“The Fears of Easter”
Matthew 28:1-10
April 24, 2011
Easter Sunday

Dr. H. Mark Ashworth

The story of Easter takes place in a Good Friday world. A Good Friday world knows what to expect. Those who have power will use it to maintain power. The way things have been is likely to be the way things will remain. And when someone dies, they’re certainly going to stay dead. The Good Friday world is a broken world. We can describe that brokenness in many ways. We can talk about the violence, the selfishness, the despair, the greed, the prejudice, the hatred, the grief, and on and on. But I am convinced that if we drill down far enough to see what is underneath all of that, we would see that what defines a Good Friday world perhaps more than anything else is just this: fear. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that as we hear Matthew tell of that first Easter morning, we keep hearing notes of fear.

The first fear is the unspoken fear, and that is the fear that it is all over. The women come to the tomb not to do anything. They simply come to be where Jesus is buried, to see the tomb. It’s got a big stone over it and guards posted around it. There’s nothing in Matthew about coming to anoint the body. They simply come. And I don’t think it’s any stretch to say that they come out of respect and love and the deep sorrow that such love brings. But it’s hard to see anything resembling hope here. Hope has been dashed with the terrible death of Jesus. The feelings of the women are anything but foreign to us. They are the feelings that can come after we say all the right things about God. God is love. God is the creator. God is all-powerful. Etc., etc. And after we say all those things, there’s the thing we may ask in the quiet places of our hearts: but why doesn’t God fix it? Why doesn’t God make things better? The women are afraid that for all Jesus has meant to them, his story is over.

And then there is the fear we see in the guards at the tomb: fear that God is acting and we’re on the wrong side of history. The guards are those folks who are just doing their job, and their job is to protect the status quo. Jesus had represented a threat to the political and religious powers that be, and they had brutally put that threat down. And now he’s dead, buried behind a stone too big for just one person to move. He’s gone, and the guards are here to make sure no one tries to stir up trouble by taking the body. Got to protect the status quo. The status quo has all the power, after all. All the political power, all the military power, all the religious power. The guards know what side their bread’s buttered on. They’re working for the winners. Then the unimaginable happens. The earthquake’s bad enough, but it’s not unknown. But the angel, coming down from heaven looking like lightning, rolling back the huge stone like it was nothing. And suddenly the guards are terrified. Terrified of the angel? Certainly. But I think they’re terrified because the angel’s coming shows them all their suppositions are wrong. They’re not working for the winners. Their masters don’t hold all the power.

God breaks in at times to shake up our settled certainties. And we need that, because even those who claim allegiance to Christ have at times placed ourselves on the wrong side of history. We’ve stood up for slavery. We’ve stood against the equality of women. We’ve rattled sabers for wars of conquest. We’ve stood with the strong against the weak and with the rich against the poor. We’ve allied ourselves with political and military power, thinking we’re working with the winners. And so many times we’ve been wrong. This is a fear we need to take more seriously than we probably do: the fear of protecting the status quo instead of being open to the radical liberating power of Almighty God.

But let’s go back to the women at the tomb. Because we find in them a second fear: the fear that comes from seeing God turn all we’ve known upside down. Or maybe fear isn’t exactly the right word. The word I would suggest is shock. They’ve come to the tomb to pay their respects to a dead man, only to be greeted in the most astounding way. An angel of the Lord is there, and the angel tells them, “I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here for he has been raised, as he said.” Matthew says that the women leave the tomb with fear and great joy. That seems contradictory. But I suspect that both their minds and their emotions are simply overwhelmed. How can such a thing be? Can it possibly be true? It’s too much to take in. There is joy at the thought of something so wonderful. But there is fear at the whole unimaginable nature of it all.

When God breaks in in a powerful and surprising way, God seems to understand that natural human sense of shock. How many times do we hear it? The angel of the Lord appeared and said…. And time after time the first words from the angel are the same: Fear not. Don’t be afraid. Over and over in scripture we hear it. Fear not, Abram, for I am your shield and will keep my promises to you. Fear not, Hagar, for I have heard your prayer and will protect you and your son Ishmael. Fear not, Zechariah, for you and Elizabeth will have a son, and you will call him John. Fear not, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Fear not, shepherds, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy. Fear not. Do not be afraid. I know you’re looking for Jesus who was crucified. He’s not here, for he has been raised. And when the women encounter Jesus on the road, what does he say to them? “Greetings!” And then those words again, “Do not be afraid.” The words themselves are an imperative, a command. And as with any command, the tone makes all the difference. There’s that tone of command that just wouldn’t make much sense with these words, that shouting tone that says “STOP BEING AFRAID!!” No, that doesn’t work. It just scares us more. But there’s the tone I hear from the angels and the tone I hear from Jesus. And for me, at least, it’s expressed in these words: “You don’t have to be afraid.” You don’t have to be afraid.

As I said at the beginning, we live in a Good Friday world. The evidence is all around us. But Easter is what God does with Good Friday.

On Good Friday, Jesus is crucified. On Easter God raises him up.

On Good Friday, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” On Easter God gives the triumphant answer.

On Good Friday, the world screams “NO!” On Easter, God says “Yes.” Yes to life. Yes to hope. Yes to restoration. Yes to reconciliation. Yes to Jesus. Yes to us all.

All of this is true. All of this is important. But again, maybe more than anything else, maybe underneath everything else, on Easter God says clearly and definitively and eternally, “You don’t have to be afraid.”

It’s OK. You don’t have to be afraid. Those are important, comforting, reassuring words. Or at least they can be. They can be when they’re not said lightly or dismissively. When you and I are in a dark place, we don’t need someone just saying, “Oh, it’s OK. Quit worrying about it.” Those are just empty, unhelpful words. But that isn’t the case on Easter. The resurrected Christ sees the women and says to them, “You don’t have to be afraid.” And I believe he says the same to us. But he says it not just with words but with the reality of himself, the reality of resurrection, the reality of an Easter hope. The one who was tortured and brutally murdered says, “You don’t have to be afraid.” The one who felt himself abandoned by God says, “You don’t have to be afraid.” These are not naïve words or words that fail to recognize the reality of suffering and pain. And it must be said that some fears are normal and even helpful. If I’m afraid to put my hand on a hot stove, that’s a good thing. It keeps me from getting burned. So we’re not talking here about those sorts of fears.

We’re talking about something much more basic to our very existence. When Jesus says, “You don’t have to be afraid,” these are words that go right to the deepest core of our fears. Are you afraid that death is the end? Are you afraid that God will abandon you? Are you afraid that the philosopher was right that life is “nasty, brutish, and short” and that it really has no meaning? Are you afraid that in the end you’re totally alone? The message of Easter is that you don’t have to be afraid.

You don’t have to be afraid, because death is not the end. Christ is risen and death is swallowed up in victory.

You don’t have to be afraid, because even in the darkest hour, God is with you.

You don’t have to be afraid, because the God who loves you gives your life meaning and purpose here and now.

You don’t have to be afraid, even in this Good Friday world, because the God who raised Jesus from the dead looks at all the Good Fridays of our lives and proclaims Easter.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Thanks be to God. AMEN.