Our Women Amazed Us
Easter 2003

Week of April 21, 2003

Lectionary Readings

Isaiah 25:6-9
Acts 10:34-43
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
John 20:1-18

After three year of healings, miracles, and teachings, the earthly ministry of Jesus seemed to end in disaster for the twelve disciples. They had left everything to follow him, and then tragedy and catastrophe struck. Impetuous Peter denied that he would ever deny the Lord, but did so three times. The other eleven said the same thing. During Jesus’s darkest moments in Gethsemane they fell asleep. Judas betrayed the Lord, then later hanged himself. When Jesus was arrested we read that all the disciples deserted him and fled (Matthew 26:56). Things were pretty much the same after the crucifixion. They cowered behind locked doors for fear of the Jews (John 20:19). And why not? If they killed Jesus they might just as easily kill them too. Even at the great commission some of the eleven doubted his resurrection (Matthew 28:17).

The Gospels paint a different portrait of the many women who followed Jesus and supported him out of their personal means. Four women are mentioned by name in the resurrection accounts---Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and Salome--but it seems clear that there were more. They were the last at the cross and the first at the tomb. Mark writes that when these women discovered the empty tomb they trembled with bewilderment. “They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid” (Mark 16:8, NIV). Matthew writes that they were “afraid yet filled with joy” (Matthew 28:8, NIV). When they did tell the eleven and the others, “they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense” (Luke 24:11, NIV). Thomas remained adamant in his doubts (John 20:24-25).

Two others were walking to the village of Emmaus, downcast because of the violent end to all their dreams, when Jesus appeared to them. Jesus, whose identity remained hidden to them, asked what had happened, at which point Luke adds a delicious detail: “Our women amazed us” (Luke 24:22, NIV) by telling them that Jesus was alive.

Even to those closest to Jesus it sounded like nonsense. It sounded amazing, that is, bizarre, inconceivable, or fabulous. But slowly, across the days and weeks, this became not only their confession but their deep conviction: “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!”

Late last month I spent a week at a Benedictine monastery on the edge of the Mojave desert. At an elevation of 3600 feet, the high desert is windy and cold, the landscape bleak and unforgiving. The surrounding San Gabriel mountains foreshorten your view of the sky. The overall impact makes one feel insignificant. If you walk about a half mile uphill on a washed out dirt road, you come to the monastic cemetery. As you round the bend of the road at the top of the ridge, on the right the first grave you come to is that of Todd Christopher. Todd was born in 1955, the same year that I was; he died when he was 39. The severity of the geography and the solemnity of the cemetery joined to make for a powerful experience. Some day I will take my place among the dead. Then what?

Then what? In the words from Isaiah the prophet for this week, the Lord Almighty will “swallow up death forever.” And there is more. Isaiah imagines our final future to be a feast with the finest aged wines and the best of meats. It will be a time when God will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove our every disgrace (Isaiah 25:8, NIV). Easter, then, offers us hope for a future of final restoration, resurrection and healing.

This becomes not only important but revolutionary when we acknowledge that our present life and times can be, in Isaiah’s words, full of tears. Maybe disgrace. To be sure, it will include the grim reaper of death. Paul describes our present life as a time of deep inward groanings, sometimes groanings too deep for words, a time of weakness, a time when sometimes we don’t even know how to pray. It is a time when we carry many burdens, a time when we can feel naked and vulnerable.¹

When we look around the world we see these tears and groanings, this disgrace and death, almost everywhere. Thousands have just perished in the Iraqi war. Almost unnoticed, at about the same time over a thousand people were butchered to death in the Congo among warring tribes. Roughly a third of the world---2 billion people---will go to sleep tonight hungry and thirsty because they lack even the meager necessities of life. Or we can look inward at our own lives and know the poverty of spirit, the restlessness and burdens we carry, some of our own making, some unbidden.

But that does not mean we live today in doom and gloom. In the midst of these sharp pangs of human mortality, God has given his children what Paul calls a “deposit” that guarantees our future inheritance. Today we experience what he calls the “first fruits” of a full harvest. A deposit is not a full payment, but it is a guarantee. The first fruits are limited, but they are a harbinger of what is to come. The key for Christians, then, is to live with a confident sense of our future outcome, no matter how bleak we find our present day circumstances. We seek to experience what one theologian called the “is-ness of the shall be.” We pray to know a sure but limited sense of the Already of God’s coming kingdom, even though we know all to well that so very much of it remains a future Not Yet.

At some level this sounds incredulous. I take comfort that those who walked most closely with Jesus for three years doubted the testimony of the women. It was, after all, so amazing that it sounded like nonsense. But they also came to believe that the women’s testimony to the resurrection was true, and so do Christians two millennia later. Christ has risen, and so shall we. He will wipe away every tear. He will remove every disgrace. He will swallow up death.

Today we can expect an inauguration or a commencement, but not a culmination, a partial beginning, not a final fulfillment. Frederick Buechner describes it this way:

There is deliverance, to use that beautiful old word, and Christians are people who through such now-and-then, here-and-there visions as they’ve had, through Christ, have been delivered just enough to know that there’s more where that came from, and whose experience of the little deliverance that has already happened inside themselves and whose faith in the deliverance still to happen is what sees them through the night.²

Though outwardly we experience any number of trials and tears, inwardly we are being renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16).

¹ See Romans 8:22-26; 2 Corinthians 1:22 and 5:2-4; and Ephesians 1:13.
² Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember (San Francisco: Harper), p. 112.