May 1, 2011 | 4:00 p.m.

Women at the Tomb

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Matthew 28:1–8
Mark 16:1–8
Luke 24:1–12
John 20:1–18

With the arrival of Easter last week, we concluded a sermon series that we’ve been working on since January, preaching all the way through the Gospel of Mark. So today we start something new. The next few weeks in the church year are known as Eastertide, or the season of Easter, the goal being that the resurrection story is so significant a part of Christian faith that we should focus on it for several Sundays and at the very least do what we can not to forget all about it on the Monday after Easter. It’s worth processing the idea of resurrection for a few weeks because it’s one of the events in the story of Jesus that is the most difficult to believe and that many Christians would prefer not to have to mess with. It’s much easier to believe that Jesus was a great teacher and he died and leave it at that. We’re going to resist that temptation and continue to talk about the resurrection over the next few weeks. Our next series of sermons will look at the various people in the four Gospels who appear as witnesses to the resurrection. Let me say right at the start that most of them have the same kind of reaction to the resurrection that many of us probably have—they don’t believe it. They are shocked and surprised by what they experience, and they try to figure out ways to explain it away. I think you will find, as I have, that as difficult as this story is to believe and as hard as many people have tried not to believe it, it is a difficult story to forget because the truth behind the story is so amazing. The idea that God defeats death, that nothing is impossible, that the darkest realities of this world can be overcome by the power of love—well, that’s just a much better story than Jesus being a great teacher who died. So come with us on this journey where we will look at some of the people who struggled with the story of the resurrection the first time around, and we’ll ask what their stories might have to do with us. Today we’ll be looking at the stories of the women who appeared first at the empty tomb.

A few weeks ago I spent a week in Guatemala on a mission trip with a group of doctors and nurses. One of the most memorable stories of that week is about a significantly disabled six-year-old boy named Wilson. Wilson was brought to the hospital by family members who made a three-hour trip from home and carried him there in their arms. They were hoping to get him a wheelchair. As it turned out, we were able to help, and while we were figuring out the wheelchair, one of our volunteers noticed that Wilson’s teeth were in a state of horrible decay, and he was subsequently seen by our dental team, who later on that day would spend until almost 10:00 at night doing a three-hour oral surgery under general anesthesia, basically rebuilding Wilson’s mouth and giving him a chance to eat normally and develop suitable adult teeth. The way we were able to help Wilson and his family, and the trust his family showed by putting so much faith in us to help him, was an incredible surprise and moving to everyone on our team.

We were also surprised when we found out why Wilson needed all of this help in the first place. He had been born without any of these issues, but when he was still an infant, his alcoholic father came home drunk, killed his mother, and strangled him for long enough to cause permanent developmental damage. The women who brought Wilson to the hospital were distant relatives who had taken care of him ever since, and they were overwhelmed by the burden. I just could not figure out, and am still having great difficulty doing so—how it is ever fair for something like that to happen and, in a broader sense, why these bodies God has given us cause so many of us so much pain.

That story is pretty horrific. It was troubling to me on a number of levels, as it should be. And I hope that most of you react to a story like that compassionately, but with some sense of distance, because I hope that something like what happened to Wilson as a baby is not something with which you have experience. But I tell the story because there is something about it that probably is much closer to your experience, and here’s what I think that thing might be: we all inhabit bodies that are quite vulnerable to all kinds of unpredictable surprises—surprises that hit us in positive and negative ways. These bodies we walk around in are in some senses absolutely amazing, and at the same time, there’s a lot that can go wrong with them. In both good and bad ways, there’s a lot about our bodies that can take us by surprise.

A few examples: You may not know someone like little Wilson, but many of us know someone who has been involved in a surprising accident that fundamentally changed their life. Even more of us probably know someone who is otherwise very healthy and is suddenly diagnosed with cancer. The surprises our bodies hand us don’t always involve tragic accidents or illnesses; many of us know someone who has been surprised by a pregnancy; lots of people are also surprised when they want to get pregnant and can’t. There are countless other things about our bodies that surprise us in ways that may seem trivial but have powerful effects on our lives. Why is it so difficult to lose weight or quit smoking? Why do teenagers have to get acne, and why are we so often allergic to things in the natural world where God placed us to live? And I would be leaving a big topic out if I didn’t mention sex: if God made us to be able to enjoy our bodies in that way, why is there such a long list of things that can go wrong in the bedroom? There’s a cultural dimension that explains why every other TV commercial seems to be about a drug or product that will make sex better, but there’s also the biological fact that our sexual bodies frequently do things or don’t do things that take us by surprise.

Now many of the things I’ve just mentioned may seem to you like modern problems that probably don’t have much to do with the Bible and weren’t around in the time of Jesus, but that’s definitely not the case. I can offer one example from the Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca who once expressed his hope of being freed from “this clogging burden of a body, to which nature has fettered me.” Plato and other philosophers would have agreed; there was a large contingent in the philosophical schools who viewed the body as a prison from which we should hope to escape. I have to say that I’m often inclined to agree. I see everything from little Wilson’s story to a teenage girl struggling with anorexia and I have to ask God, “Lord, in your infinite wisdom, could you not have created us with bodies that don’t cause so much trouble? What’s the point of it all?”

So that’s where I am in terms of thinking about the incredible number of things that can go wrong with human bodies. I’ve come to expect that our bodies are factories of flawed engineering and vulnerability, and it is out of that place that I am confronted by the story of the women at the tomb on Easter Sunday.

Let me say this first: it is no mistake, either in the facts of the story or in the way that all four Gospel writers tell it, that women appeared first at the tomb. Ancient Israel was a patriarchal society; the opinions of women were not valued and their testimony was not to be trusted; they were not even allowed to appear as witnesses in court. But all four Gospel writers, who don’t unanimously agree on much, make a clear declaration that women went first to the tomb and were the first to witness the resurrection. We know from this that in a literary sense—in the sense of how you tell a story well—we are being set up: something is about to happen that is quite contrary to our expectations.

And that’s exactly what happens. The women witness the greatest human body surprise of all time: they saw that Jesus was dead, and now the body is gone and they are told that he has been raised. We know what to expect from our bodies, and so did they. Bodies are vulnerable and weak and people die, and when they die, they are dead.

But that is not what this story is about, and all four Gospel writers are clear about that; all four include these women in the story. In the context of ancient Israel, the writers grab the reader’s attention by making women the witnesses at the tomb, and then they tell a story that is completely contrary to what everyone knows to be true, and when I say everyone I am including the women in the story and the disciples, because they are all surprised too—they don’t believe it either. And that’s the point. This story of resurrection is intended to take whatever your automatic presumptions are about the limits of life in this world and blow them to pieces. We often see things through a quite limited lens, but God wants to open our minds by showing us something we don’t expect to see. One author talks about it this way:

One of the things that makes these stories so believable is just that sense of unexpectedness—the disciples don’t come to the empty tomb and say, “Well, there you are; just like he said.” [Jesus has been raised. No], they arrive never having really believed that their Lord would return from death, and now they find themselves in a disturbing new world where anything is possible; and so bright is the light in this new morning that even the familiar face of Jesus becomes unrecognizable.

The women and the disciples see something happen with Jesus’ body that is beyond their wildest dreams, and what is so important about that is that it changes the way they understand everything.

So there I was, in a Guatemalan hospital, wrapped up with all of my jadedness and pessimism. Little Wilson, a victim of infant strangulation, sits in front of me in his mother’s lap. He is out of surgery and must be feeling pretty sore. He still can’t walk or speak and most likely never will; so many of his teeth have been reconstructed with stainless steel caps that we’ve started calling him Jaws, reminiscent of the villain in the old James Bond movies. But everyone in the room is captivated by little Wilson and his new smile. The doctors and nurses can’t stop taking turns holding and playing with him, and the one volunteer on our trip who coordinated the whole thing is so overcome with emotion about this little boy that he can’t pose in a picture with him for more than a few seconds without starting to cry. And little Wilson looks like it’s just about the best day of his life. Out of my pessimism, I thought, it’s not supposed to work this way. But I was taken by surprise.

What do I know? I cannot figure out why our bodies don’t always work better than they do, but if I sit back and think about it, I can think of plenty of examples of how miraculous our bodies really are. On a regular basis, I have the privilege of visiting patients at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago a few blocks from here, where victims of all kinds of horrible accidents and twists of fortune are faced with bodily challenges I can barely imagine, and they rise to the task with a dedication that inspires me. I have watched friends and colleagues and members of this congregation walk through the hardest of fights against the dreadful power of cancer and I have watched them win. I have watched couples try for months to get pregnant with both success and failure and have seen their marriages strengthened in the midst of the struggle, and for some of them, out of a mature and humble acceptance of their limitations, I have seen orphaned children find a home and a life. I have seen teenagers grow out of acne and emerge a little less vain on the other side; I have seen people quit smoking and feel a real sense of victory in their lives; and I have talked with people who know that sex isn’t always the easiest part of a marriage but who also know that being with someone who truly loves you is a tremendous gift that can often help to work out the rest.

As we move into these next few weeks of talking about the resurrection, I want to acknowledge to you that there is one part of the story that is missing in all four of the Gospels. None of the accounts—Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John—talk about how the resurrection took place. Apparently they did not know. Neither do I. I have no particular expectations of any of you in terms of how you will come to understand how the resurrection took place, nor do I expect me or my colleagues to be able to furnish you with any factual evidence as to whether or not it took place and how that happened.

What I must tell you, though, is that the story of the resurrection is a surprise from God that I think is meant to take the limits that I place on life and shatter them to pieces. The resurrection takes my assumptions about the limits of my body and in turn it then takes my assumptions about the limits of my mind and my heart and my soul, it takes my assumptions about the limits of compassion and forgiveness and love, and opens them up. The resurrection brings me into a place where my pessimism does not have the last word, because God has taken what once was dead and now it is alive. And perhaps most importantly, the story of the resurrection doesn’t take place in a world where nothing is wrong and everything is happy. It takes place in a world full of people like little Wilson, who show us so clearly that we live in a real and damaged world that is in need of fixing. Resurrection is most powerful when we acknowledge that it is God’s powerful answer to the reality of death. Last week I read a sermon from Easter Sunday by Rowan Williams. I cannot think of better words with which to close than some of his:

Christian joy, the joy of Easter, is offered to the world not to guarantee a permanently happy society in the sense of a society free from tension, pain or disappointment, but to affirm that whatever happens in the unpredictable world—sometimes wonderfully, sometimes horribly unpredictable—there is a deeper level of reality, a world within the world, where love and reconciliation are ceaselessly at work, a world with which contact can be made so that we are able to live honestly and courageously with the challenges constantly thrown at us. . . . . The joy of the resurrection has a unique place in Christian faith and imagination because this event breaks open the shell of the world we thought we knew and projects us into the new and mysterious realm in which victorious mercy and inexhaustible love make the rules.

Amen.