On the Way -9:00am

Written by Bill Weisenbach

Saturday, 22 March 2008

On the Way Text: Matthew 28:1-10    There's an old joke.  What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Presbyterian?  And the answer is: someone who rings your doorbell but who has absolutely no idea what to say.  They must not have been Presbyterian, those two women on that first Easter morning.  They had a message that needed to be told; the message that Jesus had been raised from the dead.     Now, I don’t know about you, but about the last thing I want is for some wild-eyed person knocking on my door at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning, telling me about some graveyard vision that they've had.  In fact, to have anyone knocking on our door for any reason is something not often done in our polite community, we call first.  Uninvited visitors are usually unwelcome and we approach our front door with suspicion not knowing, moving from OK to bad news, if it will be the UPS man wanting a signature, the Girl Scouts selling cookies or the Jehovah’s Witnesses wanting us to subscribe to the Watchtower.  We assume that whoever's on our doorstep is someone that we probably don't want to talk to.      It used to be that people would have their name on a sign in front of their house, or at least on the mailbox.  Nowadays what you see is a street number and a sign announcing what security firm is protecting the house, and warnings that tell you not to trespass, or to beware of the dog.  Our homes are no longer places where we welcome strangers.  Nowadays our homes are fortresses, where others come by invitation only.      We modern folk just don't want anybody, especially if they have not bothered to call ahead, knocking at our door at dawn to share with us the latest news from the cemetery and we are equally not inclined to carry that message anywhere else.   So even though the Easter angel says, "Go quickly and tell," we don't.  At best, we keep it to ourselves.    But I think there is more than culture that makes us reluctant to “go quickly and tell,” we are Presbyterians, so we aren’t sure what it is we are to tell, the facts are sparse.  Matthew's Gospel gives us little to go on.   All Matthew really tells us is that Jesus' body wasn't stolen.  And he makes that point by reminding us that Roman soldiers were posted outside the tomb.  The Roman army was fierce, Roman soldiers were the elite of their day, the Green Berets of their time.  And those Roman soldiers knew that if they failed in their duty, the penalty was their own death.  But Matthew says that somehow, even with those guards there, Jesus was raised.  Even when that angel is mentioned, note that the purpose of that angel was not to resurrect Jesus.  No, the implication is that Jesus had already been raised, and that the angel came down simply to roll away the stone so that the women and the others could see for themselves that Jesus wasn't there.  So, dislike it as we may, Matthew doesn’t give us a very helpful explanation of what happened on that Easter morning.  Instead, all we're told on this Easter morning is to go and tell.  Those women were willing to do that.  And as they did so, they saw Jesus.      It's important to note that aside from the Easter stories in the four Gospels, the New Testament does not even mention the empty tomb, but it talks about resurrection constantly and the reason for that is, that by itself, an empty tomb doesn't prove anything.  It doesn't necessarily mean that he's been resurrected.  All an empty tomb means is that he's not there.      There was a young minister, fresh out of seminary.  He had been asked to go to the cemetery to perform a brief committal service for an old man, a Mr.  Smith, who had died.  He was informed that there were no family members present and that he and the funeral director would probably be the only ones there, so they arranged to meet at the grave at noon.  But on his way to the cemetery he got lost.  By the time he finally got there it was past one and he didn't see the funeral director anywhere so he assumed that the burial had proceeded without him.  Feeling remorse, the young minister looked around and noticed some freshly dug earth and a couple of workers sitting nearby.  So he walked to the spot and proceeded to pray a prayer over the mounded earth.   Just then, one of the worker looked at the other and said: "I’ve see a lot of strange things in this cemetery, but I’ve never seen anybody pray over a septic tank?"    On Easter, the angel reminds us that Jesus isn't in a cemetery, the tomb is empty.  We're not asked to believe in an empty grave because we're not going to find Jesus in a graveyard.  As the angel said, he's not here.      So then, where do we meet Jesus?  Do you remember what the women were instructed to tell the disciples.  Not “go back to the cemetery and look at the empty tomb.”   No, they were told to go to Galilee, to the area where Jesus had healed and taught and worked wonders.  That’s where they would find him, better yet, that’s where he would find them!  Mary and Martha meet up with him after obeying the angles instructions.  They met up with Jesus on the way.  As they listened to the angel's voice and went out to tell the others and Jesus found them.        May it be so for you and for me.

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