April 26, 2009
(Third Sunday of Easter)
Surviving Easter
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Acts 3:12-19
• Psalm 4
• 1 John 3:1-7
• Luke 24:36b-48
(From
The Lectionary Page)
“Well, I see you survived Easter,” the familiar voice on the phone said. The voice belonged to my friend Joan who lives in a suburb of Chicago and who is a very active member of her Episcopal parish. We compared notes on Holy Week services at our respective churches and from our respective perspectives – she as a lay person, me as a priest. Together, we marveled over the sheer number of hours logged in worship during Holy Week and Easter.
It was only after we hung up that I found myself mulling over the phrase, “Surviving Easter.” Obviously, we were speaking facetiously, as though a week of magnificent liturgy were somehow an ordeal to be endured. It dawned on me that the phrase, Surviving Easter, actually works at a more literal level as well. When we speak of being a survivor, we refer to living through a significant, often traumatic, event or experience and emerging from it profoundly changed.
Our gospel lesson for today from Luke takes place late on that first Easter Day. The resurrected Jesus has appeared to the women disciples who came to the tomb early in the morning to anoint his body. Later that same day, according to Luke, he appeared to Cleopas and his unnamed companion on the road to Emmaus – we’ll hear that story next year. Cleopas and his buddy dashed back to Jerusalem to tell the 11 remaining disciples that they had seen the Lord. They found the eleven in the upper room. It’s at this point that our gospel passage opens today, with the eleven now having two independent accounts of the resurrected Jesus. Predictably, they reacted to this news, not with apostolic vigor, but with paralysis. Jesus had been crucified. They had survived by running off. Not surprisingly, they gathered in the last place in which they had experienced the fullness of their relationship with their beloved teacher – the upper room where the Last Supper had taken place. Physically, they had survived. Emotional survival for them now meant somehow picking up the pieces of their lives in the midst of their grief and bewilderment and not-unreasonable fear. To the eleven, the wild tales told first by the women and later by Cleopas must have sounded like a pipedream at best, a cruel joke at worst. For heaven’s sakes, everyone knew that the only thing that followed death was more death. How could Jesus possibly be alive? The best that they could hope for on the evening of the first day of the week was to survive the next few days, both emotionally and spiritually, until everything calmed back down, and then try to figure out what to do next.
They had no idea.
Luke’s telling of the resurrection appearance to the eleven is dramatic, to say the least. Jesus is somehow able to enter a room through a closed door, but still corporeal enough for his wounds to be visible, and for him to eat some broiled fish. Clearly this is no vengeful ghost, no disembodied spirit, but exactly what physical form he takes Luke does not detail. True to form, Luke is less interested in spelling out the mechanics of the resurrection than in spelling out the implications for all who would follow Jesus. Surviving Easter, indeed! In one fell swoop, the disciples were whiplashed from abject grief to complete terror at the sight of their Lord, to overwhelming joy at his resurrection, to a dawning awareness of what this would mean for them. They were no longer to be merely Christ’s followers, his students if you will. They were to be his apostles, the ones who would go forth to all nations proclaiming repentance and forgiveness of sins in the name of the resurrected Jesus.
Luke, of course, will go on to detail how they did that in Part II of his gospel – the book that we call the Acts of the Apostles. In fact, our first reading this morning from Acts is a sample of Peter being an Easter Survivor. In the verses immediately preceding our reading, Peter does what, for him, would have been unimaginable only a short time earlier – he heals a man who was physically handicapped from birth. He acts in imitation of Christ AND he uses that healing as a teachable moment to do what Christ had commanded him to do, back in the upper room that first Easter evening – to proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sin in the name of Christ. In this, and in the other acts of the Apostles, as Luke will describe them, those with eyes to see and ears to hear will come to understand that being healed from a lifelong infirmity illustrates the fullness of the good news. Sin, our misuse of free will, impairs our movement and hinders our capacity to walk humbly with God. And it is overturned in the power of the resurrection. Sin and death, and the eternal separation that both place between us and God, is vanquished in the risen Christ. Peter could teach that only because he had lived through Easter and had been changed by it.
To be a survivor is to live through a significant event or experience and emerge from it profoundly changed. To survive Easter – to live through Easter and beyond Easter – is necessarily to order the remainder of one’s life through the good news of the resurrection. That was the commission given by Jesus to the eleven there on the evening of the first day of the week, and guess what? It is the commission that is given to us as well in baptism. It is to experience the joy of the resurrection and to allow that joy to change us, such that we – Easter Survivors every one of us -- are propelled into the fullness of daily discipleship. In the name of the risen Christ.
