Fear and Great Joy--June 30, 2023

Fear and Great Joy--June 30, 2023

"But the angel said to the women, 'Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him. This is my message for you.' So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and tan to tell his disciples." [Matthew 28:5-8]

Fear... and great joy.  Gospel truth... that sounds too good to be true.  Hatred and indifference that crucify Jesus... and love that bears the nails and then rises from the dead.  These are not opposites from which we must choose--they come together.  They are held in tension, in paradox.  

Follow me back to that first Easter morning for a moment, would you?  This seems a fitting place to conclude this month's focus on how love "rejoices in the truth," as we've been looking at throughout June.  One of the things I keep coming back to about this story, especially as Matthew tells it, is the mix of seemingly contradictory reactions to the truth of the empty tomb: the women run from the tomb "with fear and great joy." Not just fear, and not pure ecstasy, either, but both at the same time.  After all, if Jesus really is alive again, then everything they "knew" about life, about power, and about the universe itself is thrown up into the air and turned upside down.  That's going to mess with their heads for a while, and ultimately rearrange their entire way of thinking and living in the world.  Like the line of David Foster Wallace riffing on Jesus puts it, "The truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you."

That's resurrection morning for you--an impossible mix of news so good it brings tears to your eyes that is also so mind-blowing it forces you to do the hard work of rethinking everything else.  Most of the time in our lives, we are resistant to that kind of truth, because we don't like our views of the world turned on their heads, nor our apple-carts upset.  When Copernicus realized that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system, he ran into hostility, rejection, and condemnation from the Respectable Religious Leaders of the day (both the Roman Catholic magisterium, and sadly, our own Martin Luther ridiculed him) who couldn't fit that discovery of truth with the systems they had already permanently set up in their minds.  When that happens, people get excommunicated, burned at the stake, or branded as heretics, time and time again.  So you can understand why there is at least some level of "fear" for the women who have just been brought face to face with an angel and an empty tomb.  If Jesus is alive again, they don't know what is solid anymore--and they are being sent into uncharted territory to bring the dangerous news to the disciples who will also be skeptical and afraid when they hear it.  And yet, of course, the truth that Jesus is alive again was reason to rejoice--and to see the truth in the folded graveclothes and the rolled away stone made it clear this wasn't a cruel joke or wish waiting to be disillusioned.  It was good news, worthy of rejoicing over, exactly because it was true.  And yet it was also scandalous and subversive news, because it was it was the truth and not just a fairy tale.

I want to suggest that being a Christian always involves the choice to live in that constant tension, holding together both the deeply joyful and comforting news of life beyond the grip of death and the deeply perplexing need to re-think everything in light of the resurrection.  And I want to suggest, further, that in some ways our whole lives of faith never move beyond that Sunday morning as we find ourselves in the sandals of two women named Mary running from the tomb to preach the first Easter sermon.  We never grow out of the call to tell anyone we can find, with tears of joy and trembling hands at the same time, that Love incarnate refused to stay dead in order to make everything new.  We never leave that mission behind, for whatever other things churches may do and whatever other projects, programs, and ministries we might pick up.  And neither do we ever move beyond that tension of being stirred up with joy alongside being shaken to the foundations as the resurrection makes us re-examine everything else we thought we knew.

That brings me to one last thing I want us to be clear about from this month's focus.  When we say, along with Paul the Apostle, that love "rejoices in the truth," it's never separable from the particular truth we have come to know in Jesus--the truth of life beyond the grip of death, the truth of love that is stronger than hatred, the truth of grace beyond deserving.  We don't throw a party for every factually correct sentence ever spoken, just because it is "the truth" (I'm pretty indifferent, actually, about the fact that two-plus-two-equals-four, and I'm heartbroken by truths like a terminal diagnosis for someone I care about, or the number of children who go hungry every night).  Rather, we rejoice in the particular truth of Jesus--the truth that at his table the outcasts are given places of honor, the truth that his love will not let us go, and the truth that his life.

I remember an insight of my preaching professor from back in seminary that stays with me these days. He used to say that a faithful sermon will always speak "trouble enough to make you squirm and grace enough to make you weep."  I think he was right, and I would say that beyond just preaching sermons, that's each of our calling.  We are sent as witnesses--to whomever we meet in ordinary life situations and routine workdays--to share joyful news that Jesus is risen, which is also troublesome news because it makes us question all the other stories we've come to believe about the finality of death, the need for power, and myth of scarcity.  

May we find ourselves both always reeling from the revolutionary announcement that the Old Order of things has been dethroned, and always rejoicing at the message of the women that the same Jesus who dethroned that Old Order is alive forever with a love that will not let us go.

Lord Jesus, keep us rejoicing in the truth of your life beyond the grip of death, even when it shakes everything else we thought we knew down to the foundations.