An Easter Sermon!
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia and Amen.
If people can celebrate Christmas in July, and this week’s Virtual VBS can celebrate a pop-up Christmas, why can’t we celebrate Easter in August?
I’d bought the book over a year ago (actually, during the Eastern season of 2019). But it took the pandemic of 2020 for me to actually read it. Called Resurrecting Easter—How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Story, the book is a fascinating mix of travelog, who done it, art book, and theological reflection on the deep meaning of Easter.
Written by renowned Bible scholar, John Dominic Crossan and his wife Sarah Sexton Crossan, Resurrecting Easter traces the Crossan’s worldwide search for the earliest depictions of Jesus’ resurrection. And, what they found fascinated both them. And me!
The Bible has no descriptions of Jesus’ resurrection. Nowhere, in other words, do our writers suggest, either that they were there when Jesus rose from the dead, or that they could give a moment-by-moment description of what Jesus’ resurrection looked like. Or how it happened!
Instead, as I’m sure you know, they give us a description of a shockingly empty tomb and the testimony of angels announcing what already had happened.
Early Christian art followed this same practice. There are pictures of empty tombs and of angels speaking to surprised and shocked women. There are empty tombs and the risen Lord Jesus speaking to Mary Magdalene and the other women. But there are no known pictures of Jesus breaking out of the tomb and rising from the dead.
Not at first. As time goes by, however, images of Jesus rising from the dead do begin to emerge. And, the Crossans and I, were both shocked and delighted by them!
The most prevalent and powerful images were inspired by details found only in the Gospel of Matthew (including some from the text we read as our gospel today!).
And, while we barely notice those details—often dismissing them as trivial—the ancients realized—and saw—that they give the most astounding—and true—Easter message possible!
We’ll start with today’s text. While both Mark and Luke have versions of this story—Jesus asking the disciples “Who do people say that I am?” and then asking Peter, “But who do you say that I am?”—only Matthew includes this little follow up between Jesus and Peter.
Jesus says (in part), “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! … [Y]ou are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and … whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
Modern Christians tend to focus on Jesus giving Peter “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” and debating whether that means Peter’s successors as popes get to decide who gets saved and who is lost. (They don’t.) Ancient Christians focused instead on what Jesus—in that same passage—says those keys open!
Which is this! “The gates of Hades!” The keys given to Peter and the Church open the gates of Hades! Now, that might not mean much to us today, but to the ancients—both Jews and Greeks—they knew exactly what that meant! And they were shocked!
For both Jews and Greeks, “the gates of Hades” referred to the kingdom of death. In art, that kingdom would be portrayed as a castle. And, in front of that castle, was a huge gate and pillars of solid rock that neither humans nor angels could either open or destroy. “The gates of Hades”!
“I will give you the key of the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus says today, “and … whatever you loose [or unlock] on earth will be loosed [or unlocked] in heaven. And the gates of Hades will not prevail against it”!
Can Jesus mean what he seems to mean? That the church has been given the key that unlocks Hades and the kingdom of death?
That’s what ancient Christians thought! And another text—again, found only in Matthew—sealed it for them!
Several of the gospels record that, the moment that Jesus died, the curtain in the Temple split in two, from top to bottom. (A symbol that, from now on, God would reside in a new “Temple,” the temple of Jesus’ risen body.) But only Matthew adds this!
The same moment that the curtain of the Temple split, Matthew notes, “the earth shook, and the rocks were split.”
The significance of that comes next. “The tombs also were opened—the dead who were locked forever behind the gates of Hades—and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.”
“Fallen asleep” is of course a euphemism for having died. Which means this: when Jesus dies, not only is the curtain of the Temple—the separation between God and God’s people—removed. The gates of Hades imprisoning the dead are split open too!
Which is exactly what Matthew says in the very next line! “After [Jesus’] resurrection they [those who had been imprisoned in death] came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.”
Happy Easter!
Truly, Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed!
Back to that book I was talking about earlier. Paying closer attention to these texts than we tend to, ancient Christians realized something extraordinary about Christ’s resurrection. And they depicted it like this!
Christ harrowing the Gates of Hades and Pulling Adam and Eve to new life!
Christ doesn’t come to new life alone. His resurrection isn’t his alone! In ancient art, Jesus’ resurrection literally means the resurrection of all who are, or have been, or will be imprisoned by death!
Beneath Christ’s resurrection feet are the broken and destroyed Gates of Hades!
And what is our savior and lord doing? In picture after picture, Jesus reaches out to the representations of all humanity—Adam and Eve (along with King David and Solomon and the saints)—to join hands and be pulled from death into new life.
Happy Easter! But remember! In today’s gospel reading Jesus gives us, the Church, that key. It is our job—given us by Jesus—to share and spread this Good News.
And to free people from all that imprisons or deadens them.
For Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia and Amen.
