Easter is Suppose to
Hurt. John 20:1-18
Easter moves us from Friday to Sunday, from
death to new life.
Friday, in Christian reckoning, is a null-point
wherein the power of God is defeated by the empire of force. But the church has
found in that Friday shut-down the transformative work of God.
It is a Friday truth that suffering love has
transformative power that the “executioners” never suspect. What I mean to say
that it is the act of crucifixion of power that really show who Jesus is. It
was not until the Church Lied on Jesus that The State was able to crucify him,
it was not until the Good Jews on the time of Jesus who went to church and kept
the Passover and prayed the prayers decided to conspire with the cradle to
prison pipeline that morality and legality got mixed up.
Sunday follows Friday.
Sunday—Easter Sunday and all of the Easter Sundays to
follow—exhibits the transformative power of God’s new life in the world. Yes I
know we have come this morning to get our Easter Shout on, But the Challenge is
that Easter is not all fun and Games that there is Pain in the middle of the
Celebration. I tell you we need to think of Easter as more of a funeral
celebration of Life then a Christmas Pageant.
We cannot escape the particularity of that surprise in that
ancient moment when the Nails are pressed in to the hands and feet of the
Savior, We can not escape the pain of seeing the salvation of the world lynched
on a cross.
Let me see if I can explain, In
the 1630s English Puritans represented their journey across the Atlantic to
America as the exodus of a New Israel out of Old World slavery into a promised
land of milk and honey. And through the centuries, the story Thanksgiving Story
of the American Israel would serve as our nation’s most powerful and
long-lasting myth.
But to black Americans the nation
was not a New Israel but the old Egypt, condemned to sure destruction unless
she let God’s people go.
The existence of slavery,
segregation, discrimination, and racism contradicted the mythic identity of
Americans as a chosen people. I
African-American Christianity
has continuously confronted the nation with troubling questions about American
exceptionalism.
Perhaps the most troubling
was this: “If Christ came as the Suffering Servant, who resembled Him more, the
master or the slave?”
Suffering-slave Christianity
stood as a prophetic condemnation of America’s obsession with power, status,
and possessions. African-American Christians perceived in American
exceptionalism a dangerous tendency to turn the nation into an idol and
Christianity into a clan religion.
In
other words, it was clear that the Pain of Slavery and its legacy was to much
to allow any real celebration. Any time someone tried to celebrate the Easter
time of the American Society, there would be someone to remind him or her of
the Good Friday of our Journey now. I challenged you that you can’t have Easter
in any form without the recall of Good Friday.
Divine election brings not
preeminence, elevation, and glory, but—as black Christians know all too
well—humiliation, suffering, and rejection.[1]
Chosenness, as reflected in
the life of Jesus, led to a cross. Led to Good Friday and death, and the Pain
of the Cross. Yes no matter how you look at it, to follow Christ hurts at the
deepest levels and to be a community
that follows Christ is to be in a state of Pain.
The lives of his disciples
have been signed with that cross.
To be chosen, in this
perspective, means joining company not with the powerful and the rich but with
those who suffer: the outcast, the poor, and the despised.
In the world, but not of the world. These words capture the
relationship of the Church to human society and culture. On the one hand, the
incarnational character (Christ ness) of the Church establishes her in history,
in this particular time and place and culture. On the other, the sacramental
character ( the Cross) of the Church transcends time and space, making present
another world, the kingdom of God, which is both here and now and yet still to
come.
Because we are “not of the world,” Christians stand against
culture when the values and behaviors of the culture contradict the living
tradition of the Church. The Church has to take on the responsibility of the
cross.
One
key example can be seen in the life and ministry of Martin Luther King Jr.
King's
firm insistence that the Christian church should participate in civil rights
activities set him apart from politically conservative scriptural
fundamentalists. In 1940, he revealed his commitment to social gospel Christianity in an address on "the true mission of the Church" delivered to the Atlanta Missionary Baptist Association:
Quite often we say the church has no place in politics, forgetting
the words of the Lord, 'The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath
[anointed] me to preach the Gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the
broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and the recovering of
sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised."
... God hasten the time when every minister will become a
registered voter and a part of every movement for the betterment of our people.
Again and again has it been said we cannot lead where we do not go, and we
cannot teach what we do not know.
As ministers a great responsibility rests upon us as leaders. We
can not expect our people to register and become citizens until we as leaders
set the standard.[2]
With the Celebration of Easter God’s power for life is always
again being given in a world tempted to settle for deathliness.
Death on Easter is the power of death that leads to hostility
toward neighbor, that evokes greed and
rage and violence toward others.
But Easter tell an alternative account of the world, where gifts
of healing and forgiveness defy death.
Joseph Washington believed that understanding the nature and
causes of Black suffering, begins by associating the Black community with that
of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53
('He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our
iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his
wounds we are healed.' (v.5)).
In other words, God's plan for humanity is fulfilled through Black
suffering! However, what exactly is this 'plan'?
Well, according to Washington God's plan is for humanity to be set
free from racism.
This means as those who suffer, the Black community, the Good
Friday Christians have a mission - to free
(liberate) non-Blacks from their sin (i.e. racism).
This also means that as a result of their divine calling
(mission), Blacks are suffering (and have suffered) for the sake others, just
as Isaiah's 'suffering servant' did.
The church keeps Easter so that we now, in our culture of despair,
may be recruited for a more excellent way.
The Easter Lord, via Easter texts, invites an Easter people to be
about that defiant civil disobedience of new life in a weary, spent world.
Some might Ask So what does this have to do with Easter, well here
is the egg.
Jesus was executed by Roman authorities
because his teaching was a threat to the established order of the
socio-political system of the empire. The Politics of Jesus were against the empire.
While its was the Jewish leaders that set him up it was the empire that killed
him as a terrorist. In other words it was the lutenetes of Caser that water
boarded and tutored and wiped Jesus and finally crucified him.
From that the church claims that in his
death Jesus has done something decisive for us.
The news of Easter is that, in the
resurrection of Jesus, God has broken all the vicious cycles of deathliness in
which the world finds itself.
The Easter narrative of John 20
provides an early attestation about the “seeing” and “believing” of the first
Easter, first reported by the
uncredentialed women and then verified by the credentialed male apostles.
The news of this new aliveness is
breathtaking;
Mary’s declaration, “I have seen the
Lord,” is one of bewilderment and astonishment (John 20:18).
Neither she nor her companions could
explain what had happened, because they had no categories for this exhibit of
God’s power for life. The narrative portrays a deep, singular event that defies
all of our modern categories of explanation.
Peter witnesses to the gift of
forgiveness given in Easter (Acts 10:43).
Easter invites us to imagine, embrace,
and live in a world that is without fear of death or guilt. It is no wonder
that the authorities recognized the Easter proclamation to be dangerously
subversive of the world organized around death and guilt.
Let me end with this story, A little
Boy about Omri’s age went on a class field trip to the Hat at South Of the
Boarder and the teacher gave eat of the students a quarter and told them when
they got to the top of the hat if they put their quarters in the telescope they
had they might be able to see all the way back home to Darlington one young man said well I want four quarters
if yall can see back home with one quarter, well four quarters make a complete
dollor and with a dollor I might be able to see my furture. In other words the
little Boy belived that if he paid a greater price he could get a greater
reward or if not atlest see where he was going.
[1] American Salvation The place of
Christianity in public lifeAlbert J. Raboteau http://bostonreview.net/BR30.2/raboteau.php
[2] http://www.stanford.edu/group/King//gospel2.htm Martin Luther King, Jr., and the
African-American Social Gospel
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