Easter Sunday Service
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, April 20, 2025)
Speaking of music, I did a count this morning, since last week, Holy Week, Palm Sunday, I think we've done 13 services here at the church, and someone from the music department, usually several people, have sung at every one of those services. Could we please give thanks to Ed and Carson and David and the university choir? Thirteen services is a lot, and I have the most wonderful staff. We have the most wonderful staff at this church. Everyone from the housing and maintenance staff who assist us to the staff here at the church have done so much this week and worked so hard. They're the best people I've ever worked with. I love them. Can we thank them as well? Thank you, staff.
And again, thank you all. I'll get to it now. My pattern, my habits so far with these Eastern sermons, this is my fourth, a couple of times I've shared a story of my children's skepticism. I'm going to do that again today, a different one, one you haven't heard before. It's school vacation week. So they're actually in Kalamazoo, Michigan with their mom, so I can talk about them while they're away. This is a story from when they were small. They're now 15, 13, and 11. At the time, they were six, four, and two, and they were just noticing that I was away a lot during Holy Week, 13 services, and we were having dinner Easter Eve, I guess the Saturday before Easter. And we were just talking about what's dad been doing at church? And I said, "Well, on Thursday I went and did this." And we remembered the Last Supper and the foot washing.
And then they asked, "Well, what'd you do Friday?" And I said, "We remembered that Jesus died." And I said, "Tomorrow we're going to go to church for Easter." And they said, "What's that for?" And I said, "Well, that's when Jesus died. Jesus was risen." And Cami my now 15-year-old, then 6, said, "Did that really happen?"
I'd like to say that her skepticism has abated. It has in some ways, but I think she still has that question. And I tell that story, and I've told other versions of the stories of their lingering doubts, because it's relatable. And not just to some of us who might be in this room wondering the same thing, did that really happen? Not just because we are modern and believe in science and all these things. In our Gospel story this morning, there are people who say, "Well, that didn't happen." When Mary and the other women go to the disciples, the people who knew Jesus best, they tell them what they saw and tell them what they heard. And it says in the text that Ben read, "They thought it was an idle tale." The Greek word for idle tale here is leiros. It means folly. They thought it was folly, gibberish, gobbledygook. They thought it was nonsense. This is nonsense. What are you talking about?
The disciples, the people who knew Jesus best, Easter morning did not believe, and neither did Peter. He went to the tomb. He sees it's empty. We translate it as amazed. The Greek word means something more like just deeply, deeply confused. It's not like he believed in the women all at once. He and the other disciples don't buy the story, but some people do. These women do, and other people as well. These stories in the Gospel were not meant to be read as little vignettes abstracted from the whole story. Luke, in particular, tells the Easter morning story in a unique way, and it bears telling, fleshing out some of the details. So, before these women come to the tomb on the first day of the week, before that, on Friday, it says they prepared spices for Jesus's burial. They saw where he was laid and they wanted to do what their tradition commended them to do, which is to care for his body, to wash his body and anoint it and prepare it for burial. They did not have a chance to do that.
But the next day was the Sabbath and so they rested as they had been commanded. And then they get up, then they go to the tomb, but they don't see Jesus notably. In some of the other Gospels, the women see Jesus. They don't see Jesus. On Easter morning, Jesus appears to other people. So immediately after the scene that Ben read, Luke takes us to a road going away from Jerusalem and there are two disciples walking on this road going away from Jerusalem and on the road they meet a stranger. Now it's a dangerous road and also, they're disciples of a man who was just tortured and executed. Jerusalem is not the best place for them to be. And so they're on the road out of town and they meet a stranger on a dangerous road and they talk to Him and they get to where they're going to stay for the night and the man wants to keep on going and they say to Him, "It's dangerous out there. You should stay with us."
And so He comes in and they break bread together and as they break bread together, His face is revealed as Jesus's face and then He vanishes. That's the only appearance of Jesus on Easter day in Luke's Gospel. And then these two men get up and run back and tell these same disbelieving disciples what they had seen on the road.
So if we want to believe in new life, in resurrection, I think what we ought to do is look at the people who believe in new life and resurrection in the Gospel and see what they do and how they believe. I want to be clear. I think all these people, the women, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the mother of James, and the other women who go to the tomb, and these two disciples walking on the road out of Jerusalem, I think they are all terrified, and they are terrified for good reason. As I said, the man they loved, who preached peace and mercy and forgiveness, they had seen Him taken and executed and beaten and tortured and killed. They're doing these fairly mundane acts of kindness, or at least not extravagant acts of kindness. They're going to care for the body of someone they love. They're inviting a stranger to dinner.
But in the context of the violence they have just seen, these are risky acts. They're risking their lives to do these things. They are terrified and scared, but they don't let their fear stop them. In love, they have courage and go do what they seek to do, care for this body, welcome the stranger. And it's these folks and only these folks who in face of fear show love anyway, these are the ones who just see a glimpse of the face of Jesus, or not even a glimpse, the women just see the empty tomb and hear people tell them. The men see a glimpse of Jesus's face, and then it vanishes.
These are the ones, these ones who love with courage, who love over and against and beyond their own fear. These are the ones who see a flicker of that life that they have lost. These are the ones who start to understand what it might mean for this life to persist. On this day, the disciples don't. They're still hiding and they don't believe. But to those who love in face of fear, even though it is fleeting and brief, what they have seen is undeniable and we know it is because they take more courage. The women go and tell the disciples. These two disciples return to Jerusalem, to the place of violence to spread the word. Their smaller act of loving courage gives way to greater acts of courage.
And so we are here this morning. It's hard to overstate how much Jesus is at work redefining our ideas in the Gospels. He asks his disciples, "Who do you say that I am?" And they say, "You're the Messiah." And He says, "You're right, but you have the wrong idea of who the Messiah is. Let me try to teach you what that actually means." They say, "He's the king. Oh, when you come into your kingdom, let us sit at your right hand and your left hand." And He says to the disciples, "Okay, you can, but you don't know what my kingship looks like. You don't understand what it means."
He talks about the kingdom of God, and they all think that what He's talking about is military overthrow and might. He says, "Yes, there is this kingdom coming, but it's not that kind of kingdom. You need to redefine, come to new understanding of what the kingdom is." He calls himself the Son of God or others call Him the Son of God and He says, "Yes, but this is who God is." He tells us all these things. He confirms all these beliefs in His disciples and His followers, and then He says, "Yeah, but it's not quite what you think. It's actually something a little bit different." And He has been telling them for weeks and weeks that He is going to rise again. He's been telling us for 2,000 years that He is going to rise again and as usual, we disciples have the wrong idea. In at least one version of the story, resurrection looks like reanimation, like zombie stuff without the creepy parts. The Gospel is actually suggesting something far more radical, far more sweeping.
First of all, I think it's suggesting this because the risen Jesus comes and goes, walks through walls in other Gospels, vanishes in front of their sight, appears out of nowhere. At the end of the Gospel of Luke, it says the disciples saw Him, and even as they saw Him, they were disbelieving. It's a different kind of presence. The Gospel tells us this explicitly. But the other reason why I think it's even more radical, more revolutionary, more sweeping than mere reanimation is because of what I already described. The only consistent thing we see in the Gospel of Luke is that those who do see Jesus are the ones who face their fear with love. You only see Jesus. You only see the risen life of Christ when you face your fear with love, when you love the way He loves us. And when you do, you are given the courage to keep going.
Resurrection might sound like folly, like an idle tale to the world, and maybe it is if we expect it to take the form we want it to take or expect it to take. Jesus often doesn't give things in the form we want it to be in. I think Mary, as I said, is announcing something far more sweeping, more courageous. She's asking us to abandon all our priors about resurrection and new life. Jesus promised new life. It is true. He promised He would rise, and this is the form that resurrection takes. It looks like this. It looks like us facing our fear, showing our love and catching glimpses of that risen life only in moments.
I think, especially this week, I want to be especially clear for Mary and Jesus. This love was not sentimental. It was more than that. Jesus didn't tell us how to feel. He told us what to do. Love is out in the world. Love is public. Love is political. I'm going to be honest with you this morning. I've already been honest with you, but I'm going to keep going. I'm afraid. This wonderful staff I have just told you about, these people I love who do the most amazing work, they are at risk. The work of this church, work I believe in and hold so dearly that many of you do too, is at real risk. That's too narrow and provincial. The staff and students of this university are at risk. Life-saving research is at risk. Even that, too, is too narrow and provincial.
There are millions around this world who today are going hungry, who are without food, which is sitting on shelves in this country disallowed from being shipped, who are going without medicine. One of our staff, Teresa, who's wonderful, you should meet her, grew up in Zambia, and she was telling me that when she was a child in a city devastated by HIV and poverty, that she was never scared because food and medicine with USAID on the side would show up. She knew people would be there for them, and she felt safe. And she said her friends and relatives there are now parceling out their HIV medications because they have none.
This is what's happening. We are demonizing difference in this country. All kinds of difference, differences of gender identity and ethnicity and nationality. We are rendering people we regard as too different and sending them to be tortured. And just in case we people, progressives or whatever, let ourselves off the hook too much, prior to January, there were millions of people in our prisons in this country, a quarter of the world's prison population in this country, millions hungry millions without healthcare, millions suffering from job loss or opioid addiction or gun violence. What does resurrection mean? Resurrection means a new world where all the hungry are fed and all the sick are cared for and all immigrants and strangers are welcome and all prisoners are free. And I know what you're thinking, "That sounds like folly. How could we open the doors of our prisons? How could we open our borders? How could we feed everyone?" But calling it folly is just an excuse not to do the hard, risky, dangerous work of building that world because building it is the task that Jesus gave us.
He never promised our task would be safe. He never promised our task would be easy. In fact, our options have never been between safety or danger. Our options are between either cowering and losing who we are or taking courage to stand up for who we might become. I hope you know from what I've just said that I'm not pie-eyed about this. There is great risk in our future and it will be costly. We should only expect that the story does not get any better for these women or these disciples who witnessed resurrection in the Easter story. In the years after this story is told, Peter and many of the other disciples are crucified too. The temple is destroyed in Jerusalem. The city of Jerusalem is burned to the ground. Tens of thousands of Jesus's people are slaughtered by Rome like he was slaughtered by Rome. Harm continues to befall these people, but they did not unlearn the lesson they learned this morning. They determined to love with courage in spite of what they were facing. And so here we are.
There is still harm and danger in our world, and yet this morning, all of you, so many that we ran out of programs have come into this church to proclaim in loud voice, "He is risen." And it sounds like folly to a lot of the people outside these walls. It might even sound like folly to you, but it's only folly if we misunderstand what Mary means. Resurrection is not an ersatz of the old life, just up and walking around again. Resurrection is more dramatic than that, more revolutionary than that. It is the new world, yet unmade, caught only in glimpses, but there all the same, truly there and realized in risky acts of love, great and small. Resurrection is in the work. Resurrection is the work. Courageous love is where we find new life.
So follow these women, follow these men, go out there and get on the road and do what they have done. It may be on that road you might see this new life only in moments. You may see it only fleetingly in the faces of other mourners or in the lives of strangers or in the resilient dignity of prisoners and sufferers and captives and outcasts that we are told we should not love and cannot serve. But when we take that risk and serve them anyway, when we meet that danger with love, I believe we will see the promise of new life. I believe we will know even in that moment, fleeting though it may be, we will know that it is real. We will recognize Christ rising in places we had never imagined. And then like these other frightened disciples 2,000 years ago, we will gather our friends and gather our courage and keep going.