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Easter Day
Sunday, April 21, 2019
Lectionary C

Luke 24:1-12

There’s No Easter bunny.
No Easter basket.
No jelly beans.
No hollow chocolate bunnies.
No marshmallow peeps.
No died eggs.
No colored eggs.
No candy-filled eggs.
No plastic grasses.
No Easter cards.

But there are some things that always bring the Easter story home.

The stone rolled away.
The empty tomb.
The carefully placed linens.
The mistaken identity of the gardener.

The power of these symbols is not just in what they represent, but in the absence of what they point to.

There is no explanation about how the massive stone was rolled away.
There is no evidence of the presence of any corpse, only the absence of a body.
There is no mention of who removed and carefully folded the linen burial cloths, but our faith points us to the mistaken gardener! We know that He is risen.

The part of the story that amazes me is the faithful telling and retelling of what has occurred.

Mary Magdalene goes to tell Peter and John.
They run to the tomb and find it just as she said.
Mary talks to two angels and assumes there have been graverobbers.
She speaks to the supposed gardener, who calls her by name and then vanishes into thin air.
Then she runs to the disciples in hiding and shares the incredible news. He is alive! He has even spoken to her!

The heart of the Easter story is not just the amazing truth that Jesus has risen from the dead, but how the story is quickly told over and over and over again.

The gospels summarize the Easter message like this:

Matthew 28:16 “go quickly and tell.”
Matthew 28:8 “and ran to tell his disciples.”

Mark 16:13, Mark 16:10 “She went out and told,” “they went back and told.”
Mark 16:15 “Go into all the world … proclaim the good news.”
Mark 16:20 “they went out and proclaimed the message everywhere.”

Luke 24:8 “they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.”
Luke 24:10 “told this to the apostles.”
Luke 24:35 “they told what had happened.”

Holcombe

John 20:18 “ ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.”

So maybe, just maybe the real message of Easter is Go and tell!

Who will you tell this week?

– The Rev. Scott T. Holcombe is rector of St. David’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Cocoa Beach.