Fear and great joy
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
I love Easter. I guess that’s sort of in my job description. I love Easter, but Easter’s tricky.
We try to turn it into something tame. Springtime and flowers and chocolate. But really, there’s nothing tame about Easter. Christmas is easy, or at least it can be. We can celebrate the birth of a baby without dwelling too much on who that baby is. But on Easter Day, we come face to face with an empty tomb. On Easter Day, there’s no getting away from the audacious claim I began with: Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Easter is a day for hope. But what kind of hope?
We pull out our phones and watch wars rage in real time. We remember loved ones we’ve lost. We face diagnoses and bills and an uncertain future.
And so we come to Easter, looking for hope. A certain kind of hope, maybe. A manageable kind. A hope that reassures us, that tells us everything’s going to be all right.
We’re not the first people to yearn for that sort of hope.
Some of Jesus’s followers wanted something similar. They’d left everything—jobs, families, and homes—to follow a Jewish teacher who traveled from village to village through Roman-occupied Israel.
Many followed him because they believed he was going to change things, set the world right. Israel had lived under Roman control for generations. Roman soldiers in their streets. Roman taxes on their labor. Roman governors making their laws. And many Jewish people believed that God would send a messiah—a liberator—who would drive out the occupiers and restore Israel to its own people.
That’s the hope many of Jesus’s disciples held to. A political hope.
But then Jesus was arrested. Handed over to the Roman governor. And executed by crucifixion. Nailed to a cross and left to die. The standard punishment for a political prisoner. His body was placed in a tomb. A stone was rolled across the entrance. And his followers’ hope—the hope that he would fix everything—died with him.
On the day we call Good Friday, we remember that death. We read the story of Jesus’s arrest, his trial, the long hours on the cross. And near the end, the Gospel of John records Jesus saying: “It is finished.” He dies. He’s buried. The stone is sealed. And hope is lost.
That’s where things stood when the women went to the tomb on Easter morning.
They didn’t go expecting anything. They went to grieve.
And then the ground shook. Matthew says there was a great earthquake.
An angel descended. Not the gentle sort of angel we put on Christmas cards. Something terrifying, bright as lightning, in robes white as snow.
The angel rolled back the stone that had been put there to seal everything shut.
The guards — who had been posted to make sure the tomb stayed closed — collapsed to the ground. And the women found themselves in the middle of something enormous and incomprehensible.
The angel’s message was strangely simple: He is not here. He has been raised. Go and tell the others.
Now if Jesus were the messiah many wished him to be, you’d expect what comes next to be a triumph. An earthquake, an angel, and an open tomb look like the kind of power that really could overthrow an empire.
But that’s not what happens. The risen Jesus appears. But he’s not at the head of an army. Not in the Temple. Not in the courts of Pilate or Caesar. Jesus appears to two women on a road. And the first words out of his mouth are simple: “Do not be afraid.”
And then he sends them back into the world to tell the story of what they’ve seen. Back to the same world they’ve always known. Rome is still in power. Nothing has been resolved. Nothing tidied up. The earthquake opened the tomb, but it didn’t open the prisons or remove the governor or knock down the city walls. It didn’t fix a single fact on the ground.
But it changed the people who witnessed it. The women arrived that morning grieving Jesus’s death. They left having seen him alive. They couldn’t undo that. They couldn’t unknow it. The world around them looked exactly the same. But they would never see it the same way again.
Matthew says they left with fear and great joy. Not one or the other. Both. Fear, because nothing about what they’d seen was safe or manageable or easy to understand. And joy, because the one they loved and lost is alive, and the thing the world called finished, God has somehow called a beginning.
The women at the tomb ran to tell the story of what they’d seen and heard.
And maybe that’s the heart of Easter. Not earthquakes or angels. The change in us. The going back. Going back into an unchanged world as changed people. Going back carrying something the world doesn’t yet fully understand. Going back, afraid, and full of joy. Going back, with a different hope. A hope that might not fix everything. But a hope that won’t let us see the world in the same way again.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Cover image: Mary Magdalene Questions the Angels in the Tomb. Tissot, James, 1836-1902. [link]