“Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
It’s Easter, and tonight everyone is on the move (except, perhaps, those waiting in TSA lines tonight). The Israelites are heading out of Egypt, the disciples are following Jesus to Galilee, and you and I are moving from the darkness of Holy Week to the light of Easter, from the death of the cross to risen life. It is no accident that Easter regularly coincides with Passover. Tonight you and I pass over the Red Sea, the Jordan, and the space from Golgotha to Galilee. Our vigil with Old Testament stories helps us take in the sweep and majesty of what God is up to tonight. Everything that abuses and oppresses us has been shown up as false. Even death itself will not have the last word.
The resurrection of Jesus does not come out of nowhere. It comes as the culmination of a process that has been brewing since the creation. In making our world, its creatures, and us, God has created a community of beings made to be in relationship. The Old Testament lessons we have heard tonight bear witness to the various ways in which God has sought connection with us and how we, for our own perverse reasons, have sought to shut God out. One reason we listen to this succession of Bible stories is to get a glimpse into God’s dogged persistence.
It’s Easter, and everyone is on the move tonight. God accompanies the Israelites on their flight out of Egypt. The women who follow Jesus lead the way to the tomb which they find empty. Even God, it seems, is on the move, too. When the risen Jesus meets the disciples, he says, "Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me."
Haven’t these people gone through enough? Why now do they have to pack their bags and make the journey from urban Jerusalem in the south to rural Galilee in the north?
I’m not sure there is a perfect answer to this question. But we should remember that Jesus was originally from the town of Nazareth in Galilee, and you might recall Philip’s snarky remark when first told about Jesus, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” All four Gospels suggest a contrast between the rural poverty of Jesus’s native region in the north and the urban affluence of the Jerusalem area. They also tell us that Jesus got a better reception as a healer and teacher in Galilee than he did as a critic of religious and political structures in Jerusalem.
I don’t think Jesus returns to Galilee simply because it is more friendly territory. I do think he returns there because, as a region that was open to his message, it is the best place to begin a mission that will transform the world. Jerusalem, the seat of political and religious power and authority, did not open itself to his message. Galilee, the home of people who lived on the margins of Roman and Israelite society, the place where Jesus taught, healed, and fed the people, will be the place where the Jesus community can regather, recover from its traumas, and grow.
I have some other things to say about Easter, and if you want to hear those you’ll have to come back tomorrow morning. But for tonight let us rest in these two thoughts.
First, let us just pause and take in the grandeur of this Easter/Passover moment. In a few minutes, we will together renew our baptismal covenant because Baptism is itself the church’s enactment of this movement from death to life. In Baptism we die to our old, Adam and Eve, selves and rise to our new, risen Jesus selves. Just as Israel found new life in a movement from freedom out of slavery, so you and I find new lives in claiming our solidarity with the One who passed from the cross to the empty tomb. The sweep of this story draws us in to a vision of the unimaginably wonderful gift we discover here. Death, the thing we fear the most, has been vanquished. Jesus is alive, and that means we will be, too. We have nothing to fear. We can live the kind of open, generous life that Jesus and his companions did because the things we thought were powerful turn out in the end to be paper tigers. Tonight you are offered a life of abundant joy. And there is nothing now to prevent you from moving towards it and saying “Yes”.
And here’s the second. The Roman values that brought Jesus to the cross were akin to those held by Egypt’s Pharaoh. Power structures, whether they be political, economic, or religious, tend to believe their own publicity. They think that might makes right, that elites are more important than regular people, that power itself is a sign of divine favor. The Bible’s power vectors--Egypt, Babylon, and Rome---thought themselves, in George Saunders’s words, “special, invincible, and permanent”. As things progressed, they turned out to be none of the above.
Whatever in your life that oppresses you—illness, grief, loss, failure, broken relationships—is neither special, invincible, nor permanent. The Romans who crucified Jesus thought they had won. Pharaoh believed he had a lifetime supply of slave labor. Neither of those things turned out to be true. The second great point about Easter is that it not only offers you risen life in the future. Easter also offers you hope for transcending the things that oppress you now. Whatever painful condition you lament does not define you. The only thing that gives your life true meaning is your own beloved particularity as one for whom God did all this in the first place. The late, great German theologian Jurgen Moltmann called Easter the “festival of freedom”. As Jesus was delivered from death to life, so you and I are being set free from those conditions and problems that weigh us down. We, like Jesus and the Israelites, are free now to be truly alive.
It’s Easter, and everyone is on the move tonight. Israel is leaving Egypt, Jesus is going to Galilee, and you and I are now heading toward the next, open chapter of our lives. The resurrection is not just an event to be believed. The resurrection is an earthquake that rearranges everything. Christ is risen. Israel is free. You are and will be alive in new and surprising ways.
So let us all, with Jesus and his friends, get on the road and get moving. Your problems are neither special, invincible, nor permanent. The Passover of Jesus at Easter has overcome them. "Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me." Amen.
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