March 31, 2024: Easter Sunday! Emerging from the Wilderness

Epistle Reading: Colossians 3: 1-4
Gospel: John 20: 1-18                       

This Lent we have followed a theme of wilderness. We have been traveling through the wilderness, sometimes feeling worn out and barren like the branches on the altar; sometimes feeling lost in the challenges we face personally, the challenges our very divided country is facing and the challenges of war, famine, disaster, and conflict that our world faces. It is easy to feel so lost in the wilderness of pain and anger in this world, that we cannot see the path out. We feel like we are surrounded by thorns pricking us from every direction.

But we have also been reminded that we are never alone. Even when we step off the path, getting lost, God is there walking with us, ready to guide us back. In fact, many of us have realized that we need our quiet times in the wilderness to regroup, to begin anew, to finally hear God calling us: that time in the wilderness gives us new hope, even joy. Time in the wilderness of struggle, doubt and pain, for ourselves and the world, prepares us to encounter resurrection.

And on this day, of all days, we want to sing out the alleluias and celebrate the resurrection, as we will. But we have to begin by acknowledging the wilderness that Jesus went through between that last meal with his disciples, his friends as he called them, and the magnificence of the resurrection.
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Let me take you back. On this past Thursday night, sixteen of us shared in a Maundy Thursday service downstairs in the fellowship hall where we recalled that last meal that Jesus had with his disciples. In his final time with them, he served them by washing their feet, breaking bread and telling them that this was his body, given for them and sharing wine saying that this cup was the new covenant of his blood. Jesus enjoyed this meal among his closest friends even though he knew that Judas would betray him. He used the post meal time as a final time to teach them and some of his last words were to tell them to love one another and really, by the example of his life and his earlier teachings, he was telling them to love everyone, just as they are, just as he does. 

After their meal they went for a walk to the Mount of Olives, to the Western slope where the Garden of Gethsemane is. There Jesus went to pray with Peter, James and John. Jesus told them to sit and wait for him while he took some private time, his own wilderness time, to pray. As it says in Matthew 26: 39, he prays, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but you want.” Here we see Christ’s humanity in full force. As the son of God he knows what he has to do; as a human, it is scary, he knows it will be painful, and like we would, he would rather avoid it. But he defers to God, “Yet not what I want, but what you want.” He is deep in this wilderness time, knowing what is ahead but struggling with the reality of it and he needs the support of his friends, so he turns back to them only to find them asleep. 40: “So could you not stay awake with me one hour?” he says to them in frustration feeling more alone than before. He goes away two more times and each time finds them sleeping upon his return. By the time he wakes them up the 3rd time, Judas and a crowd of chief priests and elders are approaching with swords and clubs: certainly a difficult wilderness time. 

After an ironic kiss of betrayal from Judas, Jesus is arrested and, although one of his disciples pulls out a sword to defend him cutting off a servant's ear, Jesus, as always, stops the violence and in Luke’s Gospel, he heals the servant even as he is being taken away to his death. He shows love to his enemies to the very end. 

He is taken to the home of the high priest at this late evening hour for a kind of informal trial where they sought to gather witnesses against him, questioning him, but Jesus does not respond until finally the high priest said to him in Matthew 26:63-64 “I put you under oath before the living God, tell us if you are the Messiah, the son of God. Jesus said to him, “You have said so, but I tell you from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming on the clouds of Heaven.” 

This was enough. Those who wanted Jesus dead thought of this as blasphemy and began to spit on him. They blindfolded him and hit him. They asked him to prophesy and say who had hit him. Then they took him early Friday morning to the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate seeking his crucifixion. Despite finding him to be innocent and trying to release him, since no evidence was really offered against him, Pilate goes along with the crowd and allows the criminal Barabas to be released for Passover and Jesus to be crucified.

Before they crucify Jesus, they mock him. Give him a purple robe, put a crown of thorns on his head - a literal representation of the wilderness that is painfully pricking him. 

In John’s Gospel, Jesus had to carry his own torture device, a wooden cross, alone. In the other Gospels, a bystander, Simon is pressed into service to help. Imagine the wilderness of that walk, being among people but feeling alone. The disciples have scattered. Peter who followed along has denied association with Jesus three times as predicted and is now full of remorse. A very painful death is close at hand and yet Jesus still forgives those torturing him saying as he is on the cross in Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.”

Jesus is nailed to his cross between two criminals being similarly crucified. But on Jesus’ cross, Pilate has written: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. One criminal, even as he is crucified with Jesus, mocks him. The other rebukes him noting they deserve to be there but Jesus does not. He says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” and Jesus, loving and welcoming all people even as he was dying said, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise”.

Consider the message of hope from God who forgives even those torturing him and who welcomes a repentant sinner as one of the first people to join him in paradise. Jesus showed that it is never too late to learn and emerge from the wilderness. 

Crucifixion is a slow and painful death that could take days. Instead for Jesus, the sky went dark for three hours from noon to 3pm and Jesus dies, by Luke’s account saying, “Father into your hands I commend my spirit.” 

In John’s account, some of Jesus’ female disciples are there at the base of the cross watching this: his mother Mary, Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Magdalene. They would have to witness the soldiers pierce his side to ensure that he was dead, watching the water and blood run out. You can imagine the wilderness of their grief watching this happen. In some accounts, they were able to watch Jesus be placed in the tomb that Joseph of Arimathea, a secret follower of Christ, purchased and placed him in.

All of the disciples, male and female, felt lost as that tomb was closed. They were plunged into the wilderness of sorrow, disappointment and doubt as they did not yet understand about the promise of resurrection despite Jesus’ teachings. They had believed in Jesus as their savior yet they saw him crucified like a common criminal. What hope was there now?

Wilderness times of pain, doubt, and sorrow cannot be avoided, no matter how much we try. They are a part of humanity as Jesus showed. But what Jesus also showed us is that our time in the wilderness is what brings about the resurrection, that hope is never lost, even when we are. Hope was reborn with Jesus in that empty tomb on that first Easter day.

Throughout Lent our altar and our window ledges were adorned with the wilderness of barren branches, sand, rocks and moss. Today we have grown from that wilderness time and our altar shows the beauty of new growth even in the wilderness. Flower bulbs are living models of resurrection. They die only to be buried anew in soil; nurtured by living water and the sun above, they burst forth in glorious beauty. We give flowers to the sick as a sign of beauty and hope. We give flowers to our friends and partners as signs of love. The Easter Lily is sometimes referred to as the “white robed apostles of hope”.

My friends let us embrace our struggles, our wilderness times, knowing they are part of our journey towards the hope and beauty of resurrection. Peter and John believed but ran back home after seeing the empty tomb. Mary stayed at the tomb in the wilderness of her pain and sorrow and because she was still and waited, she met the risen Christ. 
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Remember Psalm 46.
Be still and know that I am God. 
Be still and know that I am. 
Be still and know. 
Be still.

And from the stillness of the wilderness comes the birth of hope. Theologian Father Richard Rohr calls Easter the Feast of Hope, noting, “This is the feast that says God will have the last word and that God’s final judgment is resurrection. God will turn all that we maim and destroy and hurt and punish into life and beauty. What the resurrection reveals more than anything else is that love is stronger than death. Jesus walks the way of death with love, and what it becomes is not death but life.”

After school on Good Friday, I realized I needed some contemplative time to consider what Jesus went through on that day so I took an hour around the perimeter of the Evergreen Cemetery in Rutland. As I considered all of what happened to Christ from Maundy Thursday to today, I occasionally stopped to read a monument or tombstone. One in particular caught my attention. It was an obelisk style monument for Solomon Foot, a U.S. Senator from Vermont who died while he was in office in Washington D.C. In 1866. On the back of the monument, facing the road is carved these words: “As he was expiring he said, “I see it, I see it! The gates are wide open. Beautiful, beautiful!”

To be a Christian means to believe in that beautiful mystery as Rohr explains it, “nothing dies forever, and that all that has died will be reborn in love,”

Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia! Amen.

Pastor Michelle Fountain

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