Ya know what irritates me?  Well, yeah, plenty, but….Scratch that.  Lemme start over. 

Conspiracy theories abound in our world today.  The bridge coming down in Baltimore was orchestrated by….  Jewish Space Lasers are responsible for……  Every jet in the sky is seeding the world with…….  And they are nothing new.  After Jesus was raised from the dead on Easter…oh boy.  The Spin was alive and well……  his body was moved….stolen…..reburied somewhere else….put out to sea…..he was never dead in the first place…..and on and on and on and on……..

And folks then, like today, drank the Kool-aid and believed what they wanted to believe.  I’m sure that Mary Magdalene was irritated out of her skull when, after meeting Jesus in the garden, and having a little chat with him, she, all excited, runs to the disciples and says:

I have seen the Lord!

And they, of course, didn’t believe her.

Doesn’t it bug the crap out of you when you KNOW something to be true and no one believes you?  And usually it’s a pretty important ‘something.’ 

I have seen the Lord! 

What a testimony! 

Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them what he had said to her.

What wouldn’t we give to be able to say those words?  And yet, Mary was greeted with disbelief.  No one expected Jesus to rise from the dead.  In fact, one of the common elements of the resurrection stories across the gospels is that NO ONE expects the resurrection. Even though Jesus predicted his death … and resurrection … several times across his ministry, no one greets the news that God has raised Jesus from the grave and defeated death and the devil by saying, “Praise God!” No one shouts “Hallelujah” when they hear that their friend and Lord has been raised to life. And absolutely no one, upon hearing the news that death itself could not hold the Lord of Glory captive, says, “I knew it – just like he said!”

How often do we do the same?  We, like the disciples, actually deny the resurrection.  How so you ask?  We deny the resurrection every time we talk poorly about someone, refuse to serve our neighbor, refuse eye contact with someone who is different, fail to smile at a stranger…..every time we lose our patience, get frustrated when someone doesn’t get what we’re saying right off the bat, every time we spread something as truth when it isn’t, every time we act with less than love.

That’s right – we do that. 

However, like the disciples, we can change that.  In the Resurrection Story, no one expects the resurrection and no one, quite frankly, believes it at first. This is true, as I said, across the gospels, and it is certainly apparent in Luke. The women come to the tomb expecting to anoint Jesus’ dead body. That is, they have no expectation that he has been raised. In fact, only when they are reminded by the “two men in dazzling clothes,” do they recall Jesus’ promise.

Energized by this encounter, they run back to tell the rest of the disciples … who greet their tale with utter skepticism. In fact, Luke says that those who received the testimony of the women regarded their message as an “idle tale.” That’s actually a fairly generous translation of the Greek work leros. That word, you see, is the root of our word “delirious.” So in short, they thought what the women said was crazy, nuts, utter nonsense.

Resurrection, in other words, throws off the balance, upsets the apple cart, and generally turns our neat and orderly lives totally out of whack. Which is why I think that if you don’t find resurrection at least a little hard to believe, you probably aren’t taking it very seriously! And, truth be told, I suspect that’s where most of us – we’ve heard the story of resurrection so often it hardly makes us blink, let alone shake with wonder and surprise. Which is rather sad, when you think about it, because this promise, as difficult as it may be to believe initially, is huge, and when it sinks in and lays hold of you, absolutely everything looks a little different.

And isn’t seeing the world a little differently what being a Christian is supposed to be all about? 

We, who take the name of Christ, Christians as it were, are COMMANDED, to do things differently.  We are to love, regardless of whatever divides us.  We are to love, in spite of the fact that people irritate us.  We are to love.  Period.  We are to be like Jesus.  And what does this mean?  Chris Kratzer said it well when he wrote: 

Being Jesus will get you hated, mocked, demonized, betrayed, bullied, and even killed.  Be like
                Jesus anyway.  Loving unconditionally, defending the oppressed, favoring the outcast, Protecting the vulnerable, fostering equality, championing inclusivity, speaking truth to power, resisting
                the religious, and extending radical compassion.  If we’re not getting flogged, are we even
   following?

If then, if Jesus has been raised, and is alive to us and in us, who are we to not follow his command to let that love that Jesus talked so frequently about actually be alive through us.  In other words, if we are, indeed, to be like Christ, we cannot do other than to model Christ for others, to BE Christ for others. If Jesus has been raised, and is alive to us and in us, and through us, then we must remember, in the words of St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582):

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

Like the disciples, like the women at the tomb, let us proclaim the resurrection by living our lives so that others see that we are, in reality, living the fact that the Lord is Risen!  The Lord is Risen indeed!

Amen