“Rise Up”
Easter Sunday, April 1, 2018
Rev. Laura Arnold preaching
John 20:1-18
Today we shout the epic proclamation that has been said for generations upon generations on Easter mornings. We shout, “Christ is Risen, Christ is Risen indeed. Alleluia!” These are words that are supposed to transport us into the story. They are meant to make us witnesses to the story just as the women were so long ago. They are meant to make us wonder what those words actually mean.
With those words, I am transported back to a church of my childhood, sitting in the pews, kicking my feet back and forth to look at my brand new black and white oxford shoes, as my grandfather beside me found the place in the hymnal so we could sing the long time tradition of hymns. That was long before I started problematizing the words and theology of those hymns. Then, I just simply loved to sing the joy-filled words alongside the trumpets: Christ the Lord is risen today, alleluia. I remember the tradition of shouting call and responses in the liturgy and the preacher standing each year and telling us that the point of Easter is life conquers death.
So it is perhaps no wonder that the first 17 drafts of this sermon had that as the main point: that in this story of Easter what we are given is this bold, memorable story so that at any point in our lives, we can recall this story and remember that even when all seems dire and lost, God is working for something new, and that new life—in some form, recognizable or not at the time—is on its way.
I believe this is one of the points of the Easter story.
But like all of our scriptures and all of the stories within them, there isn’t one right way to interpret or understand them. Rather, these stories of our scriptures are full of meaning, poetry, metaphor, and details meant to open a window through which we might catch a glimpse of God’s epic story throughout history as well as how our story fits into it.
For me this year searching for meaning in the Easter story does not begin with Easter morning and the women who travel to the tomb. Rather, I find myself dwelling on the entirety of the story we rehearse during Holy Week. The story begins with Palm Sunday; and though our gospels contain Jesus’s parade into Jerusalem, the story is bigger than that. There were two parades that day.
On one side of the city was Pilate, the Roman governor over Judea, riding on a stallion with an army marching behind. The crowds gathered to roll out the red carpet for him, at the same time they were cowering in fear.
On the other side of the city, was Jesus wobbling atop a barely ride-able, awkward, mangy donkey. The crowds gathered around him and cheered, waving palms, and shouting “Blessed are you who comes in the name of the Lord!” all the while filled with hope.
On one side of the city came Pilate in a sprawling parade of military might meant to intimidate the Jews, who were gathering from all over the region to celebrate the Passover feast and retell the story of how their ancestors had gained liberation and freedom from oppression once before. The parade of military power made Pilate’s message clear to Jewish folks gathering: don’t think about messing with Roman authorities; know your place.
On the other side came Jesus, who didn’t play by those rules. He was the one they called the Prince of Peace and King of Israel. He was the one who taught that the Kingdom of God was what mattered more than any earthly authority and that God’s kingdom was really a kin-dom. Jesus was the one who spoke of caring for the sick and the poor and the abandoned and the forgotten, the one who ignored the status quo and instead ate with women and valued the importance of children. He was the one who made friends with people who weren’t particularly well respected, and who above all else healed and worked to make the broken whole again. That day of the palm parade he rode into Jerusalem, mocking the Romans’ way of being and mocking Pilate’s shenanigans, and, in deed more than words, showed the people there’s a choice to be made between violence or peace, intimidation tactics or building relationship, caring about power or caring about one another.
There were two parades that day. Jesus’s parade, the one meant in part to point out the absurdity of the other, had consequences.
Mocking the Roman government and their values was a costly choice. Though the Biblical story that was preserved tries to convince its readers that the religious authority of the day was really to blame for Jesus’s death, remember these gospel stories were written down while the authors were still under Roman rule. Of course they weren’t going blame the Romans, that would have cost the authors their lives as well; so the authors blamed others, the religious leaders in particular, and Judas, someone they once called a friend. But, y’all, make no mistake, the style of Jesus’s execution says it all. In the way our states dole out lethal injection and electric chairs, the Romans carried out the death penalty by way of a cross. Jesus was executed by the people who had power and would do whatever it took to maintain it. By people who refused to see the humanity in another human being. By people who didn’t flinch as they spat on a man, who abused a brown body (a dark-skinned Middle Eastern Jew as Jesus was), who ridiculed a man from a different culture, who mocked him for what he believed in, and left him for dead alongside a road, for all to see.
It is gruesome. But in order to make any sense of what was to come on Easter morning, we need to be clear about the full context of this story and these moments of holy Friday and the cross.
Because what happens on Easter morning is then not just God’s response to death in general, Easter is God’s response to the cross. Easter is God’s response to violence and brutality. Easter is God’s response: like a man in Sacramento holding a sign saying #LastOne, like a teenager who walks out of a classroom to say #NeverAgain, like all who advocate and work to change the system of status quo. Easter is God’s response to the brutality of violence that says violence cannot be the only narrative and it cannot have the last word. In the moment of Easter, God does not supply some quick fix that erases what has happened, instead God issues a response and call, saying “Rise Up.”
God’s words that day must have had the same tone of hope with which God had spoken creation into being, “Rise up,” God said. “Rise up, beloved child. Rise up. Don’t let the violence that ends lives, don’t let the abuse of brown bodies, don’t let the mocking of other cultures, don’t let the disrespect of other religious traditions have the last word. You have shown them, and you must show them once more.” “Rise up,” God said. And Jesus said, “Yes.”
When we say, “Christ is Risen,” hidden beneath the surface of the phrase is witness to the holy dialogue of God’s desire for the world, God’s hope for how we live in relationship to others, and God’s disruption of complacency when we pretend not to see what the powers that be manage to do to this world. What we witness to when we say, Christ is Risen, we witness to God’s demand: Rise Up. And Jesus’s yes.
If following Jesus is at the core of who we are as Christians, then God’s demand at Easter extends to us and our lives as well. “Rise up.” When anyone is being harmed, rise up, and don’t let it continue as if it’s normal. When hate speech is hurled, rise up, don’t let it have the last word. When racism rears its ugly head, rise up, don’t let it go unchallenged. When sexism is seen as normal, rise up, challenge it fiercely. When bodies, minds, or souls are brutalized for any reason, rise up. Easter does not just ask this, Easter demands we work alongside God to be a part of the change the world needs, for from the moment of his birth, to the moment of his death, to the act of resurrection, the one whom we follow has taught and called us to challenge the status quo, to defy systems of injustice, to act in fierce love, to honor the humanity and the beauty of all creation.
On Easter morning, God spoke. God said to Jesus, the one who shows us the way, God said, “Rise up.” And Jesus said “Yes.” As we proclaim the age old Easter saying, Christ is Risen, Christ is Risen Indeed, may we see the implicit call for our own lives to rise up, and may we utter our own version of “yes.” And with the Alleluias we shout, and the trumpets that sound, and the confetti that floats through the air, may we celebrate that the world God dreams of, the Kin-dom of God as Jesus called it, is fully possible. We are not there yet. But it is possible for this broken world to have new life. That is the story of Easter.
May we too rise up, and be a part of making it be so.