From Death, Life! BUTHANY PRESBYTERIAN CLURCH
John 20:1-17 Rev. John M. Buchanan

Raster Sunday, April 14, 1968

The best articulation of the Taster Gospel I heave ever experienced was
short, to the point and included very few words, It came over the television screen
in the last few minutes of the documentary: "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich".

The editors and compilers of the massive amount of information that went into that
document must have pondered long hours before deciding on a fitting conclusion. They
chose wisely, I believe, for what they decided to show included a very lucid proclama-
tion of the Easter message. Having probed the depths of Nazi terror, having investi-
gated every aspect of that ghastly era, having brought into our living rooms piles

of corpses and gas chambers and ovens, the searching eye of the camera finally came

to rest on a barrack wall in the concentration camp at Treblinka. It was mown as

the "childrens' camp". Through its gates came 15,000 young Jewish children, boys and
girls. One can imagine their playful glee - their excitement at a new advonture. Nearly
12,000 of them were executed there. And on the walls the camera discovered evidence
of their being - pictures, carefully drawn in idle hours, pictures of butterflies and
birds, flowers, little girls jumping rope, houses and beds, the sun and moon, things
which matter a great deal to little people. As I watched that with eyes suddenly
brimming, I thought I had never seen anything so heart-rending in my life, so utterly
and absolutely sad. And yet there was a majestyin it, an irrepressible joy that trans—
formed this image of meaningless death into a parable of hope.

There was more of the truth about man and God and the world in those
seribbled pictures of butterflies, than in all the horrors of the gas chambers.

In the midst of death life. That is the kind of world it is. Things like
those pictures on the wall keep happening. No dream is ever lost: no childish
innocence destroyed, no laughter drowned out, no effort wasted. It's that kind of
world because on this day Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

Life is full of Easter parables, little bits and pieces of the glorious
truth of this day. One of them was played out before our eyes in the life and death
of Martin luther King. He was truly a free man: a man free from the fear of death
that stalks our thinking, free from all the stuffy pressures and tensions that fill up
our days; free to give his life to a great and noble cause. The source of that freedom
was simply the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Another one is the story of William Stringfellow, a brilliant lawyer
who has given his life to the poor and disinherited, while becoming onc of the most
quoted theological thinkers in our day. Wm. Stringfellow, in the prime of middle age,
is dying of cancer and has yet to even slow his pace of living and giving. And his
books are filled with the kind of exuberant freedom that comes from knowing that the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ is a reality. In his book, A Private and Public Faith,
he befins a very articulate statement on death ~ with the simple sentence “Tiow I am
certain of the Resurrection", and from that certainty has come a life of significant
contribution to his nation and his church.

You see, all of these are Easter sermons, even though the empty tomb is
not mentioned, because they direct our attantion to the fact that Jesus Christ is not a
beloved memory, but an active presence in the world: and that all the forces of the
world — the gas chambers of Treblinka, the assassin's bullet in Memphis, the ravages of
cancer do not have the final word about human life - he does. That is the good news ~

The great temptation on Easter, of course, is to try to prove or explain
what happaned to the lifeless body of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian claim is that
on the third day he arose, and in our generation that claim sounds so uticrly fantastic
that our immediate reflex is to defend it with some irrefutable logic, and to explain
it in terms which the rational neutrality of 20th century man can digest. The "proofs"
of the Resurrection are paraded today and they sound something like this. The Church
has existed for 20 centuries, and no institution founded on a lie could exist that
long. Tho disciples, 11 disappointed, depressed individuals, were somchow transformed

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into courageous warriors who went out and conquered the world. Nothing could have
Gone that but an authentic encounter with the Risen Lord. And finally tho Bible says
it happened, so it happened. ‘

These are strong, but not infallible arguments. The truth is that you

cannot prove conclusively that the Resurrection happened, any more than you can
prove conclusively that you love your husband or wife. The record itself tolls the
story in four different idioms, each unique and separate. In fact, the Now Testament
spends precious little time describing perceptible events of Easter morning. What
really mattered, in the minds of those who wrote it down, were the implications and
the effects it had on the lives of men who were grasped by it.

It is a day also to parade all the possible explanations of what happened:
to reduce the fantastic claim to some simple common denominator that offonds the
Tationality of no nne. “It's poetry — using the language of symbolism. Josus really
didn't walk away from that tomb. But his words and teachings live on." Another
tack is the medical aspect:-"He was given a hallucinogenic drug instead of wine, and
was in a trance for three days: or - thestrain of crucifixion rendered him unconscious ,
but he revived in the cool of the tomb."

But the New Testament is strangely silent regarding any cxplanations of
how it happened. It does not attempt to dramatize those cataclysmic momonts when the
stone rolled away and the dead figure stood up - a tempting literary chalilonge to
any man with a fertile imagination! All it does -— time and time again - is proclaim
that it happened: that Jesus Christ is not dead — but alive. And it is with that
proclamation that any serious reader of the New Testament must ultimatcly come to
terms.

At this point I gladly yield to the man, whose book (Interpreting the
Resurrection )I have been reading, Doctor Neville Clark, of Oxford University, who
put it this way: "....the Resurrection 1s not a miraculous happening in the dead
past, the historic construct of which might be helpfully presented to the sight of
any uncommitted observer in order to elicit faith. Apart from faith in the Risen
Christ, the Resurrection cannot be known.". ( p. 104 )

Now, if this is true, and I believe it is; if faith in tho living Christ
is necossary before the Resurrection makes any sense, how in the world are we to
talk ond think meaningfully about it? That, of course, is the problem of anyone who
would stand up on this day and proclaim the Resurrection, and my suggestion is that
we go back to that small group of men to whom it all happened. Peter — the bragh,
unthinking spokesman; Thomas the skeptic, Matthew the crooked tax collector; Judas
the botrayer. They spent three years by his side and the New Testament is quite clear
that they never really understood him. They wanted him to be Lord and Savior but
on their terms. They put an uncertain faith in him and when he was arrestod and tried
their faith evaporated as quickly as they made their physical exit. Whon ho died,
their faith turned to despair. Up against the power of Rome — the real power of the
world — he was defenseless. Confronted with death — he did what every othor man does:
he died. And those who could muster their courage prepared the body in the customary
Manner, anointing it with preservative oils and wrapping it tightly in linen. One
of the subtle facets of the New Testament account is that not one of the persons
around him believed he would return from death.

The picture here is one of: despair and pessimism; a final, torrible
realization that there was no hope. In the crucifixion of Jesus, their master, the
disciples stood on the edge of a great abyss, over which no amount of prayer and
faith could build a bridge. It was all over. He was dead.

And then, after faith had fled in the face of despair, the Resurrection
broke in on them. The picture the New Testament portrays is not one of 11 naive,
superstitious ignoramises, but men broken by perplexity, doubt and unbelic? who
believed in spite of themselves. I+ was as if the Resurrection forced itscolf upon
them until they had no alternative but to belicve it, and live it and colcbrate it

' for as long as they lived.

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I believe you and I have to take that same road. I belicvo, if you and
I are going to appropriate, for ourselves, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have
to struggle with it logically a thousand times, discard it as nonsense a thousand
times and live a while in the valley of despair. I don't believe God grants a full
rad rich faith to a man as his birth-right. I believe he demands that we stand where
“he disciples stood - at the foot of the Cross — looking honestly and squarcly at
cll the ugliness of life, all the senseless tragedy, all the injustico and irrational
-orees that seem to rule the day. I believe God requires that we face the reality of
—cath a fow times, shorn of our faith, without comfort and assurance. Bccause
shat is what they did. I believe God requires that we take cognizance of the fact
that Jesus, his Son, did not die of old age, nor even of disease, but that a mind-
less coalition of selfish, scheming men put him to death. I believe God requires
that wo live with that for a while, and the accompanying realization that life is
like that, and that there is nothing in life we can do about it.

fini then I believe the Resurrection of Jesus Christ bursts gloriously
in upon us, just as the Risen Lord appeared suddenly in their despairing midst. I
don't think it comes easily. I don't think it can come to the superficial man who
spends his days avoiding the unpleasant realities of life. I don't thini: it ever
comes to the man who trics to believe a “home-made faith’. I believe it happens when
we surronder: when we finally, in despair and dejection, throw ourselves on the mercy
of God, when we realize that within us there are no answers. Then it happens: then
the reality of the Resurrection grips us, and we can begin to see it in things
like pictures on a concentration camp wall. ;

4nd then the implications of this fantastic reality begin to work their
way into our lives. We sec, perhaps for the first time, that life is worth living, that
things like courage and honesty and love and humility do make sense. ‘That needs
saying today. For at times it appears that there is no justice at all, that the
forces of good are powerless before the forces of evil. But to know the roality
of the Resurrection is to know that the forces of evil, the forces that combined to

. “ivy Jesus Christ didn't have the last word. He did. He defeated them, and wrote
-a the nature of the universe the eternal truth that the most powerful forces in all
the world are life and love. That needs saying and believing today.

And finally death - given all our worrying about the world, the bomb, the
riots, tho war, what really concerns us most is the fact of our own inevitable death.
Vouldatt it be blessed to be free of that? Wouldn't it be beautiful to live in that
ind of freedom? Well that is exactly what Easter is all about. From death, life!
The grave is not the end. Death does not speak the final word. God docs.

And agai yield to Neville Clark, who hassaid it far more beautifully
han I could hope to:{ "The unfini-od tac’s we have tried to do, the dreams and hopes
“nd aspirations after which we have striven, the relationships we have vainly sought
to porfect and complete, the experiences that have lifted us up and laid us low,
mould’d us and made us — all these will not be lost or left behind, but will be the
notes by which we revAer harmony to the music of the City of God." (Ibid ». 114) BB

Hew to conclude? Simply,I believe. Like the town crier calling in the
night, the message of Easter is this: "All is well". And as Christians wo hear that
mossagc, not in easy optimism that prctends that all is well anyway: but in a blunt
realism that acknowledges that there ig much that is not well. But the cry has
been shouted: Love is the victor! God reigns' Death is not the end! From Death,
Lifes!

All is well. Christ our Lord has Risen.

Amen.

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