This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at First Church of Athol [Massachusetts], Unitarian. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2003 Daniel Harper.
The children’s story told about Palm Sunday: link.
Sermon
We sit here this morning in a historically Unitarian church. Some of you here this morning went to Sunday school in what was historically a Unitarian church — perhaps in this very church. I, too, grew up in a historically Unitarian church, and the story of Easter I heard as a child was the Unitarian story of Easter.
I love our Unitarian version of the Easter story, and I’m glad the children are with us this morning to hear this story. Why is our version of the story different? When we retell that story, we don’t assume that Jesus was God. And that leads to all kinds of little changes that add up in the end…. Tell you what, let’s just listen to the Unitarian story of Easter and find out what it all adds up to in the end.
We left Jesus as he was entering the city of Jerusalem, being wlecomed by people carrying flowers and waving palm fronds.
On that first day in Jerusalem, Jesus did little more than look around in the great Temple of Jerusalem — the Temple that was the holiest place for Jesus and for all other Jews. Jesus noticed that there were a number of people selling things in the Temple (for example, there were people selling pigeons), and besides that there were all kinds of comings and goings through the Temple, people carrying all kinds of gear, taking shortcuts by going through the Temple.
The next day, Jesus returned to the Temple. He walked in, chased out the people selling things, and upset the tables of the moneychangers. Needless to say, he created quite a commotion! and I imagine that a crowd gathered around to see what this stranger, this traveling rabbi, was up to. Once the dust had settled, Jesus turned to the gathered crowd, and quoted from the Hebrew scriptures, the book of Isaiah where God says, “My Temple shall be known as a place of prayer for all nations.” Jesus said it was time that the Temple went back to being a place of prayer — how could you pray when there were people buying and selling things right next to you? How could you pray with all those pigeons cooing?
I don’t know about you, but I think Jesus did the right thing in chasing the pigeon-dealers, the moneylenders, and the other salespeople out of the Temple. But the way he did managed to annoy the powerful people who ran the Temple. It made them look bad. They didn’t like that.
In the next few days, Jesus taught and preached all through Jerusalem. We know he quoted the book of Leviticus, where it says, “You are to love your neighbor as yourself.” He encouraged people to be genuinely religious, to help the weak and the poor. Jesus also got into fairly heated discussions with some of Jerusalem’s religious leaders, and he was so good at arguing that once again, he made those powerful people look bad. Once again, they didn’t like that.
Meanwhile, other things were brewing in Jerusalem. The Romans governed Jerusalem at that time. The Romans were also concerned about Jesus. When Jesus rode into the city, he was welcomed by a crowd of people who treated him as if he were one of the long-lost kings of Israel. That made the Romans worry. Was Jesus planning some kind of secret religious rebellion? How many followers did he have? What was he really up to, anyway?
Jesus continued his teaching and preaching from Sunday until Thursday evening, when Passover began. Since Jesus and his disciples were all good observant Jews, after sundown on Thursday they celebrated a Passover Seder together. They had the wine, the matzoh, the bitter herbs, all the standard things you have at a Seder. (By the way, if you’ve ever heard of “Maundy Thursday,” which is always the Thursday before Easter Sunday, that’s the commemoration of that last meal; and while not all Bible scholars agree that least meal was in fact a Seder, many scholars do think it was a Seder.)
After the Seder, Jesus was restless and depressed. He had a strong sense that the Romans or the powerful religious leaders were going to try to arrest him for stirring up trouble, for agitating the people of Jerusalem. He didn’t know how or when it would happen, but he was pretty sure he would be arrested sometime.
As it happened, Jesus was arrested just a few hours after the Seder. He was given a trial the same night he was arrested, and he was executed the next day. The Romans put him to death using a common but very unpleasant type of execution known as crucifixion. (And the day of Jesus’ execution, the Friday before Easter, is called “Good Friday,” a day when many Christians commemorate Jesus’ death.)
Because the Jewish sabbath started right at sundown, and Jewish law of the time did not allow you to bury anyone on the Sabbath day, Jesus’ friends couldn’t bury him right away. There were no funeral homes back in those days, so Jesus’ friends put his body in a tomb, a sort of cave cut into the side of a hill, where the body would be safe until after the Sabbath was over.
First thing Sunday morning, some of Jesus’ friends went to the tomb to get the body ready for burial. But to their great surprise, the body was gone, and there was a man there in white robes who talked to them about Jesus!
When I was a child, my Unitarian mother or my Unitarian Universalist Sunday school teachers would tell me that what had probably happened is that some of Jesus’ other friends had come along, and had already buried the body. You see, there must have been a fair amount of confusion that first Easter morning. Jesus’ friends were upset that he was dead, and they were worried that one or more of them might be arrested, too, or even executed. The burial must have taken place in secret, and probably not everybody got told when and where the burial was. Thus, by the time some of Jesus’ followers had gotten to the tomb, others had already buried his body.
Some of Jesus’ followers began saying that Jesus had risen from the dead, and following that several people even claimed to have spoken with him. My mother always said that we Unitarian Universalists don’t believe that Jesus actually arose from the dead. It’s just that his friends were so sad, and missed him so much, that they wanted to believe that he was alive again.
That’s our Unitarian version of the Easter story. It’s a good story, but it doesn’t really have a very snappy ending. The standard ending of the Easter story has a lot more pizzazz, doesn’t it? In a literal, orthodox Christian story of Easter, Jesus gets to rise from the dead — not just in some metaphorical sense, but really rise from the dead! Jesus comes back to life and talks to various people, angels in dazzling robes appear, Jesus even shares a meal of grilled fish with some of the disciples. Now that’s what I call an ending!
Yet while the orthdox version of the Easter story has a better ending, I don’t find that version of the story satisfying at all. Because by emphasizing the allegedly miraculous aspects of Jesus’ death, I feel you cover over what is truly important about Jesus. What is truly important about Jesus is his life and his teaching. He taught one of the great truths of the ages: That if you want to be a good person, you are to love your neighbor as you love yourself. He taught another great truth of the ages: that you should love God with all your heart and all your mind (and for the word “God” you can feel free to substitute something like “truth” or “that which is highest and best”).
Everything else, as Jesus himself says, is commentary on these two great truths. Thus, to me — to many, if not most, Unitarian Universalists — the story of Easter is far less important than the great truths that Jesus taught in the days leading up to Easter. The story of Easter is less important than the example Jesus sets for us when, like Socrates before him, and like many others since, Jesus gave his life in service of those great truths.
With our ending for the Easter story, we lose the whole notion that Jesus is somehow God. We lose some of the poetry of the story. Yet what we gain is a sense of a life lived for the sake of truth. For us Unitarian Universalists, Jesus doesn’t need miracles to be great. For us, Jesus doesn’t need to literally rise up from the dead for his truth to live on in us. What we gain is the example of a life lived for the sake of truth.
Truth will shine forth, in spite of human wrongs and human injustices. Jesus was arrested by small-minded men; as Bible scholar Carole Fontaine puts it, he was “an innocent man executed on trumped-up political charges” — yet the truths that Jesus taught during his life live on in spite of all efforts to silence him. This is all the resurrection I will ever need to believe in: the constant and ongoing resurrection of the wisdom of the ages; the resurrection of truth, as in each age truth shines forth in the lives and deeds of great women and men.
We live in a troubled age, with wars and rumors of wars; an age when we are too ready to stoop to violence; an age where sometimes we are required to use violence. We remain in need of the truths Jesus taught, truths that were grounded in love. It is up to us to resurrect the truths of Jesus once again:
To love God (or, to love what is highest in best in the world) — with your whole heart, with your whole mind, with your whole might.
And, — To love your neighbor as yourself.
May we live out our lives in the spirit of these two truths. And that will be all the resurrection that we ever need.