Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
We know that Christ is raised
and dies no more.
Embraced by death,
he broke its fearful hold,
and our despair
he turned to blazing joy.
Alleluia!
As daffodils break from the ground in bloom
and shots break the skin of our arms,
death has been defeated.
In our passage today,
Jesus’ predictions about himself
have been fulfilled!
“He has been raised;
he is not here,”
God’s messenger tells the women;
who even in Jesus’ death
come to show their devotion and love.
Their friend and savior had died,
and now his body is gone.
What’s next,
they ask themselves and one another.
After a hasty burial,
he needs to be spiced and preserved.
He is still loved.
They’re greeted by a messenger,
and they themselves go,
running with fear,
to tell the disciples —
or not tell them in Mark —
what they have seen.
“He has been raised;
he is not here.”
We know the powers and principalities
the struggles, the challenges,
the sorrows,
the cares and occupations of this world.
In the midst of all of that
we gather to triumphantly proclaim
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Rather than emphasize
the Cross as the high point
of God’s acts of salvation,
we look beyond the Cross
The Cross was necessary;
because without facing death
Jesus could not defeat death.
James Cone writes,
“The real scandal of the gospel is this:
humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross
of the condemned criminal Jesus,
and humanity’s salvation
is available only through our solidarity
with the crucified people in our midst.
Faith that emerged
out of the scandal of the cross
is not a faith of intellectuals
or elites of any sort.
This is the faith of abused and scandalized people—
the losers and the down and out…
It is the cross
that points in the direction of hope,
the confidence
that there is a dimension to life
beyond the reach of the oppressor.”
Luke 12.4 says
“Do not fear those
who kill the body,
and after that can do nothing more.”
Our help is in the name of the Lord
the maker of heaven and earth
who through his own self-giving
has defeated death itself.
Jesus Christ is risen today
and death no longer has the last word.
Death doesn’t have the last word
for people lynched in the American lynching era
or people lynched by police today.
Death doesn’t have the last word
for victims of violent crime
or perpetrators of violent crime
executed by the state.
Death doesn’t have the last word
for the half-million Americans
dead from this plague.
NT Wright says,
“Death is the last weapon of the tyrant,
and the point of the resurrection,
despite much misunderstanding,
is that death has been defeated.
Resurrection
is not the redescription of death;
it is its overthrow and,
with that,
the overthrow of those
whose power depends on it.”
Jesus didn’t lead an armed insurrection
against his Roman occupiers.
Jesus defeated them not
because he defeated their last tool—
the last tool of those
who seek to dominate and control.
Jesus Christ is risen today
and death no longer has the last word.
“He has been raised;
he is not here.”
We live in a constant state
of knowing the badness
that surrounds us.
But we gather together today,
to remember because we forget,
to remember because we lose hope,
Jesus Christ is risen today
and death no longer has the last word.
“He has been raised;
he is not here.”
A new creation comes to life and grows
as Christ’s new body takes on flesh and blood.
The universe, restored and whole, will sing:
Alleluia!
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!