God shakes our world – Matt 28:1-10, Col 3:1-4

Easter Sunday, St. Stanislaus.  (Using the Gospel from the Vigil).

I used to live in California, and there was a Bible study I’d go to in the rectory of a nearby church.  One day, we were discussing some passage and I was explaining how some aspect of it struck me, when suddenly everything jolted.  My first, unthinking instinctive reaction was: “someone’s done an emergency stop.”  Then, I remembered we weren’t in a car… we were in a rectory, and rectories don’t do emergency stops.  It was an earthquake.  Not one that caused any real damage, but enough to jolt us, to spill people’s drinks, to make me joke that maybe God didn’t like that interpretation I’d just offered.  Enough to remind me that the earth we instinctively think of as solid and ultimately dependable is neither of those things.

Neither is death solid.  The solid impenetrable looking stone that blocked the entrance to the tomb was a victory monument for death.  Death was making a claim on the world, a claim of terrible reliability, of normativity, a claim that you can organize your life around the assumption that death will claim you and have the final say, just as surely as the earth will stay still when you stand on it.  The earth jolts.  The victory monument topples.  The movement is not to let Jesus out, but to show that he’s already gone.  He has triumphed over death.

The earth quakes, the guards tremble with fear, the faithful women who saw their Lord die share the fear but meld that with joy.  They don’t fall, they run, because they have a gospel to proclaim.

It’s not standing, waiting, gazing in wonder at the empty tomb that Jesus comes to them.  He meets them on the Way.  He meets them running to tell the Good News that they have received with joy from the angel.  The women don’t gain their faith from apocalyptic signs, but from encounter: from trust in the angel, they’re led to run to bear witness and find themselves running into the arms of the crucified Lord they had sought, the crucified Lord who has risen.

In that encounter, God shook their world once again.  They knew: he was crucified.  They had been there.  They had seen his loving self-gift, his offering of himself on the cross.  They knew he had called his followers to follow him in that life of self-gift, of picking up their crosses and walking the road of discipleship.  There was no way for them until this moment to know the power of that love, that it was stronger than death, that it would shake the seemingly stable earth and roll away a stone to show them just how powerfully they were loved.

Now they fall, not from the tremors, not from fear.  Finally, they fall, moved by love to prostrate themselves at their Lord’s feet, to adopt a posture of worship, to have their fear quelled and then consent to “go,” to tell the good news, the news that there’s a love that’s stronger than death, a love that shakes the world, and love who meets us on the way and offers us himself anew to worship and adore.

And that’s amazing news.  But it’s not all.  If only Christ had been raised, this would be an isolated oasis incident in another-wise deadly world.  The letter to the Colossians has the breath-taking consequence: we have been raised with Christ.  It’s even more earth-shattering strange good news: we have died, our life is hidden with Christ.  God’s love has bound our fate so tightly with Christ that we have died with him and are raised with him.  That truth, now hidden, will be gloriously revealed.  It’s through the gift of baptism, that we have died and risen with Christ.  This is what we renew this day.  We renew our watery connection to this earth-shattering death-dying love; we renew our delight to fall to the feet of our Lord and worship; we renew our longing to love as Christ loved, to give ourselves in service of our sisters and brothers as Christ gave himself, and to encounter him in the poor served; we renew our zeal to run forth and tell the Good News!

Let us rejoice and be glad, so that the waiting world, which still waits in darkness, in fear of the dictatorship of death, might see the vibrancy with which we love and might dare to believe that the long night is over: this is the day the Lord has made, the Lord of love who died to conquer death, who lowered himself to raise us up with him, who gives us a Gospel to proclaim.  Happy Easter!  Alleluia!