Love is Stronger than Death: An Easter Sermon

​Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia! (I love doing that!)
 
We celebrate Christ’s resurrection every week. But on Easter morning, we celebrate with extra oomph. Death could not hold Christ. The tomb was empty. Christ is alive. Can I get another alleluia?
 
On that first Easter morning, a good man who had been killed unjustly was brought back to life. That was good news for the two Marys and the other people who loved him.
 
But what makes Easter good news two thousand years later is not that. What makes Easter good news today is that Christ lives with us.
 
Like the two Marys, we encounter the risen Lord for ourselves, in our own lives. We have our own resurrection experience every time we come together in Christ’s name to hear the good news and to share the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, and to commit ourselves again to lives of faithful discipleship.
 
That similarity means the Marys’ experience of resurrection can teach us about our own experience of resurrection.
 
Start with what brought the Marys to the tomb on that first Easter morning. Partly it was the same reason we have funerals for people we love, and even after that visit their tombs. They loved Jesus.
 
But there was more to it. Jesus meant something to these women.
 
In the first century the Roman Empire controlled the Holy Land and used its military muscle to extract taxes and tribute. Local elites cooperated with Rome to ensure their own position and to get rich. This was rule by power and violence, without real regard for justice or the well-being of ordinary people.
 
Jesus came into that world, preaching a better way. Jesus told his suffering and oppressed people that God loved them. Jesus asked people to love God and each other in return. It was a simple message. But it was good news, and it gave downtrodden people hope.
 
Jesus himself represented that hope. And then Jesus died brutally. It seemed like the ultimate victory of power and violence over love, power and violence crushing hope yet again.
 
Think how awful it must have been to watch Jesus die, and with him all your hopes for a better world. Some of Jesus’ followers simply gave up. Most who remained were in hiding, terrified that the same forces who had killed Jesus would come after them next.
 
But not the two Marys. What made them different?
 
It wasn’t just love for Jesus. Peter, John, and the others loved Jesus, too. But Peter and the boys had given up hope. For them, Jesus’ death seemed to prove that power and violence were too strong to oppose.
 
Unlike the others, on that darkest day, the two Marys held onto some tiny hope that, despite all that had happened, the things Jesus had said were true, that power and violence would not have the last word, that God’s love was stronger than death.
 
That hope brought the two Marys to the grave on that first Easter morning in defiance of Rome, defiance of the religious elite in Jerusalem, defiance of the guards stationed at the tomb, defiance of despair itself.
 
The Marys didn’t know what to expect. They worried that they would find a dead body. They worried that they wouldn’t even get that far, that the stone in front of the tomb would keep them out (Mark 16:1-3). But they went anyway because a small part of them hoped against hope.
 
They hoped that God would do the seemingly impossible. They hoped that love would win out over power and violence after all. They hoped that life would overcome death. They hoped that Jesus might just rise again despite it all.
 
And they were right.
 
The stone was rolled back. The guards were immobilized. The tomb was empty. And for the first time, God’s people heard the good news that Christ is risen, that Christ is alive.
 
That is good news, good news that they needed, and good news that we need. Even when things seem hopeless, maybe especially when things seem hopeless, God’s people can trust that Christ is alive and well and with us always, that miracles are possible, that good news is coming.
 
But that is not the end of the story, not quite. The two Marys didn’t yet encounter Christ himself. They had to do one more thing. Before they could see Jesus, the angel told them to “go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed is going on ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’”
 
Resurrection was for the two Marys, but not just for them. Resurrection is not something that we experience alone. God calls us to share resurrection. And so we come together in faith, as we are doing this morning, to share the good news of resurrection and to thank God for it.
 
And the good news keeps coming.
 
The women obeyed the angel. “They left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.” And it turns out that the women didn’t have to wait until they got to Galilee to see Jesus. Jesus appeared to them as soon as they left the tomb, as soon as they set out to do what the angel told them to do, as soon as they went to tell the others.
 
Christ doesn’t leave us to journey without him. Christ meets us right from the beginning. All we have to do is take the first step, and there he is, helping us, sustaining us, carrying us when we can’t keep going on our own.
 
I wonder what would have happened if the women hadn’t gone to the tomb on that first Easter, if they had given up in fear and despair like the others. Or if they had disobeyed the angel and kept the good news of resurrection to themselves.
 
Would Jesus have appeared to them anyway? Would Jesus have appeared to the other disciples? We can’t know, of course. I think probably Jesus would have done.
 
But what we can know is that showing up matters, that sharing resurrection matters, that following Jesus together matters.
 
Perhaps most of all, the women’s story reminds us that hope matters, and that we have solid grounds for our hope. As people of faith, we know that no matter how bad things may seem, God is at work, and that “for God all things are possible” (Matt 19:26b).
 
Back on Ash Wednesday, at the beginning of Lent, many of us were anointed with ashes, and we heard the grim words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.”
 
It was a reminder that we will all die, that the tomb is part of our story.
 
But on Easter we get the good news of great joy that the tomb is empty.
We get the good news of resurrection, the good news that Christ died and rose again so that we, too, might live.
 
So today, immediately following communion, I invite you to linger for a moment at the altar rail so that we can finish what we began on Ash Wednesday. I will anoint you with holy oil and bless you with the good news of this morning, the true end of our story. “God’s love is stronger than death, and to God’s love you are returning.”
 
That is the good news of Easter, good news that is well worth sharing. Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia!