Easter Sunday
The Reverend Shearon Sykes Williams, The Sunday of the Resurrection: Easter Day,April 20th, 2025
“…I have seen the Lord….” John 20:1 -18
Alleluia! Christ is risen. (The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia! ) These are the words of Easter, the joyful, hopeful, beautiful words of Easter. We come together today to hear those words anew. They were first uttered by the earliest Christians 2,000 years ago, and we hear them afresh every Easter morning. And this Easter we are especially eager to hear them. We see Good Friday everywhere we look. So how are we to be Easter people in this Good Friday world? How can we give voice to Christ’s resurrection and all that it means, love and compassion, peace and forgiveness, courage and justice? How do we live as people of the Resurrection when the counter forces of evil are very much at work, the voices of hatred and violence, lies and vengeance, injustice and cruelty?
The very first Christians became followers of Jesus because of the resurrection. That was it, pure and simple. It is often said that the Gospels are long prologues to the resurrection. They tell the story of Jesus’ life and ministry, his healing, his teaching, his preaching, and all of these things are very important, but they are shared through the lens of the resurrection. And the Church is here, 2,000 years later, still proclaiming, “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”
The Gospels were written years after the first Easter. They came about in the context of worshipping communities, gathered to remember Jesus and to celebrate his resurrected presence with them through the bread and wine, through reading Scripture, through the physical things that helped them to experience him, together. They understood themselves as the beloved community, gathered in Jesus’ name, to recall his words to them about how to live as people of justice, mercy, compassion, and love. All of the death-dealing ways of the world, all of the forces that had conspired to kill Jesus, no longer had power over them, because the life-giving ways of God had brought forth Jesus from the dead.
Yesterday morning, I was typing away on my sermon for today, and my son Andrew walked in and asked if I was looking forward to having more people than usual at church on Easter, to which I replied, “yes, of course, you know I live for a packed-out church, my son.” He said, “Well, I know a way to get EVEN MORE people there than usual.” “How’s that?”, I inquired. “I could pitch a tent in front of the church tonight, with a sign on a pole outside the tent that says “the line starts here”, and I could stand there in a suit so people would think they might not get in tomorrow.” I told him I thought he had been watching too many episodes of Portlandia, but the thought that people would be cuing up ahead of time because they wanted to celebrate Easter together so much, that they would camp out overnight to make sure they got in, is a pretty cool one, I have to admit!
We have awesome news to share, my friends! It really is that good. And it is news that our world, our country, and everyone we know needs to hear, especially now. The news that all people are created in the image of God and called to live in beloved community. The news that Jesus taught, preached, healed and proclaimed the good news to the poor and oppressed. The news that Jesus died at the hands of a vicious regime, the Roman Empire, desperately trying to stamp out all possible threat to their power and exert military control over their subjects, but that earthly power did not have the last word. And the biggest news of all, that God raised Jesus from the dead and inaugurated a new way of being in this world. The way of mercy and compassion, the way of love and forgiveness, the way of courage and truth-telling.
One of the things that struck me during the Good Friday Passion reading this year, was the poignant exchange between Jesus and Pilate, just before Pilate condemns Jesus to death. Jesus tells Pilate that “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice”. And Pilate asks, “what is truth?” These cynical words are some of the saddest in Scripture. Pilate saw truth as something that was malleable, something that could be changed to suit his need to stay in power and reinforce the might of the Roman Empire. But Jesus gives voice to God’s eternal, changeless truth, the truth of his kingdom that is not from this world, a truth that we come to know by listening for his voice and learning to distinguish it from opposing voices. As his followers today, we do that by developing a relationship with him, through being a part of the beloved community, through worship, prayer and service to others. And Jesus meets us exactly as we are and invites us to be more than we think we can be.
The risen Lord invited the first witnesses to the empty tomb to become more. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb on that first Easter morning, while it was still dark, and ran to tell Peter and the beloved disciple that the stone had been removed from Jesus’ tomb. The two men run to the tomb and the Gospel says that Peter sees, and that the beloved disciples sees and believes, but does not fully comprehend, and then they return home, understandably overwhelmed and not knowing how to process everything. And there was a lot to come to terms with. Peter really loved Jesus, he had been such a faithful disciple throughout Jesus’ ministry, but he ended up denying Jesus on the night of his arrest, not once, not twice, but three times. He knew that as one of Jesus’ disciples he could get rounded up too. He was not there for Jesus in his darkest hour and the weight of that, the shame of it, was a lot to bear. The beloved disciple was particularly close to Jesus and had laid his head on Jesus’ chest at the last supper. He had been faithful to Jesus to the end. He was there at the cross as Jesus died a gruesome death. Jesus even entrusted his mother to him as he was dying. He had, it seems, understood Jesus’ teachings more fully than the others, but even he didn’t fully comprehend the enormity of what had happened when he and Peter saw the empty tomb and burial clothes. Mary Magdalene didn’t understand at first either, thinking that grave robbers had taken Jesus away. But she stays at the tomb, grieving the loss of her dear teacher. Mary Magdalene also stood with Jesus as he was crucified, the only other time that she appears in John’s Gospel. Outside of the resurrection accounts, she is only referred to in the Gospel of Luke as one of the women healed by Jesus who becomes his follower and contributes to his support. And yet Mary Magdalene has the privilege of encountering our Risen Lord first. And that perhaps is simply because she is present. She is there to see him after the others have gone home, but it takes a while for reality to dawn, for darkness to turn to light. She sees him but doesn’t know it is Jesus until he calls her name. That is the moment when she knows who Jesus is. Earlier in the Gospel of John, Jesus is pictured as the good shepherd, the one who knows each of his sheep. He calls them by name and they recognize his voice. He knows his own and his own know him.
Being seen and known by God is a wonderful and scary thing. We long to be known, to be seen, to be loved. We all do. And we are known and seen and loved by God. But love makes us vulnerable and that is why being known by God can also be scary. Can we really trust that God loves us, even those hidden parts of ourselves that we work so hard to disguise or ignore or deny, those aspects of our lives that we would rather not have exposed, the places of shame and despair? But God shines light on it all, the noble things about us and the deepest, darkest things. Bringing it all into the light, is how the healing happens. Peter was hot-headed and impetuous, but he really loved Jesus and wanted to do the right thing, even though his courage failed him. Mary Magdalene was caught up in grief and confusion, but she stayed the course. And Jesus loved them all. They each went forward forgiven, healed and renewed, as they and others formed the early Church. They shared the good news of Christ crucified and risen far and wide and we are here today because they saw, believed and eventually came to comprehend the enormity of what had happened. They became people of the Resurrection over time.
We too are called to be Easter people. We are a beloved community, gathered in Jesus name, week after week, Sunday after Sunday, listening for the good shepherd’s voice. We gather to seek the truth, we gather to experience Jesus’ love and forgiveness together and then go out to continue his work in the world, treating everyone with dignity and respect, welcoming the outcast and the stranger, and advocating for the common good. Jesus died FOR US. Jesus rose FOR US. And Jesus lives IN US. That truth is what enables us to live as resurrected people in a Good Friday world. Standing with the marginalized, the oppressed and the persecuted. And asking Christ to help us see his image in everyone we meet, in friend and stranger, in those in whom he is easy to see, and in those whom it is very hard to see.
“Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” And that, my friends, is the good news that we are called to proclaim this day and forever more. Alleluia! Christ is risen. (The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!)