Easter Day April 4th, 2010

Easter Day
April 4th, 2010

If we were in Russia this Easter morning, when we met people at church or on the street we’d shout “Christos voskresye!” –“Christ is risen!” –and they’d shout back, “voeesteno voskresye!”—“Truly he is risen!” and then we’d kiss three times.
It’s the idea of the triple kiss that grabs me. Because Easter is a love story.

If you were raised “in the church,” you probably remember learning the Apostles’ Creed.
There’s a strange little line in it that says that after Jesus’ death, “he descended into hell.” For a long time, that line was left out of the Episcopal Church’s Prayer Book—they considered it too mythic and just a bit “embarrassing.”
Myth it might be, but descending into hell refers to something quite profound. The story goes that after Adam and Eve sinned, heaven’s gates were shut fast. So until the coming of Christ, Adam and Eve and everyone who came after them went after their deaths to hell—not the hell of fire and brimstone, but a sort of holding area supervised by demons.
The story goes that between Good Friday and Easter morning, Jesus went in swinging and “trampled down the gates of hell,” vanquished the confused and outraged demons, and led those poor, warehoused souls into paradise.

Jesus’ Easter love broke the chains that bound them.
But Jesus’ Easter love didn’t only act that first Holy Saturday. It keeps right on acting, working in the world to liberate us human beings from whatever imprisons us.
This can be on a huge level—Slaves in the American south trusted that God would ultimately liberate them from slavery. Black people in South Africa had faith, had faith against all odds that God would ultimately free them from apartheid. Neither group believed that Christ would personally come with a flaming sword to free them, but they believed with all their hearts and souls that Christ’s saving love was stronger than the chains of oppression and prejudice and would prevail.
We all have personal chains that bind us, chains that can feel like the bonds of hell. getting tighter and tighter, seemingly impossible to break, whether these are “addictions” to alcohol or drugs, or more subtly to consumerism, or hopelessness or cynicism, to chronic sins of meanness, dishonesty, anger, resentment.
Have you seen or felt Christ’s Easter love working? You have if you’ve ever sat in an AA or an NA meeting. Men and women tell how their faith in a “higher power” has set them free from seemingly hopeless addictions. Maybe that power has changed your life. For Christians, the name of this “higher power” is Jesus Christ.

But that’s not the whole of the Easter love story.
In the Gospel we’ve just read, Mary Magdalene stands weeping in the garden next to Jesus’ tomb. As far as she is concerned everything is lost. The tomb’s emptiness mirrors her own.
Because, yes, she had loved Jesus. Not the way a lover loves the beloved, or the way spouses love one another—even though fiction writers like Dan Brown like to play with that idea.
We know from other places in the Gospel that some time before Jesus had healed her, had liberated her “from seven demons,” which we can interpret as out-of-control forces within her. As her healer, Jesus had known her and her demons, had known hergood and her bad, her pain and her joy—her unique self.
And despite or maybe because of, knowing her so completely, he had accepted and loved her. She was able to rest in his love.

If you have been very fortunate in your life, you have had a glimpse of that experience of being utterly transparent to another person. Somehow, even though they knew all your flaws and failings, they loved you anyway.
And if you have experienced that kind of love, you understand what it meant for Mary Magdalene to watch Jesus die. Part of her died with him.

In the garden outside the tomb, she doesn’t recognize Jesus at first. In fact, she mistakes him for the gardener. But then he says her name, “Mary!”
And with that naming of her name, she comes back to life. She realizes that Jesus Christ has risen and will never die again. So she is now firmly, eternally, the precious Mary that Jesus knows and loves. Jesus’ intensely personal knowledge and love can never be taken away from her again.

I don’t know about you but honestly?— for me it is a bit frightening to think of being so completely known by someone, even if that someone is Christ.
Yet just for a moment let yourself imagine it: Imagine Christ delighting in you, yes you! loving you as someone uniquely precious. Calling you by name, your own name.

Easter is a love story, the story of Someone whose love for us would not let him rest in death. Christ’s love for us was so powerful that it pulled him into resurrection life—
This is what we celebrate this morning: Christ’s ongoing love that gives us hope that we may be freed from what holds us in bondage, and even more precious, a love that gazes on us with delight and calls us each by name.