Who Will Roll the Stone Away?
I am almost ashamed to admit my difficulty in preaching at Easter. I suppose as an experienced pastor, professor of preaching, and seminary president I should know what to do and what to say at Easter. Yet, every year for more than thirty years I experience similar frustrations and difficulties at Easter time. I love preaching during Advent. I find lent a time for careful treatment of significant issues for persons, the church and the world but Easter throws me. It seems so grand in scale and so much is made of it that I am never sure I actually want to attend worship on that day. Yet I must be present since I am expected to preach on this holy day.
As I look out on the assembled throngs from that Easter pulpit I wonder who are all these people and what do they want? Why did they come on this day? Why won’t they be back next week? The music is generally grand and triumphant. The sanctuary is beautifully decorated with flowers, everyone is dressed in their finest, and the pews are crowded to all most overflowing. Seems like a description of any preacher’s fondest wish. Yet, I struggle with what to say.
What’s my problem? I think I wrestle with how Easter has been appropriated and presented in the church to the world. The primary focus on Easter is what I would describe as “generic triumphalism.” The claims presented from many/most pulpits focus on how God has overcome death in the resurrection of Jesus. Death has been overcome in some cosmic sense which gives us all hope for eternal life. Hence, God has triumphed and, by extension, the church as the representation of God’s act has also triumphed over death. I refer to this cosmic claim as generic because it seldom is applied to any particular or specific instance where death is actually overcome or turned back in the world of the hearer. The claim is presented as futuristic and is limited for the most part to personal eternal life.
Are we left then with some spiritual truth about eternal life that requires no application to everyday life? Is that all Easter is – an idea to believe about life after death? Is what is central about Christian faith an “idea” about eternal life or is there a dimension of power and reality which moves from thought to action? Are we actually ever saved by an idea? But is Easter not most often presented as just that, an idea? This generic claim of God’s triumph over death is suppose to function in what ways in our lives? Is the Christian faith trapped in the frame of philosophical idealism? Is faith primarily a matter of believing this idea about eternal life?
I get some help in my struggle to speak at Easter from the story of the women, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the Mother of James, and Salome who in Mark’s gospel (16:1-8) go to the tomb to prepare Jesus’ body for burial. They were heartbroken and afraid. Their primary concern was who would roll the stone away from the grave so that they could attend to Jesus. They found that the stone had been rolled away and that a messenger awaited them with the news, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here.”(16:6) The women were told to go tell Peter and the other disciples what had happened. The story ends with the women fleeing in fear and amazement without telling anybody this news. Obviously, they must have found their tongues sooner or later or we would not still be focused on the meaning of their discovery during our time.
I am, however, intrigued by their initial question: who will roll the stone away?
Perhaps the first movement of the Easter drama focuses on unlocking the grave. Who can roll the stone away from the death that characterizes our world and even our own lives? Could the women’s concern be of help to us in our appropriation of Easter’s message and power?
Who will help you and me in our lives as we experience the limits of death? Who will roll the stone away from those places where death and decay has us locked in or trapped? When the possibilities of life seemed sealed by obstacles that are too large or too complex to be easily overcome, who will help? How do the forces of death at work in our lives get addressed? Where do we get the courage to even go to the tomb? Where do we get the courage to even ponder the possibility that someone will help us roll the stone away?
Perhaps the women at the tomb help us to ask the story of resurrection a different kind of question. We are not so interested in the experience of triumph as we are hoping for the experience of presence. Easter becomes an opportunity to imagine that God would be present in our lives to roll away the stone from our grave. Easter become the experience of the courage to confront death and to believe that life is eternal. Easter becomes the assurance that God is present in our times of limits and loss. God’s love reaches into and beyond the tomb. Easter begins by rolling away the stone that keeps us more dead than alive.
From this perspective Easter is not the triumph over the idea of death; it is the discovery of life in the midst of the experience of death. It is the experience that God’s presence makes a difference in how we live our lives and deal with our loses. With death being present at so many points and places in our experience, the promise of God’s presence is power available to us to develop both courage and action that reflect the transforming possibility of resurrection.
Easter is not only the triumphant celebration of an eschatological event but also an experience of how to make sense of life here and now. I want to experience Easter as an event which helps me to face the powers of death which already have me in their grips. The realities of racism, economic deprivation, drug addiction, inadequate education, and reduced public support for women and children are the contemporary faces of death which wreak havoc our society. Easter speaks to these forces. It promises that God will help to roll away the stone so that we can face these forces and find the courage to overcome their destructive power with the eternal power of God’s presence.
Easter does not deny the reality of death! It challenges its durability by promising that life is eternal. God’s presence is a counter power to the forces of death. Easter then is not so much directed to the church as it is directed through the church to the world. Churches are to be vehicles for putting the principalities and powers on notice. God is rolling away the stone from the grave and unleashing the power of life. Easter calls the world to this earthshaking news as it seeks to release a world groaning from the damage of death to experience the presence of life, the power of God.
Perhaps my discomfort with Easter as it is currently celebrated in most churches is that it is such a “churchy” event. We gather to hear about eternal life but have no expectations about taking that message into the world in which we live. I guess it is safer to stay in the church and celebrate the eschatological possibility of life eternal. What would happen to our Easter pulpits if we simply sought to roll the stone away so that people could confront the forces of death in their own lives? Do we dare challenge the principalities and powers of our age with the implications of a God who is both present in life and who lives beyond the boundaries of death?
Keith A. Russell
Editor-in-Chief
Director of Doctor of Ministry Programs
New York Theological Seminary
