las Tres Marias. In certain Latin American countries they are said to have been the original girlfriends of the Three Magi. Other places, the three stars that form the belt of the constellation, Orion, are called Las Tres Marias. Somehow these three women, whichever three they were, have found a place in human consciousness.
Out of this larger cast of characters it is, of course, the men with whom we are the most familiar. Again, in all fairness, these same men, once the Risen One appeared to them, found their courage – found a new meaning for their lives – and they left that locked room and they went out into the world and spoke their truth and changed the world forever.
They spoke freely about the things Jesus had told them. Some stayed near Jerusalem, others traveled far and told their stories to people who had never heard of Jesus. There are wonderful folk-tales of some of them ending up in distant lands – India, and Spain, and Joseph of Arimathea, a follower, if not a disciple, went as far as the land that would be England, carrying the Holy Grail. While these may sound fantastic, and quite likely they are, we do know of Paul’s travels through the near East and southern Europe with the others who traveled with him.
But it was not just the men who did this work. We know their names because their names were given and recorded. The women – being just women – often were not named – but they were there. When the men spoke in a new location, new communities of Jesus people formed and these were often led by the unnamed women.
It's Easter Sunday and I have hardly mentioned Jesus here so far, which seems odd, I know. Because on Easter Sunday, Jesus rose. Through his love and his faithfulness, and his trust in the God he called Abba, Jesus rose from that grave and lives among us still. Whether we read that story as literal fact or metaphor, Christ lives with us still.
I have spent time today discussing this extended cast of supporting players – the men and women of the early church – because the story of Easter is actually less a story about Jesus than it is a story about them. Just ordinary men and women – sometimes getting it right, often wrong. Just human people, beloved of God.
Yes, Jesus rose, but when he rose from that grave all those humans who loved him and believed in him, rose with him – all of those there that day and in the days to come, down through the centuries – all the way down to us.
We rose from fear and we rose from slavery and we rose from death itself because Jesus showed it could be done. Jesus, leaving that tomb, was the catalyst for what really matters about Easter – that we rose with him, and we still rise today. And that was always the reason he came to be with us. We are the reason for Easter.
Jesus didn’t just come and live and die and live again to show us that he could do it. He did it to show that we can do it. Not that we are “saved” from an angry God by his rising, but that we have been lifted into being the fully realized creation that God sees when God looks at us.
We are risen, just as Jesus is. We must look at that and accept it for the reality it is. Stop just trying to make it a nice story shoved into the pages of our bibles. We are a Risen people. We do not need to live in fear or guilt or subservience. Instead, we can live freely, in love and caring and hope for all of us – not fighting for scraps of God’s love, but accepting that it is all ours and always has been.
Christ is Risen ..... and so are we. Alleluia. Amen.
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