Easter Message | 2019
I cherish this time of the church year. I cherish the traditions of Holy Week—as well as Easter itself.
- Last Sunday’s procession, celebrating Jesus entering Jerusalem by holding up the palm branches and declaring him as king.
- And Maundy Thursday…
- Remembering his Last Supper.
- And the foot-washing ceremony. (But this year, there were more people involved. All my kneeling to wash and dry their feet—it did a number on my back! Fortunately, I quickly recovered.)
- Last, the stripping of the altar. The barrenness, the somberness, the silence of it all.
- Then Good Friday…
- The procession and veneration of the cross.
- The Stations of the Cross—the pictures of Jesus depicting
his passion—displayed here on these walls.
- Finally, last night’s Easter Vigil.
- The Great Fire, from which was lit the Paschal Candle.
- Then the cantor intoning the liturgy as we processed from the courtyard here to the nave.
- And the reading of the salvation story—all the way from the waters of creation to the waters of the River Jordan.
The vigil is filled with a sense of profound mystery and a quiet joy. For some, it’s the most meaningful experience of Holy Week—even more so than this morning.
Speaking of this time, this morning, I most certainly love it as well.
- The music.
- The singing of hymns of celebration.
- The playing of the organ and the brass ensemble.
- The adult choir, the children’s choir and the hand bells.
- Also, the symbols of Easter, including the empty cross.
Most of you, but probably not everyone, may be surprised to learn that not all Christians use symbols in their worship—nowhere inside their buildings or outside, either. Not even empty crosses.
It’s a disagreement the church faced in its early years, again in the Middle Ages, and especially during the Reformation. In some places today, it remains among Christians a cause of division. It has to do with how groups interpret the Second Commandment—whether a graven image refers to that of one or more false gods or even includes images of the God that we as believers all worship.
For myself, I have to say I appreciate so much those symbols reminding us of God and the Christian life. They just seem to add to the richness of worship and to our personal lives, as reminders of who we are and whom we adore and obey.
Besides the empty cross, there are yet other symbols of Easter. For example, those taken from creation. Like, among the other flowers adorning the chancel, these lilies. When we see them, we may sometimes associate them with cemeteries or memorial gardens, which might remind us more of death than life. And, in part, that’s fitting. The decaying of the bulb represents the wasting away of the body. Yet what ultimately happens is that, in the spring, they come forth from the ground, displaying again their beautiful blossoms.
Another Easter symbol from the plant world is the pomegranate, because the seeds that “[burst] forth from [it] symbolize the power of the Lord who burst forth alive from the tomb.” Have any of you ever heard of that symbol before?
Images of living creatures also remind us of Easter. One of them used is the mythical bird known as the phoenix, which, after living for several hundred years, is destroyed by fire caused from the heat of the sun—only to rise up from its ashes being born anew in its glory. Another bird is, strangely enough, the peacock. “After shed[ding] its feathers each [autumn, it seems to] grow…[even] more beautiful ones [in the year to follow].” It’s an image often appearing on the walls of the catacombs.
Besides the empty cross, perhaps the most significant symbol of Easter—and arguably the most beautiful—is the butterfly. It begins with that unbecoming, gray-brown cocoon, also known as a chrysalis. Like the grave of Jesus, what it holds seems completely lifeless. Then later we notice that an opening has been made. Like the women approaching the tomb, we find that the cocoon is now empty. Last of all, we behold flitting nearby that bright, beautiful butterfly, reminding us of the beauty of the risen, resurrected Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene, the other women, and, later, the other disciples.
In closing, I want to share with you a story about butterflies. It has to do with a woman, a woman named Lavern. Once, when interviewing with a congregation, I and Deborah were invited to a dinner at the home where she and her husband lived. At that time, we
didn’t know it would be the first of a number of times of dinner invitations. That’s how Lavern was, as well as a modest person and an all-around, good Christian woman.
Well, one year, near the end of my pastorate, Lavern became sick, soon diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Fortunately, she never suffered any pain, but with time, could no longer live at home. She was moved to a room at the local nursing center. Now we often think of such places as way-stations from life to death. And frankly, that’s often what they are, whether one lives in such a place for a number of weeks or months or even years. For Lavern it was, as I remember, not very long. Most of the time, I found her sleeping in her room. Sometimes a relative would be sitting near the bed.
One day, however—as I walked through the door—I was met by a big surprise. That plain-looking, sanitized room had undergonea transformation! It was full of butterflies! Not real ones, mind you, but colorful ones nonetheless.
- Pictures of them taped all over the walls.
- Cut-out, butterfly mobiles tied to strings hanging down
from the ceiling.
- And most beautiful of all, a stained-glass butterfly sitting
on the windowsill.
Asking a nurse’s aide about them, I was told that Lavern’s daughter and daughter-in-law had recently come to decorate the room. The staff person told me they said the image of the butterfly was one of her favorites—something I hadn’t known before. There, in that room of impending death, Lavern was surrounded by life. Whenever entering the room, her loved ones not only saw her body wasting away—heightening their sense of grief—but they were also inspired by both the reassuring and overwhelming presence of the risen Christ. Their simple trust in the goodness of God—that inspired me. And it still does.
Whenever you see a butterfly or, for that matter, experience anything else that reminds you of the risen Lord—a passage of scripture, a hymn, some other symbol of the resurrection—may that simple trust in God belong also to you.
“But [the women’s] words seemed to [the disciples] an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”
Idle tale. Another version of the Bible says “fairy tale.” Still another, “nonsense.” My favorite is this one: “sheer imagination.”…“these words seemed to them [sheer imagination].”
In the resurrection accounts, it should come as no surprise that the men who were closest to Jesus did not believe the testimony of the women who were closest to him. To say in that age and region women were, at the very least, regarded as second-class citizens—superior only to children and the outcasts of society—and so were not considered as reliable about facts as men is an understatement. Time, place, and culture have not completely done away with that opinion, with that prejudice. In the mid-1990s, a member of the National Association of Women Judges wrote the following:
Custom and law have taught that women are not to be taken seriously and are not to be believed. For most of this country’s history, the law class[ified] women with children and the mentally impaired and forbade us to own property, enter into contracts, or vote….Although the laws have changed, social science and legal research reveal that women are still perceived as less credible than men.[1]
According to many studies, that’s true even when it comes to experts who are called, in court cases, to the witness stand. Even up to the present, male and female stereotypes still, to some degree, persist. For men, they revolve “around [characteristics such as] “competence, assertion, and rationality, whereas female stereotypes [focus] on warmth and expressiveness.” While men still continue somewhat to be regarded as “very logical…and easily able to separate feelings from ideas,” women continue having to disprove the opposite—that they are “very illogical” and are “unable to separate feelings from ideas.”[2]
We certainly see this portrayal of women in the resurrection account in the Gospel of Luke, who were, when they saw the two men at the tomb, “terrified”—as if the disciples would not have been! We may see that focus on feelings also in the Gospel of John, when Mary Magdalene, in her grief, became disoriented, recognizing neither that the men in the tomb were very different from other men nor that the man in the garden was Jesus and not the groundskeeper. Her emotions of despondency, of hopelessness impaired her perception to see things as they were.
Stereotypes are unfortunate, are unfair in that they are simplistic. Much too often they pigeonhole persons in one way or another. They fail to account for the wonderful
diversity and variety and uniqueness of each member of the human race.
At the same time, they do have some basis in reality. That’s something that, in one way, is hinted at in a landmark book written many years ago by a forensic psychologist—David Shapiro. The title of the book is Neurotic Styles,[3] in which he identifies and maps out several kinds of such tendencies, namely, the obsessive-compulsive personality, the paranoid, the hysterical, and the impulsive. While the obsessive-compulsive style may be the most common among us—including yours truly—the hysterical tendency is, rightly or wrongly, more closely associated with women. Shapiro notes it involves problems with memory, with recalling details of an event, remembering instead only general impressions. Other characteristics include suggestibility and emotional outbursts, the second of which almost seem to come from outside the individual—like an “alien force” invading her very being. If the disciples understood the women at the tomb in such a way, it’s little wonder that they didn’t believe them.
At the same time, it’s important to know that Shapiro identifies the impulsive neurotic style mostly with men. Words that describe it are “whim, urge…, and giving in.” Such actions can be characterized by “speediness, abruptness, and lack of planning…” Such persons focus not on the long-range consequences of some of their actions, but rather on satisfying immediate desires.
When thinking about such markers, I cannot help but see in my mind one other actor in today’s gospel—and that is Peter. Doesn’t the impulsive style really seem to describe him? Think about it.
- When, at the Sea of Galilee, Jesus first called out to Peter and his brother in their boat and told them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people, [i]mmediately they left their nets and followed him.”
- Again, w/Peter and others in a boat—and Jesus walking toward them on the open sea—Peter called out, “‘Lord,…command me to come to you on the water.’ [Jesus] said, ‘Come.’ So Peter got out of the boat, started walking…, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and [began] to sink…”
- And when Jesus was betrayed, the chief priests, Pharisees, and soldiers coming out to arrest him, “…Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear.”
If Peter was anything, he was impulsive, rash, acting first and thinking later —if thinking at all.
One other such action of his comes at the end of today’s Gospel. Although we may assume he had the same attitude as the other disciples—that the women had gotten
spooked at the tomb and came running back to the men with their fantastic story—nevertheless Peter soon and maybe secretly “got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in[seeing] the linen cloths by themselves; then…[returning] home, [was] amazed at what had happened.
Even if Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women had suddenly been seized by a case of mass hysteria, at least Peter himself was hardly in a position to dismiss their testimony. Like the women—and the other men—he certainly had his own faults, his own shortcomings. And yet God used him and all the others to share the good news proclaimed early on the morning of the first day of that week.
Three years ago, in a Bible study in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Little Rock, AR, the leader took up the question about each of the gospels recounting that the first witnesses of the resurrection were women. Given the low status of women at that time—and through much of history since then—it seems likely, he said, that the hierarchy of the Church—in order to make the good news more believable—would have “changed” the story so that the male disciples and not the women would have had that role. He points out that since “their witness was not [regarded as] credible in their own time and place…makes it far more likely that they were…the first witnesses. So [a]nyone who thinks the [gospel writers of the early Church made up the accounts] of the resurrection must ask themselves why the Gospels all insist on telling the story of the women [as] the first witnesses. What was once ‘nonsense’ [or an idle tale or supposedly sheer imagination] is now a clear testimony” to the message given to and passed on by what we could call expert witnesses: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen!”[4]
[1] Schafran, Lynn Hecht Schafran, “Credibility in the Courts: Why Is There a Gender Gap?” in The Judges’ Journal (Winter, 1995): 34.
[2] Tess M.S. Neal, et al, “Warmth and Competence on the Witness Stand: Implications for the Credibility of Male and Female Expert Witnesses,” in Journal of the American Association of Psychology and the Law Online, volume 40 (December 2012): 488-497. Also see Neal, “Women as Expert Witnesses: A Review of the Literature,” Public Policy Center, University of Nebraska (March 2014).
[3] David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles (Basic Books, 1965; 2nd edition, 1999).
[4] Clifford M. Yeary, “Women First to Witness the Resurrection,” in Arkansas Catholic (Diocese of Little Rock, 14 September, 2013).