Let Us Walk Through the Door

Easter Day, Year C
20 April 2025

Isaiah 65:17-25
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
Acts 10:34-43
John 20:1-18

 

Ten days ago the day care children came into the church. It was a field trip. A field trip partly to satisfy the children’s curiosity as to what is behind the doors they see their teachers walk through from time to time, and partly for me to talk to the children about Easter.
Our day care is not a Christian day care, so the object was not to win converts but for the children to have an idea why we celebrate Easter. For education’s purpose Easter is a festival like any other festival celebrated in a multicultural society.
Of course, the church asserts that Easter is a festival unlike any other.

Before the kids came over I thought about how I could speak about Easter to two and a half to five year olds. It is hard to speak of Easter without speaking of death, which I decided even young children know something about, for all of them have probably stepped on a bug they deemed icky, or just because they could. And then we have that large crucifix here, the crucified Jesus now hidden by Christ the vine growing on the outside panels of the triptych, a crucifix that tells the story but that is sufficiently abstract not to be gory.
That was the first part of my chat. For the second part I had brought a crocus bulb to show something that looks all but dead and yet is one of the first glorious beacons of spring. After all, the reawakening of nature in the northern hemisphere is a beautiful reminder of the resurrection. Easter eggs fall into that same category.

It went alright, I think. The hardest part was keeping the attention of a crowd that young for even a few minutes. I was reminded that our day care teachers are wonderful educators and that this is not a skill that falls into one’s lap.
But I was also left with the impression that despite children’s experience of death and new life in the natural world, the death and resurrection of Jesus must seem abstract, even if one has experienced the death of a loved one, which happened a couple of years ago when the father of a child in our day care succumbed to a serious illness. That family is Christian and their hope is in Jesus. Yet even there some abstraction remains. Even those who believe that Jesus is the first-born of the new creation still long to see their loved ones.

It also turns out that the analogy of nature’s reawakening, despite its beauty, has limits. Its limits are not defined solely by the fact that the analogy only works in the northern hemisphere, but also because resurrection is the opposite of the way of nature. It is natural for things to live and to die and resurrection is not a natural thing. Resurrection is the opposite of nature.
John Updike writes in a poem,¹

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages …

When we lived in Winnipeg I did a number of funerals for families who had no connection to the church. The funeral home would call me up and I would meet with the family and together we would plan the service. What always astounded me was a general belief in life after death, and in their loved ones going to heaven, whatever heaven may have meant to these families. This astounded me not because I believed that God only loves good Christians, no, we believe God loves all people. It astounded me because usually the things that are important to us mean some kind of commitment. Yet these were families who did not speak of religious or spiritual commitments. It seems that Western society is still permeated with an undefined belief in the immortality of the soul. Yet, the immortality of the soul we get from Plato, not from Jesus. Jesus rose bodily. The problem with the immortality of the soul is that the body doesn’t matter, while all of our experience is mediated by our body.

And so, if we find it hard to wrap our heads around the resurrection, and we are not alone, Mary and the disciples also found it difficult.

In Christian theology resurrection is part of God’s work of creation. The creation stories in the Book of Genesis are not a scientific report but tell about all things having their origin in God. Creation flows from God’s love. Creation is about relationship.

The Gospel of John from which we read today begins by asserting that ‘³All things came into being through Jesus, and without Jesus not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.’
Some of what we hear at the very beginning of John’s Gospel we hear again at the end. It was still dark when Mary went to the grave. When Jesus calls her by name and she recognizes Jesus, darkness vanishes.

There is another connection. As John’s Gospel begins by recalling creation, it is in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, that we learn that creation began in a garden. In the last few chapters of John, Jesus is found in a garden three times: the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prays and is arrested, there is a garden where Jesus is executed, and finally, Jesus is buried in a garden, which is why Mary mistakes him for the gardener.

That the garden of the resurrection echoes the garden of creation is no coincidence, for resurrection is about restoring the world to the way that it was before the fall, to the way it should be. As God desired to be with us at the beginning of creation, God desires to be with us still. That is the reason God came among us in Jesus.

God’s desire to be with us in Jesus is expression of God’s love. God created the world in love, and in love God restored the world in Jesus.
In The Divine Comedy the medieval poet Dante, after wondering about how we can participate in the life of God, speaks of God as the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. Dante receives the answer to his question when he ‘felt his will and his desire impelled by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.’

And so I wonder if we can better understand the resurrection in the way that Dante describes God, as the Love that moves the sun and the other stars, and that also wants to move us. We may better be able to understand the resurrection when we know that God is love, for our own limited experience of love and grace is the place where we come closest to a mystical experience, to the experience of God. Later John will write, God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. (1 John 4:16)

Yet love is a tricky thing because we have often abstracted love from God as if love were possible aside from God.² Yet when love is abstracted from God it becomes a burden, for it becomes something we must perform, before it is something we receive. There is a famous passage from St Paul that is often read at weddings. You know it,
⁴Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. ⁸Love never ends. (…) ¹³And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
This is beautiful but can also seem like an overwhelming task.

Remembering Dante’s wondering about how we can participate in the life of God, and remembering the answer Dante receives,

“I felt my will and my desire impelled
by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars,”

we can read St Paul’s famous passage like this (because Jesus is the love of God made visible),

⁴Jesus is patient; Jesus is kind; Jesus is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵or rude. Jesus does not insist on His own way; he is not irritable or resentful; ⁶he does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷Jesus bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. ⁸Jesus never ends. (…) ¹³And now faith, hope, and Jesus abide, these three; and the greatest of these is Jesus.

We can read the passage in this way because Jesus is the love of God made visible. Jesus is the love of God that moves the sun and the other stars, and it is in Jesus that God makes all things new. The love of God has a name and his name is Jesus. Jesus is the love of God that assumed our flesh, even to be crucified by our sin, so that sin might be crucified by love.³ Jesus died for the world and God raised Jesus for the world in order that all things be made new, including you and me.

I want to close with Updike’s poem in its entirety.

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Jesus is God’s love made visible. Let us walk through the door.

Christ is risen.
He is risen indeed. Alleluia.