Jesus Changes Lives
Easter Sunday – April 4, 2010
Sometimes one event, one encounter, can change your life, change your whole perspective, change what you do from that point on. Sometimes one event, one encounter can change how you live and what you live for.
I was reminded of that this week when I was watching the TV show Bones.
It's one of those law enforcement shows, with the forensic anthropologist, Temperance Brennan, also known as Bones, & her scientist colleagues who partner with the FBI to solve difficult, mysterious deaths.
In this most recent episode, the young FBI psychiatrist, Sweets, is riding on the subway, minding his own business, when he notices the young man sitting next to him suddenly getting all emotional. Being a psychiatrist and a generally good guy, he takes out his earbuds, turns off his iPod, and asks if something's wrong. But nothing's wrong. The other man has just found out that the leukemia that has dominated the last 8 years of his life is gone. He's cancer free! He's got his life back! And he's filled with ideas and plans for how he is going to make up for that lost time, how he'll live his life to the fullest – he travel and date lots of exotic women.
But in the next moment, a flood of water comes shooting down the subway tunnel, pushing the train off its tracks, upending the car, sending people flying everywhere. No one is seriously hurt, except this young man, who is thrown forward into the pole, hitting his head. When the chaos subsides, Sweets kneels beside him to find that his new friend, the one with his whole life stretched out before him, has died.
Well, this whole chain of events knocks Sweets for a loop. He's rocked by the injustice and senselessness of it all. It gets him to thinking about his own life. He starts re-evaluating how he's been living. He wakes up to how precious life is, and throughout the episode, we see Sweets wrestling with the deep questions of life, sifting through his priorities, trying to figure out if this is the life he wants, or if maybe something needs to change if he's really going to life his life to the fullest.
Easter is one of those events that invites us to ask the same deep questions. We get the story of that 1st Easter morning from the gospel of Luke this year. And in it, we have the same basic details we get every year. The women come to the tomb, expecting to find a dead body there, expecting to find a lifeless corpse. After all, that's why they have come bringing the spices and ointments that they had prepared on Friday – to care for Jesus' body the way it deserves.
But when they get there, they find themselves face to face with something they never expected. There they have an encounter that will change their whole lives. They come to the tomb, and find the stone is already rolled away. Right away, they are at full alert, on guard. They know something is up here, just like you would if you came home one day and found your door ajar. They go into the tomb, and look! The body's not there... but before they can even start processing what that means, 2 men are suddenly there beside them with a message: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified and on the third day rise again.”
Then the women did remember those words – even if they didn't know what they meant at the time, even if they still didn't quite get what they meant now. (They still haven't seen the risen Jesus yet, remember.) But remembering his words sends them racing off, back to the 11 and all the rest of the disciples to share what they have seen. Because when you have a life-changing experience, you want to talk it over with the people you trust.
But we see when they get back to wherever the disciples were staying that not everybody thinks this is a life-changing event. The disciples hear what Mary & Mary & Joanna and the rest of the women say, but they don't believe it. Jesus has risen – but that's just unbelievable. Dead people stay dead. They don't come back to life. They think it's just an idle tale, meaningless gossip from a bunch of grieving women who don't really know what they saw and heard. But Peter – he has a different response – he wants to go and see for himself what these crazy women are talking about, and so he runs to the tomb. When he gets there, he stoops down & looks in – and all he sees are the linen cloths Jesus had been wrapped up in, lying there by themselves. No body. No men in dazzling clothes. What he doesn't see there amazes him, and he just goes home.
Sometimes one event, one encounter, can change your life, change your whole perspective, change what you do from that point on. Sometimes one event, one encounter can change how you live and what you live for. But it all depends on what you do with that one event, what you make of that one encounter. The gospel story shows us the different ways people reacted to the news that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Some went rushing to tell others, some flat out didn't believe at first, and others had to go see it for themselves.
And in that episode of Bones I was telling you about, Sweets too had options. There were lots of different ways he could have responded to what happened that day on the subway. He could have wallowed around in it for a few days and then just slowly let his life go back to normal, let himself sink back into the every day and forgotten all about it, let it pass like a momentary interlude of personal angst and then moved on like it didn't mean a thing. You know, sometimes that happens to us. We have these big life events that are so deep & so meaningful, and we say to ourselves that we're going to change – and then we don't. Sooner or later, life just goes back to normal.
Well, Sweets could have done that, but he didn't. After all of his soul-searching, his days of wrestling with this chance encounter, he let it change him. I won't give away what he did, but it opened him up to new possibilities, moved him in a different direction, moved him to more fully embrace life in the here and now. That's what happened when he randomly met a man who got a new lease on life and suddenly finds it snatched away.
But we come here this morning and hear an even more fantastic tale – for here in Luke's gospel, we meet a man who was dead, and suddenly, mysteriously, inexplicably, is raised to new life, eternal life – the life that never ends. We have the same options that faced Jesus' followers on that first Easter day. We have the same options that faced Sweets after the subway accident. The question is, what will we do with this one event, this one encounter? Will we let ourselves be changed by this story? Will it make a difference in our lives? After this day of joy and celebration is over, will we sink back into the every day, or will we embrace this story of love that gives itself away, love that cannot die, love that offers us not just eternal life after we die, but a new way of living in the here and now? Will we let the truth of the risen Jesus change how we live and what we live for? Because life in Jesus, resurrection life, will do that to you. It is a gift that comes from our risen Savior this morning, and every day, offering us a new beginning, a chance to see if the lives we are living are the lives he longs for us to have, lives that really matter. Let's not waste it. This Easter, may we let the story sink in, may we let Jesus sink in – and may he transform our lives.
Amen.
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