It’s Easter Sunday!
All week in all of our special services, we’ve read all the
bad stuff. Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane, asking God to spare
him from what he knows is coming, but yet agreeing to do it if that’s God’s
will. Jesus being betrayed. Jesus
being arrested. Jesus being
questioned. Jesus being beaten and
tortured. Jesus being humiliated. Then, Jesus being killed. All the bad
stuff. All the stuff we’d really like to
skip over, and that sometimes we do skip over.
And now, finally, we get the payoff!
We get the celebration! The tomb is empty! He is risen!
And that’s cool and all. But the payoff does not work
if we skip over the bad stuff. It’s only because we know all the bad
stuff that the miracle of Easter really seems like a miracle.
Think about it. If we skip from Palm Sunday to
Easter, what do we have? We have Jesus riding into Jerusalem in triumph,
hearing the cheers of the crowd, being proclaimed the king, and then Jesus
rising from the grave in triumph, seeing the amazement in the faces of everyone
as they see that Jesus lives. Jesus goes from triumph to triumph. And again, that’s really cool, but it’s not
reality. Jesus did not go from triumph
to triumph. Jesus went from triumph to
tragedy and back to triumph.
If we skip over the tragedy, we
lose the meaning of the triumph. We lose the miracle of Easter. Easter becomes just a nice holiday to hunt eggs
and eat chocolate bunnies. And not that there’s anything inherently wrong
with hunting eggs and eating chocolate bunnies, but if that’s all we get out of
it, Easter becomes just another secular celebration. The miracle of
Easter is lost. It’s only through the
sadness and shame of what human beings--people like you and me--did to Jesus
that we can truly appreciate the glory and the triumph of this Easter day.
Mary Magdalene was not able to
skip over the tragedy. She was there.
She was there when Jesus carried his cross through the streets.
She was there when they put Jesus on the cross. She was there when the
notice Pilate prepared, the one that read, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the
Jews” was attached to the cross. She was there when the cross was raised
up. And she was there when Jesus died.
Can you imagine how she must
have felt? Mary Magdalene was one of the closest followers of Jesus.
She had been traveling with Jesus for some time. She had seen Jesus work miracles. She
had seen him say and do all sorts of amazing things. And now she was saw him die. She had to
have been devastated.
But even in her devastation,
even in her despair, Mary Magdalene kept her faith. At least, she kept it
enough to do her duty. She went to the
tomb on that first Easter Sunday to prepare Jesus’ body for burial. In
the Jewish faith, there were certain rituals that you were supposed to do when
someone was to be buried, and Mary went out there to start doing them.
She finds the stone rolled away
and Jesus’ tomb empty. And that just made her feel worse. She had no idea what had happened. What
she thought was exactly what she said to Peter and John, “They have taken the
Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
And that, in its way, is also
an expression of faith. Now, granted, Mary did not know that Jesus had
been raised. In fact, the thought that Jesus had been resurrected, that
he was alive, does not seem to have occurred to her. But still, how does
Mary Magdalene refer to Jesus? She calls
him “the Lord”. She doesn’t say, “They
have taken Jesus out of the tomb.” She says “They have taken the Lord out
of the tomb.” Even though she does not
know what’s happened, even though she thinks Jesus is dead, she still calls him
“the Lord”. Despite everything, Mary Magdalene still believes that Jesus
is “the Lord”.
And then, of course, Peter and
John went running out to the tomb to see. They saw that Mary was right,
the tomb was empty. But then, after they
saw that, they left. But Mary Magdalene stayed. We don’t know why she stayed. But it seems to me that this is an expression
of faith, too. This was the last place she had seen Jesus, and so she was
going to stay there. She was going to
stay in the last place Jesus had been, just in case he came there again.
And of course, he did.
And at first, Mary did not know who he was. But then, she did. And her faith was rewarded! Jesus was
live! And in an instant, her despair
turned to joy like Mary Magdalene had never felt in her entire life.
But suppose Mary Magdalene had
not gone through the tragedy. Suppose she had seen Jesus ride into
Jerusalem in triumph on Palm Sunday, and then had left town for a week.
She knew nothing of what happened.
She did not hear about his betrayal or arrest or death or any of
that. And then she comes back to town
and sees Jesus. Would she have had the same reaction?
Of course not. It would
not have been any big deal to her to see Jesus. I mean, she’d have been
happy to see him, of course. But there
would’ve been no reason for her to feel joy. She’d never have known
anything any different. It’d be like if
I saw you last week at the Palm Sunday service and then saw you again today.
I’m happy to see you, don’t get me wrong.
But there’d be nothing unusual about it.
Here’s the point, or actually
two points. The first point is that if you and I skip from Palm Sunday to
Easter, we miss out. We miss out on the joy. We miss out on the wonder of Easter. We miss out on the miracle of Easter.
That Jesus loved us enough to allow himself to be betrayed, to be
arrested, to be beaten, to be humiliated, to be killed. And he did that
for us, for you and for me. Jesus
willingly took the punishment for our sins, so that you and I would know that
our sins can be forgiven and that we can have salvation and eternal life
through our faith in Jesus Christ as our Savior.
Because, you know, that’s the
real miracle of Easter. Jesus rising from the dead was, indeed, a
miracle. No question about it. But
the even greater miracle is that Jesus allowed himself to be killed in the
first place. The even greater miracle is that, knowing exactly who we
human beings are, knowing how weak and sinful and unloving and selfish we human
beings are, Jesus still thinks we are good enough, and important enough, and
valuable enough, that he would go through all of that for us. Knowing
exactly who we are, Jesus still died for us.
Jesus died to give us the chance for salvation and eternal life. That’s the greatest miracle of Easter. And if we skip from Palm Sunday to Easter, we
miss that. We miss out on the tragedy,
but we also miss out on the miracle.
And here’s the other point.
I would venture to say that most of us here have had some sort of tragedy
in our lives. If it did not happen to us personally, it happened to
someone we’re close to and someone we care a lot about. And if you have
not had that happen yet, the chances are that it will happen at some point in
your life.
We wish that life was not that
way. We’d like to skip over the tragedy.
Sometimes we ask why God is putting us through it. We ask why God
does not take the tragedy away.
That’s okay. If you
remember, Jesus asked that God take the tragedy away from him, too. Jesus
prayed that, if there was some other way for the salvation of human beings, God
not make him go through the suffering and death. No one, not even Jesus,
wants to go through a tragedy. It’s okay
if we pray for God to take that away from us.
But ultimately, Jesus realized
that God the Father wanted him to go through with it. And sometimes,
that’s what we realize, too. Sometimes
we pray for God to take us out of a situation, and God says no. God tells
us we need to go through the situation.
We may not understand why. Jesus
may not have understood why. He may
have, of course--he was the divine Son of God, after all--but I think it’s
possible that, as he prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus did not
understand why the salvation of human beings had to come this way. But he
understood that it did. And that was
enough for him.
And it needs to be enough for
us, too. It’s hard. I know it’s
hard. When we’re going through a
tragedy, we don’t understand why God would tell us we need to go through it.
And while it’s always hard to go through a bad situation, it’s even
harder when we don’t understand why.
It’s hard for us to say, as Jesus did, that for whatever reason, it’s
God’s will that I go through this, and that’s enough.
But remember, it was only by
going through the tragedy that Jesus achieved his ultimate triumph. And
that can happen for you and me, too. If
you’re going through a bad situation right now, it’s entirely possible that
it’s only by going through it that you will achieve a triumph later.
It’s not easy to see that when
we’re in the middle of it. It’s not easy to have that much faith. But we know God is there. We know God
is great. We know God is good. And we know that God has plans and purposes
that we know nothing about. We also know, as it says in Romans Eight,
Twenty-eight, that “in all things God works for
the good of those who love him.” It may be, just as it was for Jesus,
that it’s only by going through a tragedy that you and I will achieve our
ultimate triumph, too. It may be that, if we skipped over our tragedy,
we’d miss out on our own miracle.
We’d love to
skip from Palm Sunday to Easter. But if we do, we miss out on the miracle
of Easter. We’d love to skip the tragedies in our own lives. But if we did, we’d miss out on the miracles
of our lives, too. And as hard as it is to go through tragedies, it would
be even worse to miss out on the miracles.
May God bless
each and every one of us. And may none of us miss out on miracles. Both the miracle of Easter and the miracles
of our own lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment