Easter Sunday
Luke 24:1-12
Year C
“Preaching happens wherever people are hungry for freedom, and someone is given a Word of freedom to preach,” writes Anna Carter Florence in Preaching as Testimony.
In Luke’s account of Jesus’s resurrection, the women are given a Word of freedom to preach.
The centering of these women is not only unique but liberating. In his Interpretation commentary, Fred Craddock notes a key difference between the resurrection story in Matthew and Mark and Luke’s version. In both Matthew and Mark, the women are commanded to “go and tell the disciples” what they have seen. They’re sent to run an errand. In Luke, the women are the disciples. Given this Word, and the authority to preach, the women “told all this to the eleven and to all the rest” (v. 9); they are empowered to share the Good News. Luke’s Gospel frequently highlights the poor and marginalized, and here he has given them the microphone. It’s as if he thinks those hungry for freedom – like women oppressed by patriarchy – are best equipped to proclaim the good news of Christ’s life, death and resurrection.
“Why do you look for the living among the dead?” the angels ask these perplexed women. “He is not here, but has risen.” The tomb does not contain Jesus, his life or his ministry. Death does not hold God captive, nor God’s son, nor God’s disciples. In Christ’s resurrection, God reveals that there is no chain God can’t break, no prisoner God can’t liberate. God’s love sets us free in Christ.
Oftentimes, I take my freedom for granted and must be reminded why the Good News is so good, how it might matter even more to those imprisoned by walls, culture or oppression. Recently, I’ve been reading Against Forgetting, an anthology of 20th-century poetry. This collection, compiled by Carolyn Forché, includes poems written from forced-labor and concentration camps, from the repressed in Eastern and Central Europe and Latin America, from those trapped by the ravages of war in the Middle East, Korea and Vietnam, from those enslaved and held captive by racism in the United States.
In one poem, Nazim Hikmet, a Turkish poet imprisoned for “radical” writing, celebrates the arrival of spring from solitary confinement with its “smell of fresh earth, birds singing/ And inside … the water jug no longer freezes.”
Robert Desnos, who wrote anti-Nazi poems as a part of the French resistance, died in a concentration camp after preaching freedom in his poem, “Epitaph”: “When all human decency was imprisoned/ I was free amongst the masked slaves.” In the same poem, he challenges, “You who live, what have you made of your luck? … Have you cultivated for the common harvest?”
On Easter Sunday, most of you reading this lectionary reflection will be free to celebrate both the resurrection of Christ and the first stirrings of spring. Your church may put out a flowering cross and decorate the chancel with lilies and greenery. Early risers may attend sunrise services to witness the dawning of a new Easter Day. Children with straw baskets may soil their Easter outfits hunting candy-filled eggs on the church lawn. Butterflies might be launched to symbolize our life-giving, resurrected freedom in Jesus Christ. But are we also cultivating for the common harvest?
However we celebrate, we do so against the backdrop of a world that continues to oppress, imprison and marginalize. However we celebrate, we should prioritize listening to those hungry for freedom — so we can hear what Christ has freed us for. We should revel in our new life in Christ, and pray for those separated from God’s abundance, that they might also be freed.
Freed from death for abundant life.
Freed from hate for love.
Freed from violence for peace.
Freed from all that oppresses and imprisons for our collective liberation.
Questions for reflection on Easter Sunday:
- What symbols do you use in your home or church to celebrate Easter, and what do they mean to you?
- Where does your own life feel free and abundant, and how can you offer that freedom to others?
- Where are you hearing the Good News outside of your place of worship, and where are you sharing the Good News with others by your words or actions?
View the corresponding Order of Worship for Easter Sunday
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