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“Who Will Roll
Away the Stone for Us?” Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis April 20, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 28:5-18a “ They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’” In Jerusalem, the grave that rivals the Holy Sepulcher for the real tomb of Jesus is set in a lovely English garden atop a busy bus station just outside the city gates. Though archeologists doubt this could be the actual burial site, the setting is more suited to a Protestant imagination. Neither incense nor candles nor crucifix can be found: only a natural scene exegeted by an earnest British guide. More impressive than the garden or the grave is the large stone rolled to the side of the grave’s entrance. Two feet thick, round as a circle, and measuring no less than twelve feet high as I recall, one wonders what the women could have been thinking as they set out alone for Jesus’ tomb at the dawn of the first day of the week. They were thinking, says Mark, how unequal they were to the task, though little did they understand the truth to which their faith would be ultimately unequal. “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” they asked along the way. No doubt Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome had a literal problem on their hands. We, for our part, have another problem: the problem of belief. There is a sense in which the question of the women is more our question than theirs. In the end we may all flee from the morning’s news in silence, but at the beginning, we are separated by two millennia of human knowing. How many of us live unable to get our minds around this tale of an empty tomb and a risen Savior? We are not equal to the task! Though the prior question would be, how many of us care? Said a Scottish theologian in the middle of the last century, “It must be allowed that there is a very large and perhaps an increasing proportion of thoughtful people to whom the prospect of a continuance of a personal life beyond the grave…does not possess its old attraction. Not only are they dissatisfied with the evidence offered in its behalf; it is…quite out of the picture which they have formed of the plan of the universe and of human existence.” “A glamorous fairytale,” he calls it, “which we may take pleasure in reading, yet about which it scarcely occurs to us even to ask whether we wish that it could be true, still less whether we could believe that it was so.” Though there are others here today, I know, others who once may not have cared, but who now find themselves standing before a grave opened to receive in death one they have loved in life, doubting the resurrection of the body and the promise of life after death, even as they long to believe. So to put a point on the question for these who have come with some degree of expectation early on this morning, our human question in the face of Christ’s death and resurrection is this: who will roll away the stone of disbelief for us that we might trust the lives and deaths of those we love into the presence of the Living God? God knows preachers have groped for words that might give heave to the weight of a people’s assembled doubt. How many rehearsals of the historical evidence have been tried in order to convince us? How many reasonable propositions fit for a scientific worldview have been sited for our assent? How many doctrines have been dusted off to do business with the truth of the resurrection? “’Listen, my child,’” says Kazantzakis’ St. Francis, “’each year at Easter I used to watch Christ’s resurrection. All the faithful would gather around His tomb and weep, weep inconsolably, beating on the ground to make it open. And behold! In the midst of our lamentations the tombstone crumbled to pieces and Christ sprang from the earth and ascended to heaven, smiling at us and waving a white banner. There was only one year when I did not see Him resurrected. That year a theologian of consequence, a graduate of the University of Bologna, came to us. He mounted the pulpit in church and began to elucidate the Resurrection for hours on end. He explained and explained until our heads began to swim; and that year the tombstone did not crumble, and, I swear to you, no one saw the Resurrection.’ This is not anti-intellectualism,” says John Shea, “but the acknowledgment of the fact that rational and historical inquiry does not exhaust” the mystery. “Lo, I tell you a mystery,” wrote the apostle Paul a few decades after the women had wondered who would roll away the stone. The mystery of God’s eternal love revealed in human flesh is all a preacher ever really has to proclaim early in the morning on the first day of the week: a mystery no human mind was ever meant to dispel but made only to trust in the face of life’s brevity and death’s finality. Yet trust does not come easy for those weaned on the Enlightenment, raised on facts that cede truth only to scientific method or historical criticism. So in order that we might try trust on for size this Easter, I ask of you what the poet asks, what Samuel Taylor Coleridge once asked us all in our undergraduate days. I ask you willingly to suspend disbelief—which is to say suspend the time and space in which you can prove your feet to be planted firmly on the ground of fact, suspend the questions you would normally discuss along the way to the tomb: enter the world of Mark’s 16th chapter asking not “how” but “why.” In Coleridge’s mind this may constitute, for the moment, poetic faith; but if by grace the stone is rolled away for just a moment, what may be given is a glimpsed trust in the God who raised Jesus from the dead. “When the Sabbath was over,” Mark begins, very early as the day dawned, locating his story on a particular day and at a definite time, the women took off for Jesus’ tomb, turning over in their minds the human options before them. But when they arrived, they looked up: that is to say they looked God-ward and saw something they could never have expected and we, short of suspending disbelief, cannot imagine. The very large stone had already been rolled back. This could mean only one thing: God had acted in anticipation of what mere human beings could not accomplish. Here, with disbelief suspended, our question is not “How?” but “Why?” Clearly, Christ’s tomb is ours to enter and the stone rolled away is like unto God’s engraved invitation! We enter with the women expecting death and with them are alarmed by the presence of a young man in a white robe. Translated, we are met by an angel, a messenger of God, the character who is absent as long as Jesus is present. But the angel’s appearance, in and of itself, signals Jesus’ absence: we are alone before God’s address. Disbelief now suspended, we tremble at the prospect of hearing God’s Word. But this angel’s address suspends so much more than mere disbelief. For after meeting our human fear with a great assurance as angels always do, he says something whose truth the women must have misunderstood as much as we: Jesus has been raised, he says, has been raised. The tense is present perfect, which is to say that what has happened in Christ’s resurrection is neither past event nor future promise but God perfectly present. No doubt the women had come to the tomb prepared to deal with an event that had happened, as we come to Easter morning thinking the task before us is to recall and find meaning in the words of ancient witnesses, witnesses whose worldview knows nothing of our ways of knowing. But the Easter story, though a happening that once became an event in datable time, does not belong to the past we may only recall. This perfect tense, says one of those theologians with whom we will linger only briefly lest the resurrection not happen this year, “this perfect tense must not be disturbed, [for] all Christian proclamation is gauged by this perfect,” this eternally present, this eternal presence, this Jesus who has been raised from the dead. To recall eternal time is to be encountered in this present time by the God who in Christ is perfectly present: he meets us just as surely in our time as he met those who were eyewitnesses in Galilee. He lives! Ask, oh please try to ask, not “how?” but “why?” Because when news reaches our fearful hearts of him who has gone before us, “then what is going to happen to us in the future cannot be indeterminate, nor can it possibly be determined by our own estimation or capacity.” Our times—all of them, in life and in death—are in God’s hand, the God we know in Jesus Christ, the One who has been raised from the dead. “What is to happen to us [then] is not left to chance or to ourselves, but to Christ himself as our Lord.” So Mark could end his gospel with fearful women who said nothing to anyone, knowing they could not and had not silenced the news that Christ lives…nor could the Roman soldiers in Matthew’s gospel who would have the world mistake the disciples for grave robbers…nor could the religious authorities in John’s gospel who thought crucifixion would be the end of him…nor has any scientific revolution overthrown him…nor has our enlightened reason displaced him…nor have our years of belief in him suspended kept the world from knowing him. For the beginning, middle and end of all truth is the God whose perfect presence lives in him who has been raised from the dead. “And I understand,” writes poet Franz Wright, whose graciously and divinely suspended disbelief returned his psychotic mind to earth, “I understand/too well: how many times/have I made the decision to dwell/from now on/in the hour of my death/(the space I took up here/scarlessly closing like water)/and said I’m never coming back;/and yet this morning/I stood once again/in this world, the garden ark and vacant/tomb of what/I can’t imagine,/between twin eternities,/some sort of wings,/more or less equidistantly/ exiled from both,/hovering in the dreaming called/being awake, where/You gave me/in secret one thing/to perceive, the/tall blue starry/strangeness of being/here at all./You gave us each in secret one thing to perceive./Furless now, upright, My banished/and experimental/child/You said, though your own heart condemn you/I do not condemn you.” On such an Easter as this, given all reasonable evidence to the contrary, the faith of one poet redeemed from death is evidence enough. Suspend all disbelief until further notice. The Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! Alleluia! Amen. |