Sunday, April 20, 2025
1.
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| Bagong Kussudiardja (Indonesian, 1928–2004), Ascension, 1983. |
No, the women find no body at all in the tomb that morning: but two witnesses instead, maybe martyrs in dazzling clothes. And their question flips religion itself upside down. Their question frees us from the shackles of our fear. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” No, the great mystery today is not about spirits fleeing the madness of earth and rising to heaven. It’s not about a winning formula for salvation either. It's about this body now missing from the tomb, and what’s become of it, and what becomes of us when we look for Jesus among the living.
So maybe that’s my question this morning.
What becomes of us when we look for Jesus among the living?
A couple of weeks ago, I received a short email from a woman who’d recently joined us for worship downstairs at the Table. And she described her experience of communion that day: of joining the line, watching others, approaching the pair of servers with the bread and the cup. She described the feelings in her body as the band played, as the rhythm swelled, as those in front of her began to sway a little, and then rock a little more, and then dance their way to communion itself. “And I had to set free the eight-year-old inside me,” she wrote, “who learned from the nuns back in the day that you don’t sway, and you certainly don’t rock, and for God’s sake you don’t dance your way to communion.” And she finished by telling me that the bread she broke that day was holy in ways she’d never imagined it could be; and that in her body the body of Christ had come alive. How about that? Dancing. Feasting. Joining the resistance with delight and abundance. In her body the body of Christ had come alive.
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| Christ in Prison, Phil Davydov |
You see, to dance into communion, through communion, is not to settle for tombs and wars and fascism in high places. It is, instead, to embody the love of God—to know God’s passion coursing through our hearts and arteries, making strong our tired flesh and inspiring new songs of praise and wonder for the moment at hand. When the martyrs greet the women in the story with news of Jesus’ rising, the women quickly and confidently remember his stories and teaching. They remember. How he gathered their resources to feed the hungry. How he challenged the rich to divest and share it all with the poor. How he insisted on mercy and forgiveness. Surely his rising doesn’t mean fixing the world’s wrongs in a day or a season or even a lifetime. Instead it means investing our days with joy and courage, and dancing to the rhythm of ‘sumud’ and ‘shalom’, ‘ahimsa’ and ‘agape’. For the love of God. And in all this we too become witnesses, witnesses to this stunning and soul-stretching resurrection. We are the ones with stories to tell.
2.
But as we know love requires a kind of truthfulness that is quite dangerous these days. Our witness to love can even break our hearts. On this side of the resurrection, even this side of the resurrection, the challenge is still about the cross, the way of the cross, life together shaped and informed by the love revealed so radically on the cross. “It is to the Cross,” says the Swiss theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, “it is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow the Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.” The Lord of the Dance takes up the cross not as punishment, not as self-defeat—but as a soulful and shared practice that looks violence and contempt straight on and chooses love and mercy instead. Counting the cost. Doing it anyway.
The thing is, and Secretary Noem might be shocked to hear this: the thing is that Jesus himself is shackled to a wall in that same crowded Salvadoran cell. If his resurrection means anything, anything at all in 2025, it has to mean this. That Jesus is crying out from the cells of that god-forsaken prison (and others) for dignity and freedom, for a return to his family in Maryland, or his lover in Manhattan, or his classroom at Tufts. Christian faith, then, is something like our willingness to hear his cry for freedom. Christian faith, then, is something like our resistance to any and all notions of our own powerlessness.
My friend Ched Myers suggests that the collaboration of Roman and religious leaders in crucifying Jesus on Golgotha marks the culmination, the realization of a so-called “crucifixion economy.” It’s an appalling notion, and still prescient in a contemporary kind of way. This idea of a “crucifixion economy.” That is, in nailing Jesus to the cross—as it had done to so many other rabble rousers of that era—the empire sought once and for all to erase his vision of abundance and mutual aid, to silence his cry for forgiveness of debt and jubilee in the land. There’s something terribly familiar in all this. Right? For this “crucifixion economy” claims that scarcity is creation’s one and only natural law. Claims that poverty is a tragic necessity, a price to be paid for progress among the deserving. Claims that state violence itself protects the just from the unjust, and the wise from the foolish, and the keepers of the peace from the rabble rousers themselves.
So Jesus is executed then. His friends—though not the women in our story this morning—scattered. His practice of plenty for the poor and forgiveness for the indebted, snuffed out. For the common good. To Make America Great Again.
It's impossible, of course, to watch what Elon Musk and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are doing this spring and not make a connection. When they brazenly defund foreign aid, and HIV prevention programs in Africa, and peace initiatives here and abroad—while cloaking all of it in messianic language—isn’t this something very much like a “crucifixion economy”? And when they continue funneling billions of dollars to CEOs at Lockheed Martin and Elbit Systems for Israel’s renewed and genocidal assault on Gaza—isn’t this something akin to a “crucifixion economy”? And when they float the possibility of paying El Salvador to incarcerate American citizens, American dissidents, American academics in dank and desolate dungeons—isn’t this their version of a “crucifixion economy”?
But discipleship takes another road. Discipleship is about joining hands and hearts and marching forward; it’s about building relationships and coalitions to fight hatred with love, to resist racism with steadfast courage and consequential action. Counting the cost. Doing it anyway. Because Jesus isn’t to be found in that tomb, my friends; Jesus is risen and walks again among the brokenhearted and hungry. And in the church that serves them.
3.
The thing is: their violence is no match—not in the end—for God’s love; and their lust for power is no match for Jesus’ willingness to lay down his life for his friends. I know you see it on the news every night; and I know it seems eternal and unending. All this cruelty. All this bravado. But hear it here, friends: their lust for power is no match for Jesus’ willingness to lay down his life for his friends. If Golgotha represents the grim logic of the empire’s “crucifixion economy,” this morning’s gospel not only challenges that logic—but awakens in our hearts (and in our flesh) a truly human (and wildly divine) alternative. God’s commonwealth. God’s commonwealth.
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| Dancing Christ, Mark Dukes |
The inimitable Wendell Berry, of course, has his own wonderful way of gently badgering us, of laying it on the line. What Easter looks like. What it means to ‘practice’ resurrection among the living:
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Practice resurrection!
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Practice resurrection!
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit.
Practice resurrection!
4.
And right there, then, in that strangely empty tomb, Jesus’ friends begin to remember, these brave and defiant women who’ve loved him so fiercely. And in their remembering, they find the road, the path, the trail they feared they’d lost. They remember how, long before his arrest in Gethsemane, Jesus imagined the kingdom of God as a cast of thousands sharing a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish in the wilderness. They remember how, long before he was nailed to the cross, Jesus insisted that God’s forgiveness requires our forgiveness of the many debts that shackle families and futures to systems of greed. How he urged them not to seek revenge, but to turn the other cheek and look the enemy in the eye. How he stood beside so-called criminals accused of so-called crimes and begged their accusers to cast the first stone at him.
You see, the heart and soul of Jesus’ teaching—and this is especially important for us now—the heart and soul of it is an economy of grace, a vision of wellness and reconciliation shared by all kinds of people and blessed by the broken and the strong. Because Christ is risen, we have before us all the courage we need, all the tenderness required, all the imagination necessary to dismantle that devastating “crucifixion economy” once and for all. Because Christ is risen, this economy of grace is ours to claim today. And because these friends trusted their own experience, because these women believed in God’s commonwealth of peace and freedom, because they could see the unseen promise—we can step out into April’s bright skies this morning and expect to see the One whose love is undiminished, whose mercy is forever, whose peace can set us free. He is waiting for us. Among the living.
Amen and Ashe.
