Easter Sunday
(C - cycle) April 4, 2010
When I was younger and could sleep deeply, I hated to wake up. I can understand why artists over the centuries have painted portraits of Lazarus being summoned from the tomb that show him with sand in his eyes, mussed hair. Sulking at the interruption of his slumber.
Jesus once said, “God is a God of the living and not of the dead.” God is constantly trying to give us new life, to wake us up, and we don’t always appreciate the favor. We’re content with our sleepy old ways. We’ve grown accustomed to the dead places in our lives. We settle for less in our marriages. our families, and our friendships.
It doesn’t bother us that much if we’ve become strangers to each other, if we’re estranged. What would it be like if we stopped resisting God, if we opened ourselves to God’s life-giving “power surge”, if we really woke up to the beauty in each other, if we made the effort to really understand each other, be there for each other, delight in each other. We’d never be lonely again.
Sometimes God can be downright annoying, rousing us out of our sleepwalking. God lets us know we should love even people we detest. That gets everything confused. We like nice, clear boundaries between those we love and those we don’t. That makes life simple and predicatable---simple and predictable and deadly. God tries to stretch us sometimes, shaking us out of our moral and spiritual lethargy, and it hurts. God makes us think we should care about people to whom we’ve been indifferent: the poor, the sick, tha disabled, people who don’t share our race, our nationality, our sexual orientation. Why should our hearts bleed for them? Well, you can search the Scriptures and you’ll never find a word against bleeding hearts, but lots of words against hard hearts, dead hearts.
The resurrection and all the possibilities it offers is where Christianity starts---because He wasn’t there, there in the tomb that first Easter morning---because He wasn’t there, we are here. “God is a God of the living, not of the dead.” Jesus believed that very deeply. He trusted God. When he surrendered to God on the cross, he didn’t fall, he rose. God raised him from the dead.
Once he said to Lazarus’ sister Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me although they be dead, shall live, and all who live and believe in me will never die again. And I will raise them up on the last day. Do you believe this:” That question hangs in the air today. What will our response be? Martha’s was, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the messiah, the son of God.”
Trust Jesus that God will enliven us in this world and wake us from everlasting sleep in the next. He speaks from experience.