John Hassell
April 20, 2025
Easter Sunday
Good morning, Seekers. Happy Easter to each of you. To quote from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, “You have been raised with Christ!”
Preparing this sermon for me was like visiting a new country. Many of you have heard dozens of Easter sermons, but this time, at least for me it has been similar to stepping into a completely different world.
I would like to present to you, how I discovered in this new country, a new vision of Easter, of the Resurrection, or as our spiritual cousins who are from the Eastern Orthodox Christian heritage call “Anastasis” the Greek word for the Resurrection.
But before I get to that, in the interest of full disclosure, let me state unequivocally: I believe in the resurrection down deep in my bones. Whether someone believes that the Resurrection literally happened or whether it was a metaphor doesn’t really matter. What’s important is what does the Resurrection mean in terms of life, how we live our lives. From my experience in the response to the HIV epidemic, I’ve seen resurrection. The Rev. Jim Mitulski, my friend and mentor, has shared that he became so sick from HIV laying up in a hospital in intensive care for several days and thinking he was going to die. But with good care, he came back from almost certain death. For him, that was resurrection. He’s not a Christian fundamentalist; he is a fundamentalist about the resurrection, and so am I. In the world of HIV medicine, we often hear the term, the “Lazurus effect”, to describe someone so emaciated and near death that after anti-retroviral therapy, is restored to life; is renewed in body and soul.
I have come to learn that the Easter story itself needs to be resurrected. So come along with me in this new land, as I have come to see the Resurrection in a new way, a new light, a new point of view.
Like you, I always thought that the feast of the Resurrection was vindication of the claim that Jesus is the Messiah, the divine one, not just another prophet or another revolutionary fighting the Roman empire. We often saw the resurrected Jesus in a triumphant, victorious pose, all by himself, arising from the tomb arms stretched out, all alone, a solo act, depicted as an individual coming out from his tomb as a superhero. It’s a one man show. As a child, I thought it was a magic trick Jesus used to prove himself. I call this image, the touchdown Jesus. ‘Look at me, I’ve shown all those doubters that I am divine.’ Theologians are a little more polite and call this image the “individual tradition” of the resurrection.
I think the word ‘iconic’ is overused. Today, Celebration Circle Mission Group, shares this image of a real icon: The Icon of Anastasis.
I’ve come to learn that icons as depicted in Eastern Orthodox Christianity are portals into the divine, windows into the heart of God. Not just beautiful works of art, which they are, but sacred liminal openings into the Holy Mystery. John Dominic Crossan and Sarah Sexton Crossan’s book “Resurrecting Easter” opened my eyes to this new vision of Easter.
Once I started looking deeply into this sacred icon and studying the icons of anastasis, often depicted in Eastern Christianity shown here today on the screen, I realized that after sixty some years, I’ve been missing the point! This icon depicts a different, beautiful, more inclusive resurrection, which theologians today call the “universal tradition” of the resurrection.
The Western and Eastern traditions of the Resurrection are radically different.
The Western or individual tradition of the Resurrection sends a message – it’s all about me. Everyone else witnessing it are spectators. The Eastern or universal tradition sends a completely hopeful message. We see the resurrected Jesus pulling Adam and Eve up from their graves grasping them with his wounded hands. We see David and Solomon, wearing crowns, David with his beard and Solomon his son clean shaven and often John the Baptist, the first martyr of the New Testament, he’s the one who looks like he needs a haircut and a shave. They’re gathered around as witnesses to Jesus pulling humanity out of Hades, symbolized by Adam and Eve. Remember Hades isn’t hell, rather it was a place of the dead, not a place of eternal fire and torture. Jesus is standing on the crumpled gate of Hades showing that he has broken open the gates to the place of the dead. You see scattered near the feet of Jesus, the broken locks and hinges of the gate to Hades. You see the first martyr of the Hebrew Bible, Abel, with his staff and two patriarchs at his side. Most importantly, we see Jesus, with his wounded hands, lifting all humanity up from the grave.
The resurrection, I submit, couldn’t have been just about Jesus! It was and is for all of us.
Recall the prescient declaration from Is. 25:6-7 “ … God will swallow up death forever!”
We aren’t passive observers or spectators – rather we, Adam and Eve, are participants in the Resurrection. We’re rising up out of death into the aura surrounding Jesus as Jesus steps out of the tomb.
In First Thessalonians 4:14, we read “For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so through Jesus, God will bring with Jesus those who have died.” Here it is: Christ did not rise alone!
Permit me to be a bit subversive and allow me to paraphrase from a non-canonical source the Gospel of Nicodemus: “Christ stretched out Christ’s hands and took hold of our forefather and foremother, Adam and Eve, and raised them up and went into Paradise holding them by their hands.
“Why then do you marvel at the Resurrection of Jesus? What is marvelous is not that he arose but that he did not arise alone, that he raised many other dead ones who appeared to many in Jerusalem.” wrote the writer of the Gospel of Nicodemus.
What if the Resurrection is more than a sacred event we hold dear every Spring, but a place for us? A hallowed corner in our own spirit. Remember Jesus said, I go to prepare a place for you. Is that place in our hearts, a place in our beloved community, at Seekers Church?
Don’t you find it intriguing that in none of the Gospels do we have an account of the resurrection itself? The most important event in the life of Jesus isn’t described in the Gospels. We have accounts of the before and the after, but we have no account of Jesus rising from his tomb. We have stories of Mary Magdalene getting to the tomb first while the men were cowering in their hiding places. I would be remiss, if I didn’t highlight here, that Mary Magdalene and the women who accompanied her, were the first to proclaim that Jesus was resurrected. We have accounts of the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus and another account of Jesus asking Thomas to touch his wounds from the crucifixion.
The good news today is the Feast of the Resurrection is the human race, lifted and resurrected from its tomb, liberated from death. Instead of rising alone, Christ raises all humanity with Christ.
There’s a song I love to listen to that has this beautiful lyric to describe Jesus: “You’re the one who never leaves the one behind. If you left the grave behind, so will I…” sings the Gospel artist Osby Berry. In the Resurrection, Jesus leaves no one behind!
So what? How should we then live, knowing that the Resurrection was more than a Resurrection for the Divine One in Jesus Christ but for humanity – all of us?
Let us ponder the words of Saint Ambrose of Milan: “If Christ did not rise for us, then Christ did not rise at all, since Christ had no need of it just for Christ’s self. In Christ, the world arose, in Christ, heaven arose, in Christ, the earth arose, for there will be a new heaven and a new earth.”
The Resurrection, therefore, has placed a call on each of us to renew heaven and renew the earth. The Resurrection gives us a corporate, communal, universal vision of freedom from death, liberation from Hades. Faith, plus God’s presence, which we will in a few moments experience in the Eucharist, equals resurrection.
You say what? You want me to renew heaven and earth? Yes, I do. Standing up for justice; practicing non-violent resistance; caring for creation; caring for the outcast, the throwaway children, the strangers, the undocumented migrants in our land, the widows and orphans, finding a way out of a civilization based on violence. That’s all about renewing the earth, renewing the promise of heaven, not just as an escape strategy. The stories from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament aren’t showing us going to heaven but about heaven coming to us. They tell us that God wants to come and be with us. Emmanuel means God is with us. Remember the ancient hymn from advent, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel.”
Returning to my experience in seeing people with HIV resurrected from death, we know that resurrection comes in many forms, healing not just bodies, but the natural world, healing divisions in our communities and resurrecting even our own country from its political divisions and offering a more beautiful path away from an obsession with violence.
And so, rejoice and be glad, you have been raised with Christ! May it be so. Amen.