First Reading
Acts 10:34–43
So Peter opened his mouth and said: “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. As for the word that he sent to Israel, preaching good news of peace through Jesus Christ (he is Lord of all), you yourselves know what happened throughout all Judea, beginning from Galilee after the baptism that John proclaimed: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. And we are witnesses of all that he did both in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and made him to appear, not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” (ESV)
Or
Jeremiah 31:1–6
“At that time, declares the LORD, I will be the God of all the clans of Israel, and they shall be my people.”
Thus says the LORD:
“The people who survived the sword
found grace in the wilderness;
when Israel sought for rest,
the LORD appeared to him from far away.
I have loved you with an everlasting love;
therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.
Again I will build you, and you shall be built,
O virgin Israel!
Again you shall adorn yourself with tambourines
and shall go forth in the dance of the merrymakers.
Again you shall plant vineyards
on the mountains of Samaria;
the planters shall plant
and shall enjoy the fruit.
For there shall be a day when watchmen will call
in the hill country of Ephraim:
‘Arise, and let us go up to Zion,
to the LORD our God.’” (ESV)
Second Reading
Colossians 3:1–4
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (ESV)
Or
Acts 10:34–43 (See Above)
Gospel Text
John 20:1–18
Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” So Peter went out with the other disciple, and they were going toward the tomb. Both of them were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. And stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples went back to their homes.
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”—and that he had said these things to her. (ESV)
Or
Matthew 28:1–10
Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you.” So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. And behold, Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.” (ESV)
Comments and Questions for Discussion
First Reading
I think that reading this passage to study it, we do well to place it in some context. This speech comes when Peter visits the centurion, Cornelius. You remember the setting. Peter was on the roof, hungry, and he has a vision, a great sheet filled with all sorts of animals descends from heaven and God says, “Peter, kill and eat.” Peter replies, “Never, Lord, I’ve never eaten anything unclean.” And God says, “What I have made clean, do not call (make) unclean.” (It’s usually translated “call unclean” but the word is translated as “defile” in a much more transitive sense everywhere else in the Bible, so I think “make unclean” makes better sense.
So Peter then receives word that Cornelius wants to see him and he goes, and when Cornelius tells him about his own dream and why he’d asked Peter to come, our reading is what Peter said in reply.
First thing to note. In our reading, Peter is speaking to a Gentile, a powerful Gentile. Peter isn’t explaining anything to other Jews, it’s as if he’s thinking aloud in front of Cornelius and his family. “Ahhh! Now I get it! I understand what that dream meant!”
And then he goes on to preach the Gospel to a Gentile. I think that what we get here is the earliest form of the Gospel, that Jesus was anointed by God, that He went about doing good and healing, that He was put to death “on a tree” (a death bearing a particular curse, per Deut. 21:22-23, and which Paul cites, Gal. 3:13), that He was raised from the dead, and that He commanded that forgiveness of sin be preached in and through His Name. That’s the Gospel in a nutshell, and probably all that was preached at times in the first months and years after Jesus’ ascension.
And it’s preached to a Gentile. It’s not the first time it’s preached to a Gentile. Philip gets that honor in Acts 8, but we don’t hear the content of that message from Philip. We do from Peter.
Peter basically summarizes everything that Luke wrote in his first book, his Gospel. That he does so to a Gentile long before God calls Saul/Paul to go to the Gentiles, is incredibly important. Last year, in Year C, I wrote at some length about what I believe to be one of Luke’s larger purposes in contributing a third Gospel to those that already existed (he clearly knew Matthew and Mark’s gospels) and then also adding on another book, The Acts of the Apostles. That purpose being to try to heal a breach that was growing wider and wider between Jewish and Gentile Christians. I won’t try to go into all of that now, but here’s a link to some of that discussion from last year, from All Saints. (CLICK HERE)
What matters here (well, not the only thing, but an important thing) is that Luke’s version of Peter’s speech invokes the main elements that he sees binding up the divided Jewish and Gentile Christians. First, Jesus was anointed with the Holy Spirit. This ties Jesus back firmly into His Jewish roots. Luke reminds his readers that it is the same Spirit that moved over the waters and throughout the Hebrew Scriptures that empowered Jesus to do what He did. This speaks to both Jewish and Gentile believer, because the Holy Spirit was so active and prevalent in their gatherings. Both groups are experiencing powerfully and immediately the same Spirit that worked through Jesus. Then Peter reminds the reader that it was the prophets who foresaw all that Jesus had done. To Jewish believers this is a reminder that Jesus is one of them, to Gentile believers, a reminder that they did not emerge ex nihilo, that the Gospel they know came from the Jews.
All neatly wrapped up in the earliest form of the preaching of the Gospel, and preached by Peter, not Paul, to a Gentile. This matters a lot because Paul was such a point of contention between the Jewish and Gentile groups in early Christianity. Luke reminds his readers that nothing Paul did had not been done first by Peter. (This isn’t the only time Luke does this in Acts.)
That’s all well and good, but what does that purpose of Luke’s have to do with us today? Here’s how I see it.
In my experience and study there is no greater healer of division that the Holy Spirit. Luke saw it, and I’ve seen it. My favorite historical example is the Azusa Street revival. In 1907, William Seymour led a revival in a repurposed warehouse that helped birth the modern pentecostal movement in Christianity. William Seymour, a black man, led white and black people into the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. People sat on benches made of planks set on buckets. Men sat side by side with women they didn’t know. Black people and white people didn’t just worship in the same building, they sat next to one another. Nobody cared. It was scandalous. When the Holy Spirit falls we really are “one in the Spirit.”
I meet weekly with a group of men from another church. They’re a lot more conservative than I am. But we work together because I recognize the Spirit at work in them and they see it in me, and so we can sit in fellowship around our breakfast table. We don’t get bogged down in doctrinal or political differences because we know there’s something bigger binding us.
I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see Luke’s vision of a church united by the Holy Spirit heal the divisions that confront us these days.
Or (alternate first reading)
Our reading from Jeremiah comes from the portion of the book called by some the “Book of Consolation” or the “Small Consolation,” basically chapters 30 and 31. I should note at the outset that scholars have disagreed about the authorship of these chapters, offering a variety of theories as to their source. Some see them as a later addition to the book, others see a “Jeremiac kernel” in them on which someone has amplified. Others see some of these chapter as coming from the prophet, while excluding certain verses, while others consider them all to be from Jeremiah himself, and treat those particular verses as the pinnacle of his thought. The verses in question are these.
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31–34, ESV)
What troubles scholars is the truth that chapters 30 and 31 of Jeremiah are so thematically different in the hope that they offer from the rest of the book, which one writer described as “all disaster.” But I’ve read enough of the discussion of those verses to have come down on the side of those who see all of these two chapters as from the prophet, including those two verses. I do, however believe that the were given/written later than the place in which they occur in the book.
What is lacking in almost any scholarly discussion of prophetic books is an understanding of inspiration, any understanding of inspiration. While these chapters are very different in tone from the rest of Jeremiah’s work, it is quite understandable to me that Jeremiah might have been led to speak thus, especially in the years following the overthrow of Jerusalem, which is why I would date our own reading later than its location among the other chapters (as some scholars would also do).
Having said all that, how are we to read this passage in light of its assignment to Easter Sunday? It seems almost too easy to point to the promise of restoration to Israel, now destroyed by the Chaldeans, and suggest that this theme is characteristic of Easter. I find myself searching and searching for something more complex, more challenging, and finding little. Still, this is what I have noted.
God speaks to Israel as to an individual. While some scholars think that “Israel” refers only to the Northern Kingdom, I agree with those who think that Jeremiah’s vision of Israel goes back to the time when all the tribes were united and all were called “Israel.” This is a pre-monarchical vision of the nation, which is consistent with the theme of distrust of the monarchy that runs throughout the prophetic tradition in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Thus personified “Israel” really does evoke the individual, Jacob, whom God loves “with an everlasting love.” And in Jacob/Israel all will be blessed when God restores them as one. Here I think is a theme we can really latch onto for Easter. Because Jesus’ resurrection is our resurrection. As we die with Him, so we are raised with Him. The love that the Father has for the Son He has for all of us. Reading Jeremiah on Easter reminds me, reminds us, that this Sunday is not only about His emergence from the tomb, but our own as well. And now I wish I’d actually preached on Jeremiah while I was still in active ministry. But I’m sure I never did.
Second Reading
Such a short little reading! In a less serious setting I might suggest that after the Tolstoy-like Gospel readings of the last few weeks and during Holy Week, the choosers of our lessons just decided to give us a little break. But I wouldn’t do that. Would I?
Only slightly more seriously, as I read and re-read this passage praying for something meaningful to say about it, the first thing that kept coming to mind was a saying I used to hear sometimes in North Carolina. “Some people are just so heavenly minded, they’re no earthly good!” You know the sort they mean. That person who drifts through life blissfully unaware of the pain and confusion around them because they’ve “set their mind on things above.”
Of course, I don’t think that’s what the author of Colossians means at all. No indeed.
On the contrary, the one who sets their mind on things above becomes a dynamo, with a heart set on seeing the Kingdom, in which they already live, manifest ever more fully on earth. Hidden with Christ in God (Take a moment to create a visual image of that. When I do it takes my breath away.) they draw on an inexhaustible well of life and energy to bring the Kingdom into being.
Of course, some will still say they’re “too heavenly minded” because they eschew worldly methods to try to bring a Kingdom result. They will decline to try to use political power to create heavenly realities. Like Jeremiah above and the whole of the prophetic tradition, they will recognize that such earthly hierarchies can never impose peace from above. They can never engender the true knowledge of God that brings change of heart.
But they will work. Joyfully, tirelessly, they will work to bring the Kingdom that Jesus died to inaugurate. They will “run with endurance the race that is set before them, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of their faith, who, for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”
Good Friday made this goal a reality. Easter Day declares that reality to the world, and invites us to set our eyes on the joy set before us as well.
Gospel Text
(John 20:18)
I am glad that in every lectionary year the Resurrection Narrative from John is listed first. There is much to glean from all of the synoptic tellings of that Sunday morning, but none is as personal and moving as the moment Jesus speaks the name, “Mary.” It is to me the perfect mate to Jesus’ call to His beloved friend, “Lazarus, come out!” In John 11 Jesus cries out in a “great voice,” and here He speaks in a voice barely above a whisper, but He calls just as loudly, “Come out.”
“Come out of your grief. Come out of your despair. The tomb that held Lazarus is broken forever and a new world emerges with me into the daylight. Come out.” And it’s all said so gently.
Mary’s encounter with Jesus is missing from all the synoptic Gospels. But she was a member of the Johannine community, and so it is understandable that a story so personal and precious would not have been widely enough circulated to find its way into the sources used by the synoptic evangelists. Some even suggest that it was Mary who transcribed the remembrances of the Beloved Disciple and wrote the gospel itself. I don’t have any objection to that idea, though I don’t find much support for it in the text.
What speaks to me is the way that Mary draws us all into the story when she asks the gardener where the body of Jesus is because “we” do not know where they have taken Him. I suppose that she could have meant herself and Peter and the Disciple whom Jesus loved, all who had so far looked into the tomb. Some suggest that the “we” is an oblique reference to the group of women who visited the tomb. No matter who, though, Mary speaks for the collective, for them, for all of us. Jesus’ absence from the tomb makes no sense, and we are mired in our despair, in our own tombs.
And Jesus speaks her name. My name. Your name. And calls us out into the daylight with Him.
Next year, or some year after that, I’ll probably write something a little more “scholarly” about John’s Resurrection Narrative. But not this year.
Or
(Matthew 28:1-10)
When I sat down to write about Matthew’s Resurrection Narrative, I thought about doing what I’d done last week with the three Passion Narratives, laying them out side by side to facilitate comparison and to highlight differences so that it would be easier to identify the ways that each evangelist’s different emphases shaped the way they told the story.
But that seemed a cop-out somehow. I may yet do that, but the stories are so much shorter I don’t think it’s necessary.
What do we see in Matthew’s narrative that we don’t see in others?
First, there is the earthquake. This earthquake connects this mighty act of God back firmly to the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. God’s presence is frequently paired with the shaking of the earth, and we know that these connections will be especially important to Matthew’s Jewish congregation. But there is one earthquake in particular that I connect this one to, the one that involved Elijah, one of the two who appeared with Jesus at the Transfiguration. When Elijah was alone and in despair, God told him to go and stand at the mouth of his cave. (1 Kings 19) And he went out and there followed a great wind, an earthquake, and fire. But God was in none of them, as God was not really revealed in this earthquake. God revealed HImself to Elijah in that “still, small voice.” And Jesus reveals Himself to the women with a word. “Greetings.”
And the still small voice goes on to commission Elijah, sending him to anoint Hazael and Jehu and Elisha. And Jesus goes on to commission the women, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.”
You will have a very hard time trying to convince me that these parallels are coincidence.
Next, instead of two men in dazzling raiment (Luke) or one young man in a white robe (Mark), we have an angel first announcing the resurrection to the two Maries. I think this bookends Matthew’s Gospel rather neatly. In a moment of great confusion an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and explains that Mary’s baby is of the Holy Spirit, and assigns him a task, to name the baby Jesus. In a moment of great terror and confusion, another angel appears to the women at the tomb and explains to them that He has been raised and will go before them, and gives them the task of telling the disciples. Where Luke’s emphasis on human agency renders the two as “men” (though their dazzling robes suggest angelic presence?) and Mark’s single man in his white robe brings the story arc of the young man in the second gospel to a close, Matthew’s emphasis is on divine agency, and we see an angel.
Lastly, in Matthew’s version of events, when the women recognize Jesus they “take hold of his feet.” Then Jesus sends them off. This sounds like an echo of Mary Magdalene’s “Rabboni” and Jesus response, “Do not cling to me.”
There is another echo in this for me, that of the Transfiguration. Of Peter’s desire to stay in that place with the Transfigured Jesus and build shelters. So also the women might have stayed in that place of adoration upon finding the Resurrected Jesus. But the response is the same. “Don’t stay here. Go.”
