He ain't here!
A concise summary of the Easter message
This is very first Easter sermon I ever preached. It’s based on a story told by the late, great Prof. Don Armentrout, one of the most entertaining seminary professors I ever encountered. It reminds of the language of “The Cotton Patch Gospel,” a musical by Tom Key based on the down home interpretation of the Gospels according to Matthew and John published by Clarence Jordan. In the show, after the angel at the tomb delivers the message to the women, he says, “That’s it; git movin!”
Don Armentrout is a professor of church history, and an expert in how the church split up into various denominations. Although he is an ordained Lutheran pastor, he doesn’t have his own church. Instead, he delights in visiting all kinds of different Christian churches. He might go to a large Episcopal cathedral one week, and then a little country Baptist church the next. It’s like his hobby.
One Easter, he went to a little congregationalist church way back up in the hills of Tennessee. He said the preacher was half reading and half paraphrasing the gospel lesson we had this morning, probably from the King James version (what else?)
He got to verse five, which reads: “And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.”
And then the preacher said, “What the angel was a saying to them ladies was ‘He ain’t here!’”
“He ain’t here.” That’s probably the shortest, most concise summary of the Easter message ever.
“He ain’t here.” The faithful women, who stood by Jesus at the cross when all the big strong men had turned tail and run away, went to the cemetery to mourn Jesus. In Matthew’s version of these events, the body had been prepared, the tomb sealed, and guards posted on Friday afternoon. So the women did not go to prepare the body or anything; all they wanted to do was to be in the place where their beloved lay, stone cold in the ground.
They went looking for Jesus among the dead. But they soon found out, “he ain’t here.”
By the time the women got there, Jesus had already been raised. Yet it was only after the women arrived that the angel rolled back the stone. Obviously, Jesus did not need the stone moved; the angel moved it to show the women. The angel proved to the women “He ain’t here.”
But why is an empty tomb so important?
Two verses later, the women meet Jesus Himself. So why would the angel come give all the guards epileptic fits, and scare these poor women half to death just to show them an empty hole in the ground?
Well, maybe there are two reasons.
First, the resurrection is no ghost story. Even if Jesus could get through locked doors in His glorified body, this was indeed a resurrection of the body. And the missing body proved a big stumbling block for the Romans and the chief priests. They had all these guards around the tomb, they had a big rock over the entrance to the tomb, and yet they could not deny the body wound up missing.
Who could have taken it? Those brave and daring disciples who couldn’t even muster up enough courage to stand by at Golgotha with the women?
Would Peter have tried it, maybe? The same Peter who denied even knowing Jesus three times because he was too scared?
I doubt it. And yet, the body was gone. Not Herod, not the chief priests, not even the all powerful Romans, could ever come up with a body. If they had, the historian Josephus, who recorded all the important events of the times, and who had no love for the followers of Christ, surely would have recorded it.
So the empty tomb serves as a symbol of the reality of the resurrection. But it is not judicial proof. That’s one of the ironic twists in the reporting of the resurrection. Jewish law required two witnesses to prove something, but only male witnesses could testify. If Matthew had just made up this story, surely he would have had Jesus appear to two men, not two women. All we have is the empty tomb. And while the empty tomb serves as a symbol of the reality of the resurrection, our belief in its truth is based on faith.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is an action of God; it is God’s loving response to the human horror of the crucifixion. In the original Greek, the language used by the angel can be translated “He is risen,” but the better translation is “He has been raised.”
The humanity of Jesus gets raised up by God so that Jesus can be for us the bridge between God and humanity. The original relationship intended by God in creation, but torn in two by our sin, can now be healed in the person of Jesus Christ.
But for this to happen, we need faith, a living, vibrant faith.
And this is the other reason for the empty tomb; it serves as a theological statement of the nature of our faith. We do not proclaim a Christ who lived only in ages past; a dimly remembered figure of history. If we expect to find Jesus only in the history books, the angel says “He ain’t here.”
We do not proclaim a Jesus who exists only as some complex abstraction, intriguing perhaps, but having nothing to do with our real lives. If we try to dismiss Jesus as some remote mysterious philosophy, separate and apart from the lives we are living, we hear the voice of the angel saying, “He ain’t here.”
And yet we do not proclaim some politically correct Jesus to serve as an excuse for our own prejudices and agendas. If we try to fix Jesus onto some campaign plank for one of our petty earthly squabbles to foment anger and hatred, again the angel brings us up short, saying, “He ain’t here.”
Listen to what Paul says this morning: we who are raised with Christ must set our minds on things that are above. This does not mean we ignore our lives on earth, or withdraw from other people like religious hermits, waiting for the Second Coming.
It means we see everything in light of God’s overwhelming love, that makes all things new in the resurrection. The love of Christ transcends vengeance, and ambitions for power, and greed, and jealousies, and all the other stuff that characterized the crucifixion. All that is the stuff of death. But Jesus is not among the dead; “He ain’t here.”
Jesus is alive, and in our lives, to raise our sights to the eternal life. And it’s our joyful duty to bring others to know Him. Both the angel and Jesus charge the women, these first witnesses of the resurrection, with a mission: “Go and tell.”
And this is our mission: “Go and tell.”
We go and tell that Jesus is alive, that Jesus is present among us, and that by raising Jesus to new life, God raised us to new life as well.
According to John Macquarie, with the cross we learned that God would be with us in the dark times; with the resurrection, we learn that God goes ahead of us to make all things new again.
Look at the dramatic transformation experienced by the disciples. After Good Friday, they huddled behind locked doors, afraid to come out. After Easter, they proclaimed Jesus to Jews and Gentiles alike, bravely facing persecutions, ridicule, and even death.
And Jesus sent a clear signal of His attitude toward them and us when He met Mary there in the cemetery. Notice the difference between what the angel said, and what Jesus says:
While the angel told them to go and tell His disciples, Jesus says, “Go and tell my brothers.”
In spite of their cowardice, in spite of deserting Him when He most needed them, Jesus calls them, and us, “brothers and sisters.”
Jesus comes back not with harsh words of judgment, but with words of reconciliation and words of forgiveness. In spite of all He’s been through, Jesus calls for love.
And this is the basis for our living, vibrant faith.
In spite of anything we might have done, in spite of our failings and our weaknesses, through Jesus, God raised all of us to new life, and conquered death for all of us.
Jesus is here, living and giving, inspiring us to live as He lives, and to love and He loves.
And so with joy we greet our Lord, forgiven, loved, and free, with shouts of “Alleluia, Christ is risen.” The Lord is here.