What a wonderful and marvelous day! It is a huge day--well beyond what words can hold and what mere mortals can take in. It is Easter. While the card shops are full of greetings about spring, flowers and the loveliness of life, Easter is the radical news that not even death can hold God, that God’s love is greater than the forces of any empire or religious structure. Death is not the end and that news is so big that normal categories of reason or discourse simply can’t hold it and any effort to make it small is scandalous.

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to the tomb, early in the morning, before dawn as Matthew tells the story. They had been there to the end at the cross even when most of the others had fled. Now, they were off to the tomb to pay respects. It was tragic but all too predictable - another prophet tortured and killed by the empire; another set of family and friends making the journey from shock to grief. Yes, this is all so predictable: hopes dashed once again before the power of Caesar, the one who called himself Lord and Savior. Once again might made right and the good were crushed under the weight of all. Tragic, yes, yet so terribly common. Yet, on their way to the tomb, the earth shook like an earthquake and an angel appeared to roll back the stone before the tomb. Matthew, in a wonderfully playful telling of the story, said that the Roman guards fell like dead men for the dead man had risen. (How often we see this, the living acting as if dead!) But, on this day, the dead one is alive. The angel said, “Do not be afraid,” the same message that angels delivered at the risen One’s birth, and instructed the two Marys to “go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed is going ahead of you to Galilee.’”

There is nothing subtle on this grand and big day. So the women ran with “fear and great joy.” The Bible does not explain the resurrection, it simply bears witness. The gospels aren’t even consistent in their description of the morning as if to remind us that it can’t be explained in normal terms and language doesn’t do justice to the mystery of it all. No literal description works for something that defies human categories. The Apostle Paul, struggling for words, even comes up with a new term, namely, a “spiritual body,” for the resurrection is about a new reality, not simply the resuscitation of the old. It is all wonderful and mystifying, baffling and amazing all at the same time.

Looking at this passage from Matthew, Tom Long writes:

Somewhere along the path to the cemetery (the women) left one world and entered another. Without even knowing that they had crossed the border, they left the old world, where hope is in constant danger, and might makes right, and peace has little chance, and the rich get richer, and the weak all eventually suffer under some Pontius Pilate or another, and people hatch murderous plots, and dead people stay dead, and they entered the startling and breathtaking world of resurrection and life. Jesus of Nazareth, who had been as dead as a doornail on Friday afternoon, was not in his tomb that morning and the world - theirs and ours - has been turned upside down ever since.” (Matthew, p. 322)

I don’t know about you, but I am ready for some “Alleluias” this year, for the world to be turned upside down. I am ready for something big and bold, something beyond the day to day that seems so often, well, like the day to day... the grinding struggles of health for so many, the shallow sound bites that masquerade as political discourse, the grinding reality of the war, now longer than the American involvement in World War II. I could use something big and bold and life-giving. Easter is such news. It is the news that God is greater than the worst that humanity can dish out; that God is even bigger than death. Easter is God’s response to Good Friday. The resurrection is God’s reaction to state-sponsored terrorism and religious narrow-mindedness and cowardice.

Easter is big; so big that it is best to tie it to creation. Out of darkness God brings life; out of death, God brings new life. God so loved the world that he gave... life. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: “The dead Christ of Good Friday and the resurrected Lord of Easter Sunday: That is creation out of nothing, creation from the beginning.” (Meditations on the Cross, p. 63) There is no reason for creation. Your existence is not required of creation. Yet, you are, you exist; you have been given the gift that is life. Resurrection, like creation, is a gift from the void.

Easter is huge. Another way to approach its size is to make the connection to Exodus. God, so loved that he stepped into creation to free slaves. Throughout Lent, Heather and I preached from the Ten Commandments. The commands are gifts, gifts to former slaves that the law would protect them and guard the innocent. The entire law gains its perspective from the introduction. It is this grand and this simple: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Resurrection is all about breaking the bonds of slavery. Life will not be held down by any pharaoh or dictator; life will not be held even by the boundaries of death.

Easter is huge; it is God’s response to fatalism. Just when we resign ourselves to accept injustice, to enter hopelessness, to give up on life, God enters with life. When we fall under the weight of might makes right and the weak will always be pushed around, God steps in and gives new life.

Easter is that big... then we go and decorate eggs. As silly as some of our practices may be, I love all the odd traditions that have developed around the mystery of faith. We decorate eggs every year, those fertility symbols that somehow got tied to Easter. In the Soviet Union it is the practice to visit cemeteries on Easter afternoon and share a picnic with the family that has gone before. It looks odd to many of us in the West, what to be in a vodka toast with the dead. But the practice is to announce the resurrection among the dead. It is gritty, earthy and wonderful. It is bold and brash: announce the resurrection among the dead, then slosh down some vodka.

It is hard to hold it; this news of resurrection. It is that big and that bold; too much for mere mortals. But we catch glimpses and touch the wonder of it all... when the hospital patient steps out of the sliding doors at Anne Arundel Medical Center and breathes in fresh air; when the soldier is welcomed home; when the dying person finds trust in God even at the doorway to death; when old systems of death--like racism--are confronted and changed.

Back in 1983 I spent the end of Holy Week in Moscow. Actually, I had two Holy Weeks that year, compliments of the fact that the East and West have different ways of dating Easter. I left New York the Wednesday after Easter and arrived on Maundy Thursday, Orthodox time. The Orthodox Church was in its 66th year of domination by the communist regime and the end of that oppression was not yet in sight. The road was hard and the external oppression was compounded by the internal pressures: who could be trusted? who might be an informer? who was compromising the truth of the Gospel? At the end of the Saturday Vigil at Midnight, we left the church and, symbolizing the days in the tomb, we walked around the Moscow church three times. Then the priests, representing the women at the tomb, pounded on the doors of the church. It was all in Russian and my memory tends to play tricks but what I recall is that a voice called out, “Why are you here, what are you looking for?” and the priest responded that we were here to anoint the body of Jesus. Then the doors were opened and the glorious choir, now the choir of angels, broke into the Easter message that he was not here but had been raised. And we processed back into the church – old women and children, worn adults and youthful adults with energy, priests in vestments and choir members in wonderful voice - just kilometers from the Kremlin - announcing that Jesus was raised, that the “powers of death have their worst, But Christ their legions hath dispersed: Let shouts of holy joy outburst. Alleluia!” And, in that holy moment of Easter, I not only believed that the Russian church would survive... I believed in the resurrection.