Sermon for Easter Day - Matthew 28:1-10

Costco has dropped a new seasonal item—an enormous chocolate bunny. The packaging reads: “Pete the Bunny is 10 pounds of smooth, rich chocolate turned centerpiece, basket showstopper, and egg-stagram sensation.” The Easter Bunny did not bring me one this year. Apparently he decided I did not need 151 servings of chocolate, 22,000 calories, or the $140 price tag. But I think we can all appreciate that this chocolate bunny, in all of its excess, is both magnificent and absurd—a perfect example of how two things can be true at the same time.

Now if you were hoping for a more sophisticated sermon opener than a chocolate bunny today, we can borrow one from philosophy that’s still on theme. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was obsessed with a famous line drawing that, depending on how you look at it, is either a bunny or a duck. At first your mind sees either the bunny or the duck. But then you begin to see the other one. He used this experience to explain the interpretive nature of human cognition. And at the end of a rather high-brow theory, we come to the simple yet strange truth: the picture is both bunny and duck at the same time.

Once you start looking around with your own human cognition, you can see that life is full of contradictory things that are true at the same time. You can be exhausted and unable to sleep. You can drop a kid off at college and feel both pride and grief. You can feel joy and sorrow in one moment, or hope and uncertainty in the same breath. Or, to take a collective example from this past week: we can see the best and the worst of humanity in the same evening, while watching a rocket head to the moon and hearing news of war. Our lives are filled every day with contradictory things that are true at the same time.

Which happens in the church, too. For example, you can be right in the middle of construction at Christ Church and welcome a big crowd for Easter. On any given Sunday, you can be both a skeptic and a believer. You can have faith and doubt. You can be Protestant and Catholic. None of this is new, of course. Christian faith is built on these kinds of paradoxes.

Our theology is full of them. We believe in the reality of sin and the promise of forgiveness. There is divine judgment, but never without grace. Our Lord is fully human and fully divine. We are sanctified, yet still learning. We are saved, and still searching. Christian faith has always been comfortable holding two truths together at once. And perhaps nowhere is that more true than on Easter morning.

Matthew’s telling of the Easter story is dramatic and full of wonder. An angel rolls the stone away from the empty tomb. He tells the women who have come not to be afraid—which apparently is an important thing to say when you arrive with a great earthquake and a face like lightning. The angel then preaches the first sermon of Easter: “He is not here; for he has been raised.” And he gives simple, clear instructions to the women: go, and tell the disciples to meet the risen Jesus in Galilee. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary leave the tomb quickly, with fear and great joy.

It is worth lingering here, in the first moments of Easter. The women have just heard the Gospel. As they begin to run, they are filled with fear and joy. Two things can be true at the same time. We should note that they are doing much better than the poor Roman guards, who have been on the night shift at the tomb. They are paralyzed with fear, frozen like dead men. I’m sure there was nothing about lightning-faced angels in their contract (Bibleworm Podcast, episode 483). And Matthew’s point is clear: when the Kingdom of God comes into contact with earthly empires, there is simply no contest. In contrast to the frozen guards, the women, who are perhaps more accustomed to heavenly things, are propelled forward by a surprising new joy, even in the midst of their fear.

Easter is a paradox. There is fear and great joy. There is a man crucified as a common criminal—and raised as a savior. There is death and resurrection, both true. As religious historian Kate Bowler writes, when two seemingly contradictory truths are held side by side, each becomes clearer than it was before. Holding death and resurrection together reveals deep treasures of truth and grace. Jesus died because of the worst that humanity could throw at him. And God raised him, because all of that is nothing compared to the power of God.

Our joy this morning is real. And yet it can be difficult to hold onto, because Easter hasn’t fixed everything that is wrong with the world. The resurrection of Jesus did not undo conflict and strife. There is still plenty to be afraid of. But Easter can change how we see fearful things. Like death itself, they do not have the last word. Once we hear the good news that nothing—not even death—can separate us from the love of God, our fears begin to lose their grip. They begin to shake a little—like those guards at the tomb. We can trust that God has crossed every divide to reach us, to forgive us, to redeem us, and we hold that joy side by side with the world as it is. In our Easter joy and emboldened faith, we trust that one day the world will be as it should be.

The first witnesses of Easter at the empty tomb are not people who have everything figured out. They are people who are running—running with hearts pounding and emotions they can barely sort out. They carry fear and great joy at the same time. And in many ways, as followers of Jesus, we have been running like that ever since.

And so on this festive day, friends, if fear is one of the things you’ve been carrying around lately, Easter does not ask you to pretend otherwise. The first witnesses carried fear too. But they also carried great joy. And that is the strange and beautiful paradox of Easter: fear and joy can live in the same heart at the same time. Fear can be very real. But because Christ is risen, it does not have the final word. Joy does.