Easter Sunday Sermon
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 5, 2026)
Hallelujah, Christ has risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Hallelujah. Please be seated. I just wanted to start this morning by just saying thank you. There's so many people to thank this morning. I first want to thank the staff of the church who work so hard all the time, but especially over Holy Week. I think we've had 13 services here since Sunday. And they've been here and been providing a sacred space and a space of grace for everyone who has visited us this week. So, thank you to our staff. Thank you also to the music department, to our choir, to all our musicians. Can we just give them a round of applause? To Sarah and Phoebe and Jen as well for your accompaniments. Also, there will be more applause today, please. Don't leave early. At the end of the service, the Hallelujah Chorus is not to be missed.
And thank all of you. It's wonderful to see you here. I'm grateful that you came out in the rain and that you're celebrating your Easter with us here at the Memorial Church. Thank you. Each version of the telling of Jesus's resurrection is a little bit different. The four gospels we have, they tell a slightly different story every time. I'm not going to try to make sense of that here. I'm going to focus on the one we have and its particularities. Our passage this morning is from the Gospel of John. And one thing that John has, there are a couple things I'll talk about, but one thing that John mentions is this weird line that Jesus says to Mary. Mary recognizes Him. She sees that it is Jesus, and He immediately says, "Do not hold onto me."
In my head, I imagine her wanting to embrace Him, this man whom she loved, who she followed, who she saw tortured and murdered. To recognize Him, to see Him there in front of her, of course, she would want to embrace Him, to hold Him. And He says, "No, do not hold onto me." And then sort of perplexingly, "Do not hold onto me because I have not yet ascended to the Father." What does that mean? Now, how is it going to be easier to hold onto Him once He ascends to the Father? It seems like it's just going to get harder. It feels like this odd detail in this story, only in the Gospel of John. It makes it sound a little apparitional, a little ghostly, like this is a spooky story.
And here we are 2,000 years later in this time of unrest, and division, and war and upheaval. And it's easy to wonder what difference a spooky story makes to all that. I don't think the gospel is evading that problem. I think it's anticipating it. I think actually what Jesus says to Mary and how Mary responds is the answer, is our answer to war, and division, and ascension and unrest. And why shouldn't it be? This gospel was written in a period of war, and dissension, and violence, and upheaval and unrest, 70 years after Jesus was risen. It was written down then. It was meant to answer to persecutions and sieges and massacres. It was meant to answer to those things, to the people who were taking it up. And so, of course, it can speak, it should speak to our upheavals.
Let me dig into this gospel a little bit more. There's another detail which is different than in the other gospel stories, not just the don't hold onto me, also the men running to the tomb. In the other gospels, it's just women who visit the tomb and then they go tell the men. Only in John do the men run ahead. And it's almost this interesting foot race, like who gets there first and then who looks in first. Scholars think that the writers we're trying to claim authority for people who followed Peter or people who followed the beloved disciple or whatever. Other scholars believe that this was meant to corroborate the women's testimony. In the culture of the time, the patriarchal culture of the time, a woman's testimony was not sufficient. And so, a man would have to corroborate it.
And so, some scholars think, well, they had to put some men in there to make this a more reliable witness. I don't think that's what it is. I think we see the men in this story. We are told about the men's response for the sake of comparison. Imagine yourself in the shoes of these disciples. Men or women, whoever. They are scared out of their shoes. The man they love most, the person they thought would escort in the redemption and the renewal of their kingdom, of their people, they have just seen Him arrested and murdered, tortured. They've seen Him killed. They've seen Him buried. They're full of loss and of fear. And the missing body does not make it better.
You hear Mary. She is even more at a loss, more full of despair. Where have you laid Him? Asking anyone who will answer, where did you put Him? At least let us bury Him the right way. We treat this Easter story, we treat this Easter morning like a triumphant resolution. And when you hear the choir this morning, it is 2,000 years later. But for the people who lived it that morning, it did not feel like triumph. At least not in the story we have this morning. We're told they don't feel this. They feel fear, and they feel loneliness, and they feel grief, and they feel sorrow, and they feel confusion.
Mary comes alone to the tomb. All this happens. He's missing, fear, and confusion. The men come. And we're told that after the men see what has happened, they go home. Now, the Greek word that we translate as go home, actually means they return to themselves. They turn inward. You might say they go back to their old lives. Well, I guess this thing's over. And if you read the rest of the Gospel of John, it looks like they do. They go back to Galilee and start fishing. They think it's over. They return to themselves, all of them full of fear and sadness and confusion. And the men turn inward and leave. They go home. And what does Mary do? Mary stays and weeps, as Karen reads so well. And it's to her, the one who refused to turn inward, the one who stayed, it's to her that Jesus appears.
"Don't take hold of me. Don't hold onto me," Jesus says. And then even more, He tells her to leave. "Don't hold onto me. Not only that, go." I think this is the difference between the men and Mary. This is the comparison. It's the difference between holding on and letting go. Why do these men go home? Why do they turn to themselves? Why do they turn inward, return to their own lives, return to themselves? We know why. We've been reading the story, if you've been following along. Each of these men in their own way have had their own idea of who Jesus was and ought to be, and they held it so tightly. They held it so tightly that they can't let it go now.
Peter, the first to declare Him the Messiah, had an idea of what that meant, and that didn't happen. And he can't let it go. He has to hold onto it. And James and John, who asked Jesus to make him their chiefs, His chiefs, His second and third in command, they have an idea of the kind of Messiah He will be. And they are holding on tight and they can't let it go, so they go home. Even Judas who betrays Him. He betrays him because he's the wrong kind of guy. He is not who I thought He was, and I'm not going to let go who I thought He was. He holds on. Even Pilate, when he says, "Are you the king," has a particular idea of what that would mean. And that's what he's holding onto when he condemns Jesus.
The counsel, when they condemn Him, they have an idea of who they think He is and they will not let the crowd, slash, Palm Sunday, who ring out Hosanna to Him when He comes into Jerusalem. We know who you are and they cannot let go of that idea. They hold onto it so tightly. They hold onto it as they cry out for His crucifixion. He's not who they want Him to be. And they have to hold on to who they want Him to be. They can't let go of it, but not Mary. When Jesus reveals Himself, Jesus reveals His mission to be utterly different than what she expected. She feels lost, and she feels confusion, and she weeps, but she lets go of it. Just tell me where they laid Him. She lets Him go. She literally allows Him to be someone she cannot recognize, literally cannot recognize Him.
He's not who she thinks she is. And if you read the gospels, when Jesus shows up after His resurrection, most of the time, people don't recognize Him. It's the people who let go, who allow themselves not to know who He is or what He means. It's to them that He appears as a stranger, as something different, as something they couldn't have anticipated. The whole point of what happens this morning is that we cannot have ideas about Jesus first and then demand that He lives up to our ideas of Him. That's making it about us and what we would want. The point is, after Easter, meeting Jesus means meeting the one we think could not be Him, meeting Him in confusion and disappointment. And maybe being surprised to find Him exactly in that stranger or that outcast.
Looking for Him where we would least likely find Him. I have some candidates for who those people would be. People who are condemned and sit outside. People whom Christianity has traditionally condemned. The folks that we would not expect. Those are the obvious candidates for me, but we can go further, because if the candidates are obvious, then you think you know where you're looking. Keep looking. Whomever you least expect, whomever you least expect to bear the holiness of God, Christ lived, died, and rose for them. Look there. Last night, from this bell tower, we chimed our bell, a bell cast in memory of the dead 68 times. It was 68 years ago last night that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, at 7:01, and we chimed the bell 68 times at 7:01.
One of the great prophets and leaders of the last century, this was part of the gift of Martin Luther King to us, part of the gift that lasts. He denounced injustice. He prophesied justice, but he was also willing to imagine that the beloved community could include those totally unlike him, could even include those who were his enemies. The beloved community could include those who meant to harm him. It's why the ministry and mission of Jesus has political implications, though those politics do not map easily onto the ones we endure today. But men in high places have always held on too tightly to Jesus. They have always used Jesus to justify their own words and actions. And I realize that I'm a man standing in a high place right now, as I say it.
All of us want him to be something for us, an emblem of our own values. They want to hold onto him. We want to hold onto him. We want him to affirm who and how we are to vindicate our own ideas and positions and politics, usually in opposition to somebody else. Because what we really want to do is worship ourselves. But what he wants us to do is love one another. And you can't love one another when you're turning in, turning towards yourself, going home, leaving it behind. You can't do that. Turning back to the old life, the old assumptions. Love means reaching out, not in. It means risking uncertainty and loss. It means being surprised by where you will find holiness. These disciples, men or women, they do not understand what is going on this morning. They cannot explain what is going on this morning. Their idea of their world has fallen apart. The things that held it together no longer hold. They are sad and afraid, and their most beloved friend and teacher is dead, mutilated, missing.
Some of us might feel familiar things this morning, confused, upset. What we thought was holding the world together, falling apart. With our beautiful triumphant hymns, we often regard resurrection like it's only a triumphal assurance. It is this day, but that's not how it looks, not all it is. It's not how it looks in the gospels. It's fear and sadness this morning. What matters is not whether we feel fear or sadness. It's what we do with our fear and our sadness. Resurrection is not about confirming our illusions or allaying our anxieties. It's about calling us out of ourselves, out of the illusions and the anxieties to which we are attached, into confusion and into sadness, maybe. But also, out of ourselves toward transformation, toward relationship, toward community, toward our neighbor, toward our enemy, toward God.
Resurrection is not about comfort or not only about comfort. It's about courage. Courage to face loss, to face empty tombs without turning away, without turning in. The question we have this and every Easter, the post-resurrection question all of us Christians have is, will we cling to an old idea of who Jesus has been? Will we cleave to our ideologies and turn in on ourselves, away from the world, away from its suffering, away from every beloved child of God? Or instead, will we endure fear and sadness long enough to glimpse something new? When we encounter a stranger or an outcast or an enemy, when we see someone who does not fit our idea of what holiness looks like, will we, like Mary, have the patience to stay, and look, and look again and find someone beloved? Can we let go of what we thought we knew about Jesus and be transformed by love?