“There you will see him, just as he told you.”: Rev. W. Ryan Ford
The following homily was shared at our Sunday Evening Eucharist Service Easter Day, 2024.
Scripture: Ezekiel 36:16-28, Romans 6:3-11, Mark 16:1-7
“You seek Jesus…”
That’s one of the very first things the angel in Jesus’ empty tomb says to Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James. “You seek Jesus.” These words tell the story of God’s grace in their lives. That Mary and Mary seek Jesus is a result of the fact that Jesus first sought them. And that they seek Jesus is a result of the fact that they have known Jesus and have loved him.
But these words “You seek Jesus” also name a yearning — a need that runs deeper than what either woman can have known of herself…a desire far beyond any she can have expected to have satisfied that morning. For neither woman actually expected to find Jesus in the tomb. What they both expected was only to find Jesus’ lifeless corpse. They have come (so far as they know) to perform a duty in honor of a beloved teacher who (so far as they know) is dead.
But the angel doesn’t say, “You seek the corpse of Jesus.” He says, “You seek Jesus.” Even before they know that Jesus is raised from the dead — indeed, even while they are still certain that he is dead — these women seek Jesus.
Tonight, the angel says the same of all of us here: “You seek Jesus.”
Did you know that about yourself?
You seek Jesus. We seek Jesus.
But we, like these two women in our reading, are liable not to know it. We, like these women, are liable to set our hopes on something far short of Jesus himself. We’re liable to come here merely for lack of anything better to do, or from force of habit. We’re liable to bring ourselves here as much because we are driven by a preexisting momentum of duty rather than being consciously drawn by the hope and the expectation of actually finding Jesus himself — alive in our midst.
But the angel’s address to Mary and Mary invites us to remember the deeper reality of our need and our longing: what we are seeking, whether we know it or not, is Jesus.
We often live at a distance from our longing for Jesus because we are afraid that longing will go unsatisfied. We fear that we won’t meet Jesus. And so, too much of the time we live as if all we’re doing with this whole Christianity thing is taking care of a corpse. We dare not let our longing for Jesus — for the living God — come to the surface.
But tonight, our gospel reading doesn’t just name our deepest desire with the words, “You seek Jesus.” It also promises us that our desire for Jesus will be satisfied:
“He is risen - he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him just as he told you.”
This is a completely unqualified promise. The angel does not hedge his bets. He does not say, “You will very probably see Jesus,” or “I saw Jesus in Galilee one time, but who can say whether you will or not?” or, “In my opinion, if you are well-behaved and you hold your mouth right, you might see Jesus.”
No, he says, “…you will see him just as he told you.”
This is the pronouncement of a certitude. It will happen.
When we say, “Christ is risen,” we aren’t merely recalling a thing that happened two thousand years ago. Nor with those words are we saying something that’s cosmically true, but impossibly remote from our actual lives. No, the resurrection means that Jesus is going before us to Galilee — that we’re going to meet Jesus here and over there in that place down the road. The empty tomb means that we don’t just know about Jesus. Rather, we know Jesus.
The fact that Jesus is going before us to Galilee means that Jesus continues to show up here in the world everywhere two or three are gathered together in his name. That Jesus goes before us to Galilee also means that Jesus has gone before us through and beyond our own death — it means that after we have died we will see Jesus.
“You will see him…” is a certitude for this life and it is a certitude for what will happen after we die.
The tomb the women visit in the gospels is not just Jesus’ tomb — it is their own tomb and it is ours.
That Jesus goes before us to Galilee means our graves will be only sites pointing away from the defeat of death and toward the triumph of God. When we die it will seem to us that we have no sooner occupied our graves than that we have evacuated them only to find ourselves seeing Jesus — just as he told us we would.
In the meantime, we, like the women in our reading, are sent on our way to share the gospel with people. In the New Testament, no sooner are people confronted with the empty tomb than they are told, “Go tell people about it.”
But if the women in tonight’s reading actually do what they are told to do…if they actually get around to telling anyone what has happened, what exactly is it they’re supposed to say?
They are supposed to say Jesus’ tomb is empty, and that they met a man dressed in white (apparently an angel) who said Jesus has risen from the grave. God doesn’t give them any training in apologetics. He doesn’t supply them with some irresistible rhetorical technique.
Instead, what these two women have to tell people seems far weaker and less convincing - what they have is personal testimony.
If we ever get around to telling people the good news about Jesus, personal testimony is what we’ll have to share too. What we have to tell people about the risen Christ are our own stories about what we have seen and heard and experienced of him. Which is one of the reasons why so few American Christians actually do tell anyone the good news about Jesus — because what we have to say seems simultaneously too incredible and too modest. What we have to say to the world actually can be said with startling brevity. In fact, we’d probably be a bit more comfortable if we could make it more elaborate and lengthy. But, unfortunately it took us less than three seconds to say it right at the start of our worship service tonight: “Christ is risen.”
Such testimony feels awfully weak. It feels awfully naked.
What proof do we have for such claims? Doesn’t God give us anything else with which to meet the wry, smirking skepticism of an unbelieving world?
He does.
In light of our readings from Ezekiel and Romans, we can say that in addition to and empowering our testimony God also gives us the gifts of the Holy Spirit and of Baptism.
In Ezekiel God promised: “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.” […] “I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”
In the New Testament, in the book of Acts, on the day of Pentecost, the resurrected Jesus makes good on that promise from Ezekiel — pouring out the Holy Spirit from heaven onto the nascent church. Then Peter, in one of the first Easter sermons, preaches to a crowd of unbelieving Jews: “Christ is risen — here’s how you know…” Then Peter points to the strange, beautiful ruckus coming from the Holy Spirit-filled-church and says, “The resurrected Jesus did that — Jesus has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing” (Acts 2:32-33).
The Holy Spirit-animated flesh and blood of the believers is Peter’s “Exhibit A” for the resurrection. The church filled with the Holy Spirit made Peter’s claim that God raised Jesus from the dead real to many of the people who heard his testimony, and the result was that three thousand of them believed and were baptized.
Speaking of Baptism: in tonight's reading from Romans 6 Paul says that Baptism is no mere symbol. Instead, Baptism is one of the ways Jesus’ saving work is actually made effective to our lives. In Baptism, Jesus’ death and resurrection are mapped onto our own flesh and soul.
Baptism means we have received the promise of an eventual resurrection — that our own death will not be the end of our story. Baptism means (to use the grammar of another New Testament writer) God will raise us up on the last day (John 6:39-44).
But Paul is also (and perhaps even more emphatically) saying that Jesus’ own resurrected life is already alive in us. The transforming gift of Baptism is supposed to make an actual and observable difference in how we live.
“We were buried [with Jesus] by baptism into death,” Paul says, “in order that …we might walk in newness of life.”
Baptism gives us a life that is already a foretaste and a sign of our promised resurrection from the dead. Resurrected lives are lives set free from sin — lives that are already raised from the dead. If we claim that freedom…if we choose to walk in newness of life, no longer enslaved to sin and death, then we have reason to hope that our claims that God has raised Jesus from the dead will indeed be compelling to those who are willing to be compelled.
None of these gifts — personal testimony, the Holy Spirit, Baptism — make it certain that anyone will have to be convinced by what we Christians have to say about Jesus. But, what is certain for us this evening is this: we will see Jesus. The tomb has been emptied. Christ is risen. He is going before us to Galilee, so that, here at this table, we will see Jesus… just as he told us.
Amen.
Rev. W. Ryan Ford, our Wesley Director, is an alum of LA Tech and The Wesley. After completing his studies at Duke Divinity School, Ryan came back to his roots here at our ministry on Tech’s campus. Ryan is a prophet with a passion for The Word of God, bow hunting, trout fishing, and wood working. He and his wife Holly have two children, Elias and Margot.