Easter Sunday
April 9, 2023 | Sunrise Service

I Believe in Jesus Christ, the Third Day He Rose Again from the Dead
A Sermon Series on the Apostles' Creed

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Matthew 28:1–10

Did you know there are about 8,000 nerves in your feet? That’s more per square centimeter than in any other part of your body (“10 Fun Facts about Feet,” www.feetfirst-footcare.com).

Your feet are one of the most personal parts of your body. I don’t know about you, but I am not accustomed to having my feet touched by people I don’t know or who are not attending to me medically. I don’t actually want people looking at my feet for all that long.

In worship on Maundy Thursday, Pastor Matt and Pastor Joe invited worshipers at the 12:10 p.m. service to walk down to the front of the sanctuary, take off their shoes and socks, and allow one of them to pour water over their bare feet and then wipe them with a towel. Alternatively, people could choose to have their hands washed in the same way. Far more people chose hands than chose feet.

Feet are kind of private. Your feet have about 250,000 sweat glands in them (“10 Fun Facts about Feet). I’m just saying …

I have some friends who are especially bothered by people exposing their feet on airplanes. Any time one of them is on a flight next to someone who has taken off their shoes, the rest of us are sure to receive in our group messenger thread a picture of the offense.

Feet are a real source of awkwardness and discomfort for people.

And so I can’t help but be taken by what the two Marys do when Jesus meets them on their sprint to tell the rest of the disciples the message they’ve just received, that he’s been raised. They come to him and take hold of his feet.

Why? Why didn’t they hug him around his arms or clutch his hands? Why is it Jesus’ feet that are the object of Easter worship? It’s as if they know that this is really Jesus by his feet.

And when I think about that it makes sense, since some of the most memorable moments of their time with Jesus involved his feet. I mean, three days ago he was crucified; nails may have pierced his feet. They knew those feet well, having walked with them innumerable steps from Galilee to Jerusalem over many, many months. Someone (John says it was Mary Magdalene) anointed Jesus’ feet during dinner a short time earlier, pouring really expensive perfume over them and wiping them down with her hair.

At Jesus’ feet is where people so often found themselves. Mary sat at Jesus’ feet while her sister Martha readied a meal, and Jesus told her “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” That part was at Jesus’ feet.

A leader of the synagogue threw himself at Jesus’ feet and begged for healing for his sick son. A man who had been ravaged by tempestuous spirits for years was healed by Jesus, and his neighbors were shocked to discover him sitting (where else?) at Jesus’ feet. Throughout Jesus’ ministry, great crowds came to him and brought “the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and many others.” And where did they bring them? To Jesus’ feet. “And he cured them.”

So much of Jesus’ ministry and mission leading up to and including his death were about his feet. That this one who comes to us as our savior, as God with us, is but a person with feet like ours — that is the good news of great joy for all people announced by angels at his birth.

And so too the Easter good news — “He has been raised!” — is experienced by taking hold of his feet: the same feet Mary wrapped in bands of cloth the night of his birth; the same feet John submerged in the Jordan when he baptized Jesus; the same feet that wandered for forty days in the desert; the same feet Joseph of Arimathea tucked inside of burial clothes before placing Jesus in a tomb.

He has been raised, and you can feel it in his feet.

Those feet are really there. That body is really there, was really raised. The Christian story is not a story of interior individual spiritual experience; the Gospels do not narrate a kind of “resurrection consciousness” on the part of Jesus’ disciples. There is no mistaking the story they are telling, and it is one that features a real body. In Luke’s Gospel, the risen Jesus goes so far as to say to the disciples, “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see.”

Why does this matter? Because in raising Jesus from the dead, God redeems our life, and the only life we have is the life of a body. The Christian story doesn’t actually have a lot of room for a soul that is separate from a body; our experience as beings created in the image of God is irreducibly bodily. Our experience of beauty and sin and pleasure and pain is all manifest in our body. And when God raised Jesus from the dead in a body, salvation came to all of humanity in all of its bodies.

The death of Jesus’ body is not the end of the story. The execution of Jesus’ body by the state is not the end of the story. The good news of God raising Jesus from the dead is that nothing we endure in our bodies is the end of the story. The breaking down of our body, whether with age or illness, is not the end of the story. No kind of abuse inflicted upon our body is the end of the story. Nothing the mechanisms of enforcement can do to a body; nothing that weather can do to a body; nothing a gun can do to a body — none of it is the end of the story.

The body keeps the score, as the title of an important book about trauma has put it, but the resurrection means the game isn’t over yet.

Mary and Mary experience the risen Jesus physically, and so they worship him physically. This is why we are out here on our feet, in the sand, shoulder-to-shoulder, feeling early April on Lake Michigan: because he has been raised, and that happening has grasped us by our arms and legs and heads and voices.

As the angel announces to Mary and Mary, “He has been raised.” We believe that. We believe it with our bodies.

We believe it first with our ears, standing in place long enough to hear the four words that have changed everything: he has been raised; though our ears may fail us in time, we believe with our ears.

We believe it with our mouths, because, like Mary and Mary, we are commissioned to “go quickly and tell it.” Though our mouths may fail us in time, we believe with our mouths.

We believe it with our legs. Our foremothers in faith ran quickly on that Easter morning. They believed and so they ran. Though our legs may fail us in time, we believe with our legs.

We believe it with our emotions. Look at the fear and the great joy enlivening the women as they run from the empty tomb. Though our emotions may fail us in time, nonetheless we believe with our emotions.

We believe by hearing and telling and running and feeling all of what’s happening at Easter. And we believe by eating and drinking. Mary and Mary took hold of the body of Christ, and in our Easter worship, we do too. We take real bread and real fruit of the vine as the elements of our communion — with God and with each other as Jesus’ sisters and brothers — and we partake together as one … body.

But look, the body gathered for Easter worship is not the only body affected by what’s happening at the empty tomb. There are soldiers here, too, and their bodies have born a resurrection blow here too. Look, the empire’s finest are rendered as good as dead when the tomb that held the body of their latest victim was found empty.

Resurrection is an earthquake that shakes every body. Some bodies will find in that shaking liberation and salvation from regimes of death and oppression. I believe that is how the Marys’ bodies received it: it freed them from grief and despair and the ongoing cycle of occupation at the hands of an empire that wielded over people like them — Jewish people — the power to kill and annihilate. But there are the agents of that empire lying motionless in Jesus’ empty tomb. New life has been shaken loose here!

At the same time, the powerful have been knocked down. The powerless and the powerful do not experience in the same way the earthquake that is resurrection, do they? What shakes loose salvation and deliverance for those on the underside of the balance of power unmoors those at the controls. The governor tried to wash his hands of the whole affair, but nobody escapes resurrection. Mary sang just as much before Jesus was ever even born: “God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts … brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.”

Hear this, then, you who look at the world with despair: he has been raised. The power of death feels so entrenched as to render us hopeless, while weapons of mass murder are proliferating on our streets and in our schools and as every attempt to curb that power is defeated before it can even begin, hear this: he has been raised, and the guards are on the ground.

Hear the Easter good news, you who fear that the poor and the vulnerable of our society will never have their fair share, that those who live on the streets are doomed by our indifference to die there — hear this: he has been raised, so the lowly will be lifted up and the proud scattered.

And hear this Easter good news you who sense that the forces of hatred and exclusion and racism are too entrenched, too baked into our culture to ever be fully eradicated; you who despair of ever being free of these forces; you who experience only isolation and animus among the races and nations of the world — hear this: he has been raised, and the first to know it are among the empire’s most despised.

He has been raised, and the thing he wants now is for his sisters and brothers to gather so that he can be among them as the head of a new family made up of Jews and Gentiles, women and men, poor and rich, to send them into a hurting world with a message to shake it to its core: he has been raised, and everything is possible.

Thanks be to God.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church