Easter Sunday Sermon, “Afraid, Yet Filled with Joy”
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Matthew 28:1-10
• “Afraid, Yet Filled with Joy”
You’re familiar with the term, “mixed bag?” No, that term doesn’t refer to an Easter basket that’s filled with different kinds of candies and colored eggs. The term actually goes back to the turn of the last century when hunters would bag various types of birds and put them together in a single bag; hence the term, “mixed bag.”
Since then, we’ve taken the term “mixed bag” and applied it to any situation in which there are positive and negative implications, such as the current situation we’re facing this particular Easter. We’ve been dealing with this pandemic now for, what, a good five weeks, and I don’t know of a better example of a situation that has involved a good dose of the positive and the negative. Of course, we’ve focused most of our energy and attention on the negative – what we’ve missed, where we haven’t been able to go, what we’ve not been able to do. But if we take the time to think about it, there’s also a good bit of growth that’s taken place, with new learnings and new discoveries, learnings and discoveries we would never have attained if we had not been forced to go through this period of quarantine. These past five weeks have truly been for us a proverbial mixed bag.
But isn’t that pretty much par for the human condition? When you think about it, isn’t it the case that we have to learn to take the good with the bad and find the silver lining in every cloud? Isn’t it that case the pretty much everything in our life can be summed up with the metaphor of the mixed bag?
I understand that some might disagree with my metaphor. They might say that “mixed bag” doesn’t go far enough in describing our human condition. A better metaphor for them might be “basket case.” And while I would acknowledge that a lot about life leaves us dazed and confused, our current crisis being Exhibit A, for those of us who are people of faith, in particular Easter faith, we find the help that is necessary to hold out in the hope that while weeping may endure for a night, joy, Easter joy will finally come to us in the morning.
That’s precisely the message that comes to us in Matthew’s account of the Easter story. Like the other Gospel accounts, the basic outline of Matthew’s is the same as the rest. The women come to the tomb at dawn on Sunday, the first day of the week, to anoint what they thought would be the dead body of Jesus. They find the stone that had been put in place to seal the tomb has been rolled away so that the women could see that the tomb was empty and how the grave was unable to contain Jesus. And depending on which account you read, there is an angel present to interpret the remarkable new reality Easter has awakened. “Jesus is not here,” is the angel message. “Jesus is risen from the dead.”
However, Matthew includes details of that first Easter morning you don’t find in the other Gospel accounts, details he thought important to the community of faith to which he was inspired to direct his Jesus story.
For example, there is an earthquake, the second one Matthew records in his Gospel, the first having taken place at the hour Jesus died on the cross. Because Matthew’s readers came from a predominately Jewish background, they would understood how earthquakes always represented God’s power breaking in upon this fallen world, a divine power brought to bear upon earth to shake things up and prepare people for some transforming thing God was about to do.
There is also a subtle irony in Matthew’s story, which Matthew is fond of employing. In this case, Pilate, the Roman governor, has at the urging of the Jewish leaders stationed a team of guards to watch over Jesus’ tomb, lest his disciples come in the night, steal his body, and claim that he had been raised from the dead. But when these guards experience the earthquake and encounter the angel that has come down from heaven to roll away the stone, Matthew tells us that they “were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.” In other words, the guards that were supposed to be standing guard over the tomb of a dead man became like dead men themselves. I think you can see Matthew’s point.
And then there is an Easter commission. When the women encounter the angel, who tells them the Easter message, he instructs them in turn to tell the disciples that good news of resurrection, because good news like that must never be kept to one’s self; it is always something we should always be looking to share.
So, how do the women respond to all they have seen – the earthquake, the terrified soldiers, the angel’s commission? Matthew describes it in terms of the proverbial mixed bag. They “hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy.”
Have you ever noticed how fear and joy always seem to be traveling companions in life’s journey? On so many occasions in life, especially occasions when some new reality dawns for us, we are basically a mixture of fear and joy. We take a new job; and we’re excited about the possibilities, but fearful that we’ll not live up to them. We move to a new town; and we’re excited about making new friends, but fearful that the old ones we left behind will forget us. We become parents; and we’re overwhelmed with joy over the gift of new life, but at the same time we’re overwhelmed that we won’t be up the responsibilities that come with caring for this new life. In every instance we have to find ways to make sure that our fears don’t become so great that they take away from our joy.
So, how do we do that? How do we not let our fears loom larger than our joy?
Here’s what the text tells us. As they women were on their way to tell the disciples what the angel had told them, as they ran from the tomb to tell them that the grave could not constrain Jesus, they met Jesus along the way; and they did what anyone who encounters the Risen Jesus should always do. They came to him. They clasped his feet and they worshiped him. It was then that they heard for themselves the words from the Prince of Peace, whose perfect love drives away all fear.
If you’re here this morning and you’re a mixed bag of emotions on this Easter Sunday, what is it you are afraid of? Are you afraid that this current crisis will never end and your future will be one uncertain episode after another? Are you afraid that you’ll never get to see loved ones and wrap your arms around them as if social distancing never existed? Are you afraid that you will become sick and that your sickness will possibly lead to your death?
Any time you feel your soul welling up with fear of any kind, call to mind what this glorious day represents – Jesus triumphed over the grave and because he did you can be joyful, because you worship and serve a Risen Lord.
My wife and I were talking this week about the mixed emotions both of us were feeling about this year’s Easter and how interesting it was that of all the weeks that the powers that be were telling us to prepare for the worst in terms of the COVID-19 consequences, this is the week that we should be ready for the curve to reach its apex. Any other time news like that would be enough to confirm my worst fears if it weren’t for the fact that I was receiving it at the same time I was gearing up to celebrate the source of my greatest joy.
On this Easter morning, we have the perfect opportunity to bring all of our fears to the Risen Jesus and to ask him to replace them with his joy and his strength. Fear is an emotion I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to get rid of completely, but if Easter promises us anything, it promises us that fear never has to be something that prevails over us forever.
Yes, whether you come to this most glorious day a mixed bag or even a basket case, you can emerge from it a soul that is full of joy. For while weeping may endure for the night, this is the morning when the joy comes; and the joy that the Risen Jesus brings is something that nothing or no one can ever take away.