Easter Sunday  C                R Lundquist                           4/7/07

Luke 24:1-10   http://bible.oremus.org/?ql=42969343

Alleluia!  Christ it risen!

There’s no explaining the Resurrection.  After all the detail offered by the Evangelists – the stories & parables, the miracles, and the blow-by-blow description of Jesus’ arrest, trial and execution…

            then all we’re told is, “and on the third day he was raised from the dead.”

            This is not a resuscitation, a reviving of a body that will eventually die.  This is a completely new thing, an unexplainable thing, which God is doing.  Jesus is different – and he is risen!

            And so I, as the preacher, cannot bring you an explanation of the Risen Christ.  All I can do is bring you the same message that was delivered so many centuries ago:

            “He’s gone… and an angel told us he has risen…and I got here as fast as I could to tell you!...” 

            That message is just as vital, just as breathless today as it was 80 generations ago.  For you and I, we are apostles of Christ – ambassadors from God bringing good news to all the people of the world.  Does that not fill you with awe?

In John Donne’s sonnet “The Resurrection,” we wrote:

            “He was all gold when he lay down, but rose

                        all tincture.”

            In the language of alchemy, the metaphysical science that sought the process of transforming base metals into gold, the tincture was the even more-elusive substance that would transform to gold any metal it touched.  This is the allusion:  that the Risen Christ has become the tincture, turning our lives to gold by his touch.  That which Jesus was before the Crucifixion now touches and transforms us who believe and follow!  And so we are Christ’s Body, touched and changed in Resurrection.

            St Symeon of the 10^th century seems to capture the essence of this understanding in his reflection on the Resurrection:

We awaken in Christ’s body as Christ awakens our bodies, and my poor hand is Christ, he enters my foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of him (for God is indivisibly whole, seamless in his Godhood).

I move my foot, and at once He appears like a flash of lightning.  Do my words seem blasphemous? – Then open your heart to him.

And let yourself receive the one who is opening to you so deeply.  For it we genuinely love Him, we wake up inside Christ’s body

where all our body, all over, every most hidden part of it,

is realized in joy as him, and he makes us, utterly, real,

and everything that is hurt, everything that seemed dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in him transformed

and recognized as whole, as lovely, and radiant in his light…

Easter is not, and cannot be, about Jesus only.  It is about you and me, and how we are transformed by God, as individuals and as community, into something wonderfully new.  For Christ is not merely life, but tincture of life.  The Risen One is no longer confined to space & time, but is here & now, changing us that we might change the world.  For the entire world is in need of God’s transforming touch.  And in the Easter miracle you are touched by Christ, who says with a smile, “Tag – you’re it!”

Alleluia, Christ is risen!