By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, March 31, 2024)
Hallelujah. Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Hallelujah. Please be seated. Happy Easter everyone. Thank you for joining us and celebrating your Easter with us. I wish you had this view. You all look beautiful. This is great. Thank you for coming and being part of our celebrations today, sharing your celebration with us today. It is of course the great feast of Easter, the signal feast, the central feast of the church calendar. One of the two big feasts that we preachers preach on every year, Christmas and Easter, right?
And among other things, I teach a preaching class here at Harvard, and one of the things I try to relate to my students, some of them are here, don't ask them too closely, but some things I try to relate is these are stories for humans, human stories. And part of what we were trying to do is relate to these stories at a human level. And on Christmas, that level of human relation, trying to find that relation to the story of the birth of Jesus, seeing new life and the story of that birth in a manger, that's easy because all of us have seen a baby. Most of us have. All of us have been babies. We know babies. The miracle of new life in new life. That is obvious to us. We can relate to that. Christmas is easy to preach on.
Easter, this glorious day, the central feast of our church year is trickier. All of us have seen babies. Who among us have seen the dead raised? We hear about it once a year. But how do we relate that to our own experience? How do we enter into this? How do we see new life here? So I was thinking about this throughout the week and especially yesterday closing in. And so I did what I often do when I am stumped by a sermon. I went to my children to try to get a cute story out of them. And Danny, our ten-year-old, is the one most likely to say something endearingly irreverent.
So I recruited him to go to Market Basket with me yesterday to go shopping for Easter dinner. And while he was in the car on the drive over, I said to Danny, planting my seeds, "Danny, what does Easter mean to you?" And Danny responded immediately and helpfully, "Easter baskets and candy." And so I said, "Well, Danny, what does that have to do with Jesus?" And he thought for a minute and he said, "Well, Jesus wants us to be happy and Easter baskets make me happy." So there you go, Easter.
And so I pressed a little harder because I didn't know if that alone would work for this sermon. And I said, "So what does that have to do with the story of Jesus with what happens on Easter morning?" And he said, "Well, his friends went to the tomb and it was empty." And I said, "Yeah, you're right. They did. How do you think they felt when they got to the tomb and it was empty?" And he thought for a second and he said, "Hmm. I think they probably felt pretty sad." And Mark tells us that they did. As I said, you all look beautiful today and the church is beautiful adorned with these lilies. We sound beautiful. The choir is magnificent this morning, always every Sunday, but especially so this morning.
And in the midst of all this of how beautiful you look, how beautiful the church is, the beautiful music around us, what rings through in the gospel passage Larry read is the sense of loss and fear, which haunts this morning for these women. They go to the tomb. The tomb is empty, and Danny is right. They're confused, they're afraid. The last word of the gospel passage today is they were afraid. And in fact, that's the last word of the first version of this gospel. They were afraid. It ends with this fear. I believe, and I hope you believe you're here, I hope you believe that this gospel message is good news, but it doesn't sound like good news yet to these women when they're at the tomb.
And not just for these women, but for the first readers of this gospel. Many of you have heard this before, but for visitors here, I can tell you that this gospel was not written a year or two after Jesus died. It was written 40 years after Jesus died. And in fact, it was written in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem. The Romans came in, they crucified thousands, they murdered thousands more, they enslaved thousands, they burned the city to the ground. It was a ruin. The crucified and the dead everywhere. And that's when they wrote down the story, the story they call the good news of Jesus Christ. And the last word of the gospel is they were afraid. Whatever else this gospel is about, it's about many things.
Whatever else it is about, it is at least about disaster or at least about how we respond. This was written as a response to this destruction and what it offers us, what it aims to offer us is a response to violence and loss. So what is that response? I mean, Jesus gives us a response in the larger narrative of the gospel. We've been reading the Gospel of Mark since early December and we can see this happening throughout the Gospel of Mark. In the first half of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is all miracles. He is all power and glory. He can do anything. He does raise the dead and he calms storms and he feeds thousands with a loaf of bread and he heals the sick.
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He demonstrates the most powerful acts, the most miraculous acts. And so it's no wonder that the people gather around him and they say, "This one is the one. Look at his power. Let's follow this power to Jerusalem." The problem is after he starts heading to Jerusalem, he starts shedding all that power. He stops performing all those miracles. He starts telling his friends, the people who accompany him, trusting in his power, he starts telling them that he's going to die, suffer and die, and they don't believe it. Why would they? They saw him raise the dead and calm storms and feed thousands.
And so when he does suffer, they run away. Most of them, they run away and they abandon him. What Jesus offers us in the gospel story is not force, but goodness. Not violence, but mercy. Not conquest, but love. Not war, but peace. The problem is that choice of peace by this Sunday morning has not yielded any magic solutions. The problem is 40 years later and the ashes of that ruined city, there were still no magic solutions. The choice of peace still offered no magic solutions. So what do we do? The world around us edging towards, maybe careening towards disaster. What do we do? Look what these women do, these brave women on Easter morning, they in fact respond just like Jesus in their way.
They have been surrounded by violence and loss and they respond with love. They go to the tomb to care for their friend, but it's a certain kind of love they respond with. It's a love that is without expectation. It's important to say, important for us to remember, especially as disaster lurks all around us in this world. It's important to say that these women did not know what would happen when they went to that tomb. They didn't even know what they would do when they got there. The stone was too heavy for them to move what they embark upon, the task they embark upon this morning, going to the tomb to care for the body of their beloved friend. It is impossible on its face.
The stone was too heavy. It is useless at best anointing a person for burial who is already buried. It was dangerous. At worst, the people who killed him still lurking around guarding that tomb and they did not know. They could not have known what their love would find when they went. And as our gospel passage ends this morning, they still don't know what they have found. The point though is they went to the tomb not knowing. They went to the tomb ready to love him regardless of its impossibility or its usefulness or its danger. They didn't know what would happen. But I think this means that Easter is not about knowing what will happen or even what did happen at that empty tomb. Easter is not about knowing exactly what this resurrected life looks like or means who of us has seen the dead risen firsthand.
Easter is not about an outcome of which we are certain. It's about a love which endures even the worst outcomes. Easter is not about knowledge. It's about courage. And here I think is where the story gets relatable, where the kind of courage that can love even through bad outcomes is something each of us knows in our own life. At the nine o'clock service this morning, we had a baptism. Who is more courageous than a young parent who brings a child into the world, who wants to protect it from everything, who would do everything and anything in their power to protect that child, but also everyday knows that they cannot at the last protect that child from everything? They embark upon that task of love, not because they know what that child's life will be, but because the child deserves to be loved whatever happens.
Think about the other things that we call sacramental rights or sacraments in the church. Think of marriage. When people stand together and get married, they don't say to each other, "I know exactly how this is going to go, and that's why this is happening." They say, "For better or for worse, for richer and poorer. I don't know, but I love you. And so we will embark upon this together." All of us lose people we love and sometimes we do know how it's going to end. We're told exactly when our loved ones will die.
We do know the outcome, but knowing that our loved ones are dying doesn't make us love them less. It makes us love them more with all our hearts because we in those moments have the courage to love even lost causes. This is where it becomes relatable. We each of us knows the courage of that kind of love, knows that love has that kind of courage. And if we know it in our personal lives, we can also scale it and make it political as I believe Christ would want us to do. Think of justice in this country, racial justice in this country, the unrealized dream of racial justice in this country, or gender justice or economic justice.
Think of how fragile those dreams are today. Think about democracy in this country and how fragile it seems. What's going to happen with these dreams of justice that we have? Will they be realized? I don't know. Are these lost causes? I hope not. But whether they are or not, those who suffer injustice in this country deserve all our love and our energy. So love them more, not less. Think of peace in this world, intractable hatred and violence and especially so this morning and in the land of Jesus's birth and death and resurrection. Will there be peace in the Holy Land? Is that a lost cause? I hope not, but I don't know.
But whether it is or not, the starved and the bombed and the hostage people in the Holy Land deserve all our love and energy. So let's love them more, not less. Think of climate change, the carbon already in our atmosphere, the destruction that will come unless we change. Is this a lost cause? Is there hope? I don't know. But endangered species and endangered habitats and vulnerable communities, all of them deserve our love and our energy. So love them more, not less. We don't know. We don't know anything more than that these things deserve and merit our love, and so we must give it to them. We must have courage.
Now, I am not naive, or at least I hope I am not naive. This recommendation, this gospel message of love, it is not a prescription for miracles. I don't believe it is. We could love just as much as I have asked us to do, as much as I believe the Gospel asks us to do, and we may still find justice to be elusive. War may still persist. The carbon may still remain in our atmosphere. We need love, but we need science and economics and diplomacy too. And I'm not a scientist or an economist or a politician, but the women who went to Jesus's tomb this morning didn't know about economics or policy or climate science. They didn't even know that Jesus would be risen. They didn't go because they had found the answer. They didn't even go looking for an answer. They went because they loved their friend. And death would not and could not change that fact. It would not and could not change the fact that they would live their lives in that love.
Easter, the good news of Easter is not about knowledge I don't think. It's about courage, about the courage to love. Our world, as I suggested, is troubled. It abounds with suffering. If we're honest, it is full of people and places and causes that do seem lost and hopeless at times, and it is frightening to think about. No wonder our gospel passage ends in fear. It is frightening. But take courage. There is more to this story, although this gospel ends saying that the women were too afraid to tell anybody anything. They told somebody. We're all here. Word got out.
If we learn anything from Mary Magdalene and Mary and Salome, these brave women today, what we learn is that emptiness is not the same as and is no reason for despair. If we learn anything from the Easter message from this good news, it is that there is no cause so lost we cannot still give our hearts to it, our hearts and our lives. So as you depart this church today, as you go out into the world for which Christ died, choose a good cause. Give yourself to it. Even if, even when all seems lost, take courage, take heart, and take the hands of those who are willing to walk with you and then set off bravely towards all those empty tombs, giving your lives to one another and to love.