Year B: April 4, 2021 | Easter Sunday
Easter Sunday, Year B
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
April 4, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page (about 24:00 in).
After what seems like well over a year of Lent, what with COVID, things are finally starting to look hopeful again. Vaccinations are beginning to open up across our state, gradually building opportunities for a safer and more social future. Outside, the smaller plants and bees have been alert for a few weeks, but now even the largest trees are waking up, testing out their new crop of leaves and blossoms. The air is losing its chilly edge, and the sun’s not nearly as shy or sleepy as it was just a month or two ago. Nature is stretching her renewed limbs, preparing for the rush of summer and the harvest not all that far ahead of us.
But apart from seasonal renewal—and our familiar annual fertility celebration with the flowers and eggs and rabbits—what’s the big deal about Easter? Why do so many of us still celebrate an event that took place in the far reaches of a dead empire? Yes, we know this is about the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave, but why is that still so important? Let’s face it: not a lot about human nature has changed in the past 2,000 years. The world continues to be full of war and violence, of poverty, hunger, and disease. Issues we hoped had resolved themselves decades or centuries ago have reared their heads again, reemerging with a vengeance. And the Church is beginning to recognize that we’ve been at least complicit—if not a substantial part of the problem—all along. Easter offers hope with its promise of a new beginning, but starting over again and again doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere.
So what’s the point?
If you were to ask most American Christians why Easter is important, you’ll probably hear an answer that mentions the resurrection but continues to place its primary emphasis on death, saying that Jesus was crucified for one of two reasons: (1) to pay the debt for our sins or (2) as the perfect sacrifice to appease God’s wrath—chances are you’ll hear a mixture of the two. Both concepts are suggested in the New Testament as the apostles struggled to make meaning out of what had just happened. But those aren’t the only answers. Honestly, they weren’t even considered particularly important for the first thousand years or so of Church history. The two theories about what God had accomplished were accepted for the analogies—not realities—they were until a more literalistic—and at the same time somehow more magical—understanding of Christ’s body and blood began taking over Western theology.
To help us recover earlier concepts of Easter, we’ll need to refamiliarize ourselves with an older worldview. Most Ancient Near Eastern cultures recognized three distinct layers to reality[1]: the heavens, earth, and the underworld. (Although people naturally think of them in a vertical progression, I’ll try to address them horizontally to avoid a literal up-or-down interpretation of heaven and hell.) The heavens, ruled directly by the Divine Council, operate with unceasing order, beauty, and unity, as reflected in the movement of the stars and planets in the sky. Earth—the mortal realm—though subject to the heavens, tends to get a little disorderly on its own and often openly rebels against divine authority. Within our earthly layer, the main role of humanity is to extend and uphold order within our realm, bringing it in line with the peaceful perfection we observe in the heavens as much as possible. Finally, we have the underworld, which is utterly unknown to humanity and, based on quite a few comments in the Psalms and other scattered mentions in the Hebrew Bible, appears to fall largely outside the rule of the heavens as well.
Within this structure, movement tends to be one way and extends only to the next adjacent layer: heavenly beings can move between the divine and mortal realms but rarely, if ever, breach the shadows of the underworld. All humans eventually pass to the underworld, but things get messy whenever someone tries to escape death or enter the heavens. And the underworld, the ultimate mystery, almost never gives up its secrets, even to the gods.
In this ancestral worldview, that’s just the way things are. The heavens run in perfect balance and seek to influence and guide mortals, and mortals eventually become citizens of Death.
And that’s why the simple existence of Jesus Christ was such a revolutionary concept. His presence didn’t just shake things up a little. He completely shattered reality, remaking the whole cosmos in the process!
With the incarnation, Christ enters mortal existence not simply as a divine eternal being but as a real, live human, subject not only to all the joys and trials of earthly life but eventually to the grasp of death itself, allowing the Divine full and native access to the underworld, a reality where the heavenly beings simply didn’t go. After making plain the ways of heaven to humanity, the Divine Mystery proceeds to enter the Hidden Realm and exposes its secrets, shining the light of heaven across the land of Darkness. The heavens now have a foothold not just on earth; they’ve finally pierced the underworld.
Resurrection then disrupts the barrier between earth and afterlife, proving God’s ultimate authority within them both. As the buried Christ opens a road from the grave and leads Death itself captive into life, he demonstrates God’s full command not only of the mortal realm but also over the mysteries and powers of the underworld. In the coming weeks, His ascension will reveal that this highway doesn’t just span these two lower realms but continues into the heavens themselves, opening the divine to mortals and exposing all of reality to the fullness of God’s transcendent rule.
That, then, is what we’re actually celebrating today. Easter is not just about the season of spring or the overcoming of death. It isn’t simply the promise of some future hope of heaven. Today we celebrate the unending wonder and wisdom of God’s inbreaking power and the glorious extent of God’s reign not just on heaven or earth but throughout the totality of reality.
Through Christ, the Divine has proved its authority over all existence, tangible and intangible, exposed and mysterious, known and unknown. Through Christ, the grave has been flooded with the Eternal Presence. Through Christ, humanity can not only ascend with him to the beauty and joy of the heavenly realms, but we can in turn establish the glories of that heavenly kingdom here among our fellow mortals.
Easter is about truths as much more substantial than the vindication of suffering as it is than egg hunts and baskets of candy. It’s more significant than the payment of some unknown debt as it is than fresh haircuts, fancy clothes, and chocolate bunnies. The point of Easter isn’t really about second chances, the dead coming to life, or an “already-not-yet” hope of heaven. No, in Easter we discover the re-formation of the cosmos, the celebration of the inbreaking power of the imminent and loving Triune God, and the inescapable presence of Kingdom of Heaven throughout the very fabric of reality.
Thanks be to God!
[1] There are often further distinctions within each layer, but the three broad categories hold.