“The Beauty of Spring, the Joy of Easter”

April 12, 2009

I Corinthians 15:12-20

Mark 16:1-8

In early March, as our Iowa winter was dragging on, as the bad news of our nation’s recession was growing, and Lent was just beginning, David Schoonover sent me a copy of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s wonderful poem, “Spring.” In those gray days, the words spoke of warmth and green grass, of flowering trees and singing birds.

Now on this Easter morning, with the sun shining and with the promise of warm weather, we would give delighted assent to the words, “Nothing is so beautiful as spring.”

What is all this juice and joy?

If, as process theologian Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki tells us, the depths of God are joy, beauty, resurrection, life, then the beauty of spring might inform our Easter joy; the life of spring might tell us something of Easter resurrection. And both spring and Easter will lead us into the depths of God.

Our celebration of Easter is connected to the spring. The season of Lent, which we have just put behind us, gets its name from an Old English word for spring that speaks of the lengthening of the days. And as you know, the date for Easter changes from year to year because the date is the first Sunday after the first full moon falling on or after the vernal equinox.

So in the seventh century John of Damascus could announce in his Easter hymn: “’Tis the spring of souls today.”

Yet Resurrection cannot—and will not—be confined to one season. Because there is no set date, we are reminded each year that Resurrection can happen any time.

Resurrection happens anytime you discover God’s power working in you to bring you out of death and into life.

When you discover the grace to forgive, even though you’ve been hurt…

When you discover the strength to live by your deepest values instead of selling out to the highest bidder…

When you discover the hope that allows you to continue after tragedy…

When you discover the courage to stand up for yourself, for others, to seek justice, to do the right thing rather than what’s convenient…

When you discover an abundance moving you to unexpected generosity…

Resurrection is happening regardless of the time of year or the day of the week.

Resurrection can happen at any time.

So while our celebration of Easter is connected to the spring, it is not spring that we announce in the church. Especially this Sunday, but, really, every Sunday we proclaim the resurrection of Jesus.

Still, spring is itself something of a holy symbol, a visual sign each year of an ultimate reality: that life does conquer death; that our wintry hearts can thaw; that God can bring something new out of barren circumstances. In these days we stop and look—even the trees and ground are telling the good news of God’s “Yes” to all creation.

This season of new life calls forth the poet’s hope that the “Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy” will be protected by the risen Christ from the degradation and sin of life. And we would share that hope. Who can look at the children who have come to worship this morning in their bow ties and their dresses and well polished shoes and not wish for them the constant joy and beauty of this day, this season?

Having been through any number of springs, however, we know that the hope and promise of spring fades. “Nature’s first green is gold,” Robert Frost told us.

Then leaf subsides to leaf

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

While the beauty of spring fades, Easter speaks to us of something greater than spring. It tells us something we want to hear, something we need to hear, because it speaks to us as adults who know the weariness, the pain, the profound loneliness, the confusion, and the fear of living. As one person put it: “In the midst of our desolation, we find the risen Christ, triumphant over death and still shockingly alive, present to us in ways we cannot understand much less explain. In Christ we find vibrancy of life and a firm compassion that does not deny our suffering but transforms and illumines it.”[1]

When Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome arrive at the tomb, their sorrow and confusion are met with a simple message: “He has been raised; he is not here.”

Their actions—buying spices, going to anoint the body of Jesus—suggest that they expect to find death, not life. They come to complete the burial rites. They will look for a corpse, not the One who had stated three times that after three days he would rise from the dead.

Even so, we can see their arrival at the tomb as an act of faith.

Faith that sustains does not overlook the harsh realities of our lives. Life doesn’t always go as we would want it to go. Friends betray, relationships collapse, children get ill. Violence is all too common.

Many people want to ignore the shadow side of life. Many of us would skip over the events of Good Friday. But recognizing that we, too, walk in the valley of deep darkness, we come closer to the power of the resurrection.

The words they hear sink in and finally it dawns on the women that they are in the wrong place. The One they seek has gone ahead of them.

Christ is alive in the world, leading us with the good news of a new power unleashed on the earth.

The risen Christ is always going ahead of us.

When we refuse to give in to evil,

When we will not give in to the cycle of violence,

When we seek to love one another,

then we discover that the risen Christ is always going ahead of us.

All the explanation that the women get is “He is risen; he is not here.”

This is all the Easter explanation we ever get as well. “He is risen…” We aren’t told how. We aren’t told when. Nobody ever knew exactly what happened because nobody was there to see it. But it hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced the people he had risen from the dead was not the absence of his corpse but his living presence.

And that has been the case ever since.

“He is risen; he is not here.”

Yes, it is easier to say and believe simply that spring has come again.

Resurrection tells us to look at the beautiful truth of spring—and then to look beyond it to something greater. We will see wonder upon wonder and all of them true. As one early Christian put it: “The Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed because it is absurd. And he was buried and rose again; the fact is certain because it is impossible.”

An impossible possibility. An absurd article of faith.

Listen again to those words of Paul. Listen to them not for the certainty they offer, but for the wonder they announce: “Christ has risen from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.”

This time of year the strawberries start showing up in the grocery stores again. It’s early in the season for strawberries. Those first strawberries are delicious, firm and sweet. They have that wonderful strawberry smell that tells of warm days, green grass, and shady trees.

First fruits, messengers. We can taste the goodness of that which is coming. The Brazilian Protestant theologian Rubem Alves says that first fruits awaken the appetite. They make us desire what is coming with more intensity. 

Jesus is the first, Paul tells us. The first of many who will enter into a new life that God will give. The risen Christ is a messenger of what is to come—life abundant, life eternal.

Spring is the beginning, not the culmination. Just as the green shoots outside the front door of the church tell us of more life to come, so the Resurrection of Jesus comes as the first fruits of a promised new creation.

Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning, not the culmination of the Christian hope. The victory of Easter is not yet complete, but it is promised.

Look around.

The edges of God show much that is tragic. We cannot be callous toward the suffering around us. Our response to a world in pain is neither a flippant optimism that things must be fine if Christ is risen nor a dejected pessimism that evil has been victorious.

The hope of the resurrection is the hope that Christ is the first of many, that God is still at work in us and through us transforming the world, bringing life out of death.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ tells us that God is bringing forth a new creation and that we are a part of it. The cross speaks of God standing with us in the flux of events. The resurrection speaks of God’s being always ahead of events. This is the ground of hope for all creation.

Our task is to carry that hope into the world.[2]

We who have heard the Easter story are invited to bring it toward fulfillment in our world, in our time. As individuals, and a congregation, our actions determine where the story goes from here.

Will anyone live as though love is stronger than death?

Will there anyone go and stammer out the strange and wonderful news that Christ is risen?

Maybe you will when your friend says that life seems to be without purpose.

Maybe you will when you face the choice between doing shoddy work that gets by and pursuing excellence at school or on the job.

Maybe you will when someone is needed to stand for justice instead of popular opinion.

Mark concludes the Easter story in a strange way: “They went out and fled from the tomb; for terror and amazement has seized them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.” In fact, in the original Greek version this story breaks off right in the middle of the sentence. A more literal translations would read something like: “they were afraid for. . .”

Not the most inspiring ending, but then again, no ending that we propose can contain the risen Christ, any more than the tomb with a great stone could. Always he goes ahead of us; we never know where or when we shall see him; we only know we cannot escape him.[3]

Resurrection answers crucifixion.

Life answers death.

This is the good news we find in the first and fading beauty of spring.

And in the unfading promise of God’s new creation, in the first fruits of that new creation, we find the eternal joy of Easter.