RBWords

     Big events generate a lot of "history."  The current centennial of the First World War is the occasion of many new "histories" of what happened and why!  It is clear that not everyone sees that terrible conflict in the same way.  There will probably be a study on the different ways that those histories are being written!!!!  The same is true for the Christian [and non-Christian] understanding of Jesus' resurrection!  It is not a matter of fact vs. fiction, but of remembrance and faith!  We are very much, at times, in the position of exclaiming first, "ALLELUIA!"  and then asking, "WHAT HAPPENED?"

 

     Each year I find myself saying, indeed, "ALLELUIA!" and then settling down to enjoy some of the almost comic elements of the accounts.  [The humor is in the way the event is told, not in the event itself.]  In the account from Matthew, there is an angel who, with the help of an earthquake, rolls back the stone from the tomb!  Now that can mightily stimulate the imagination!  In the account from the Gospel of John, there is all the running back and forth and the encounter between Mary Magdalen and the Risen Jesus in which she mistakes him for the gardener!  In the Gospel of Luke there is the astonished reaction of the two disciples when the "stranger" asks about what they were discussing: "Are you the ONLY visitor to Jerusalem who does NOT know of the things that have taken place there in these days!!??"

 

     Perhaps by now we "understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead."  In the midst of all the inevitable messiness of human story-telling, there is the one central fact that makes all the story-telling possible:  CHRIST IS RISEN!  And that is why we proclaim: ALLELUIA!  To all my Beloved Congregation, I make that same proclamation and wish you a BLESSED EASTER!  AMEN! ALLELUIA!