Easter Sunday: The Sunday of the Resurrection

It’s Easter morning, and the world looks exactly the same… until it doesn’t. The headlines haven’t changed. The griefs we carried yesterday didn’t magically disappear overnight. The people we worry about are still on our hearts.

And yet—into this very real, very un‑fixed world—Matthew dares to tell us that a stone has been rolled away, that death has been interrupted, that God has already begun something we cannot yet see. Easter doesn’t wait for the world to be ready. It breaks in anyway.

There is a 1600-year-old tradition in the church that says every Easter should start with a joke because God played a joke on the devil by raising Jesus from the dead. It’s called the Risus Paschalis – the Easter laugh.

Since two main characters in the Gospel today are named Mary, I will honor that very old tradition with a story about another Mary who had forgotten a few things she needed at the grocery store, hastily got in her car, and went back to purchase it. As she picked them up from the shelf, she realized that she had left her purse at home. Confident that she could get away with it, she pocketed the items and left the store. To her chagrin, she was stopped in the parking lot by the store manager who promptly had her arrested.

The judge, who was in a particularly rotten mood, passed sentence. “Madam,” you stole a can of tomatoes. You broke the law. You should spend six nights in jail—one for each tomato in that can.” She gasped loudly.

 Whereupon her husband, seeing the opportunity of a lifetime, jumped up and shouted, “Your Honor, she also stole a can of peas!” Poor Mary. But today we hear about and celebrate another Mary.

Imagine waking up before dawn, not because you’re holy, but because you can’t sleep. Imagine walking toward the last place you saw hope die. Imagine doing it anyway—because love makes you show up even when you don’t know what you’ll find.

That’s where Matthew begins Easter morning: with people who are exhausted, grieving, faithful in the most ordinary way. And it is there—in the half‑light of fear and devotion—that resurrection erupts.

Can we imagine the fear and anxiety Mary Magdalene had when she set out to go to the grave? It had been a violent week in Jerusalem, and she had seen what was done to Jesus. She was there to the bitter end. What might the authorities do to her, a single woman being there all alone?

She lived in a sexist, misogynistic society. None of that mattered to her. Mary was determined. She went because of her deep affection for Jesus and for what he had done to raise her up. Now she had lost everything that mattered to her.

Living in an oppressed world with narcissistic leaders in power, she now was faced with the reality that her world would be as it had always been: the powerful win over the vulnerable and defenseless and death always has the last word. Standing in the garden, she knew the pain of destruction and death, but what she could never have imagined was that there was an alternative.

At the tomb she wept with tears of grief until she heard a familiar voice. In this encounter with Jesus she and her companion are empowered to be an apostle and proclaim the first news of the resurrection. Imagine that, two women in first century Jerusalem, but fearless, faithful, loyal followers of Jesus who selected them to break the news to the world.

God has woven resurrection into our daily lives. We will see that if we can pay attention to the way God brings energy and new life into our everyday existence where God’s signature of resurrection is right there in the signs around us. Let me share something personal about that. As many of you know two years ago in February I lost my little male Chihuahua, Ashton.

On the day that he was about to be put to sleep at my home, a good friend gave me a beautiful white orchid plant. I don't know much about caring for orchids, but I've kept that plant and every year on February 26th, Ashton’s anniversary of death, that orchid blooms with six blossoms and those blossoms last for several weeks and are still blooming in full splendor nearly six weeks after the anniversary. The Easter Gospel tells us this: Don’t dwell on endings. Look for what is beginning.

If you’ve ever needed a second chance… If you’ve ever wished you could start over… If you’ve ever stood in the wreckage of something you loved and wondered what comes next… Matthew’s Easter story is for you. Because the first word of resurrection is not triumph. It’s Do not be afraid. It’s God meeting people who are overwhelmed, unsure, and not remotely ready for a miracle—and giving them one anyway.

Whatever “tomb” you may be in, whatever emptiness you may feel or whatever fear or confusion or doubt  is in your heart; wherever you may have given up hope, God can raise you up—for the power that took Jesus through death and beyond has the capacity to triumph over everything that is keeping us in that tomb.

And so the story does not end at the tomb. It begins again wherever fear gives way to courage, where grief cracks open just enough for hope to breathe, where people who thought they were finished hear Christ calling them back into life.

The Risen One still goes ahead of us— into the streets we avoid, into the conversations we dread, into the wounds we would rather not see. He is already there, waiting for us to catch up.

And when we do, we discover what Mary and the first disciples learned on that morning: that resurrection is not an escape from the world, but God’s insistence on loving it back to life.

That the power that raised Jesus is still loosening the stones we think cannot move. That the promise “Do not be afraid” is not a gentle suggestion but the heartbeat of a new creation.

So go—with trembling, with joy, with whatever faith you have today. Go to Galilee, to Milford, to Stratford, to West Haven, to the places where your real life waits. Go and tell, go and mend, go and stand with the hurting, go and live as if death does not get the last word. Because it doesn’t. Christ is risen, and nothing in this world will ever be the same.