If you’ve ever been to our Anglican seminary - Moore College in Newtown - you may have also visited its unusual chapel, known as the Cash Chapel (named after the guy who donated it, rather than how it was paid for).
Now, when people set up a church building, they tend to design it with the communion table at the centre, and you’ll generally find words of Scripture written above or around the table. Ours has ’Holy, Holy, Holy’, which seems entirely appropriate, though not as common as the classic, ’Do this in Remembrance of Me’. On the table in the Cash Chapel though you’ll find the words ’He is not here’, which is an odd thing put at the centre of a church building, as most people turn up to church hoping that He (ie. Christ) is there!
Now, I know that verse has a particular significance for Sydney Anglicans when it comes to the Eucharistic table, but we won’t go there. My point here is simply that it seems like a very odd thing to do in a church - namely, to explicitly declare at the very centre of your building, the absence of Christ!
And yet, this is our Easter greeting! These are the words that echo down to us through the ages this Easter morning. This is the message given by the angelic host to Jesus’ most loyal followers - the women who came to care for his tortured body after His death that on that Easter Sunday: ‘He is not here’.
And we’re not told where He is. The angel tells them where he was. Indeed, the angel explicitly invites the women, ‘come and see the place where He was’ (vs.6), but no clues at all as to where He‘d actually got to!
As I say, it makes for a very odd Easter greeting: ‘You have come here today to meet with Jesus. I’m sorry. He left. He was here … and He did wait …’
In truth, when I read through the resurrection account here in Matthew and look at it side by side with the other accounts in the other gospels, the overwhelming feeling I get from each of these accounts is that there was a great deal of confusion on that Easter Sunday morning, and the question at the centre of the confusion was always the same - namely, ‘where is Jesus’, and nobody seems to know!
Now of course, losing Jesus is nothing new in the Gospel stories!
The only story we get from the boyhood of Jesus (at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel), is the story of Jesus’ parents losing Him! They eventually find Him in the temple of course, with Him saying, “where did you expect to find me?”
And this story becomes almost archetypal, I think, in the Gospels, where Jesus’ followers are repeatedly losing Him, and constantly in search of Him, trying to work out where He is and what He is doing!
Right in the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel:
And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he (ie. Jesus) departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, and they found him and said to him, "Everyone is looking for you." (Mark 1:35-37)
But Jesus tells them, ‘we’ve gotta keep moving!’
And they do keep moving, and Jesus keep moving on ahead of them, and the story of Jesus and His disciples is, I‘d suggest, a story of the disciples constantly struggling to keep up with their master, who keeps disappearing into the distance in front of them!
And while we know that the pain of Good Friday was terrible, not only for Jesus but also for all who loved Him - for the women who had stood with Him as he died, and perhaps even more so for his male friends who had deserted Him in death … we know it must have been terrible, but just maybe there was some small degree of comfort for the disciples in the thought that at least now we know where Jesus is and that He isn‘t going anywhere! (or so it seemed)
And I can imagine Mary Magdalene, laden down with ointments and perfumes, finally looking to get some closure on this painful yet beautiful yet tumultuous relationship, only to hear the words of the angel, ‘He is not here’ and start shaking her head, ‘… oh my God. Here we go again!’
And so perhaps it should not surprise us that when Jesus, only moments later, suddenly appeared on the road in front of this group of women, what did they do? We’re told that they ‘held His feet!’
OK, I guess it would be easy to read too much in to this, but how does Jesus respond to their laying hold of them? Roughly the same way he does in the story in John’s Gospel where Mary meets Jesus in the garden and mistakes Him for the gardener. He says, ‘Do not hold me. I’ve got to keep moving!’
And we get roughly the same thing In this story, with Jesus saying: ‘Sorry, but I’ve got to keep moving’, though notably, in Matthew’s Gospel, we also get these extra details, ‘I’m moving on into Galilee. Go and get the rest of the disciples and meet me there.’
And again I can see Mary shaking her head and saying, ’Did He say Galilee?’
Why couldn’t He have said, ‘I am going ahead to gay Paris and will meet you there!’ ‘We will meet for croissants and coffee!’ or perhaps, ‘I’ll meet you guys in New York.’ That would be a location to plan a ministry campaign!
Realistically, why didn’t He meet them in Jerusalem, where they already were, where the temple was, where Israelite culture and worship was centred? Why meet them in Galilee of all places - home of the despised and rejected, ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’, Galilee - can anything good come out of Galilee - Galilee? And why choose Galilee, when it was a good 80 km north of where they were and an arduous and unpleasant trek?
Mary knew why. Peter, James and John knew why. All the disciples knew that if Jesus was on the move again, He’d be heading in the direction of Galilee, because Galilee was the sort of place he had always been heading towards.
If it had been today, He probably would have chosen to meet them in Gaza, or possibly Baghdad or Kabul, or maybe even Dafur. Jesus was on the move again, and if the disciples were going to take up the great pursuit once more, they were going to have to be willing to follow Him once again into the very sorts of territories where they really least wanted to venture!
And I can picture Mary trying to take all this in and saying, ‘I can do this. I can do this!’ But I think it’s with mixed feelings that she and the boys start to pack their bags for the next trip north!.
I think ’mixed feelings’ actually sums up the reaction of the disciples to the resurrection of Jesus actually. In preparation for the sermon today I did spend time reading through not only this resurrection account, written in Matthew’s Gospel, but all of the resurrection accounts that we get in the New Testament, and it did really strike me - the range of emotions that we see displayed in these stories. We see shock, we see plenty of fear, and we see confusion in abundance, but, sadly, we really don’t see a lot of joy.
Read through the resurrection accounts yourself if you don’t believe me. The immediate response of the disciples to the miracle of the resurrection was not simple joy and happiness. It took a while for them to reach that stage. And I think we can understand why.
Of course they loved their Lord Jesus, and of course it had torn them apart to see him tortured and killed, and of course his death had destroyed so many of the hopes and dreams that they had had for the future, and yet … those of us who have followed Jesus for any length of time know too that following the Lord Jesus is like riding a roller-coaster! It’s exciting and it’s adrenaline-pumping and it’s a constant mad rush, but there are times when you feel, ‘yeah, I wouldn’t mind getting off for a while!’ But the reality of the resurrection means that ’getting off’ is no longer an option!
Easter - the adventure continues. ’He is not here! He is on the move again!’ Don’t bother trying to grab hold of His feet. The Lord Jesus has places to go and He wants to take you with Him - into crevices in your home and areas of your life where you really don’t want to go, into the byways and alleyways, where difficult and desperate people live, so many of whom are likely to abuse you, betray you and crucify you, yes, and into the dark and despised areas of our world, where His light and His love are most needed! The Lord Jesus is moving ahead of us there and He asks us to follow Him there and meet Him there. Dare we take up the Easter challenge and move out of our comfort zones and into the new life that God in Christ is calling us to?
I know that it’s tempting to just stay here where things are quiet and comfortable and peaceful and undemanding. But, sadly, He is not here! He has risen! And He is on the move, and He is calling us to keep up and to move with Him - into the unknown and into the darkness, to again become part of the tumultuous and painful but beautiful adventure that is discipleship.
