My Love For You Pours From the Empty Tomb

In the gospel of Matthew, we find out what happened  to Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus for cash. When he heard that Jesus had been sentenced to death, he tried to return the money. But the authorities told him a deal was a deal. If he didn’t like it, it was his problem. Horrified, Judas ran out, tossing the coins at them. Then he hanged himself.

I can’t help thinking of Judas today. He is the one loose end in the Easter drama, the one un-mended hole in the glory road. He’s gone from the story, and I miss him.

Maybe that’s because I know what it’s like to be a Judas. I’ve committed my share of betrayals. I’ve felt the kind of shame that makes you want to disappear into the void.

But I’m lucky. And so are you, my fellow Judases, because we know something he never got to discover. We know that God’s love for us pours from the empty tomb.

Judas didn’t get to know that. He was the only one of Jesus’ disciples who never got to see Christ’s shining face, never got to feel the breath of peace upon him, never heard the familiar voice say it to him, “Peace.”

I think of Judas this morning because I know what my life would be like if I’d never heard that voice—how the shadows would gather, how enveloping they would become, how completely the light would disappear.

And so on Easter, I find myself wishing that Judas had been able to hold on just another couple of days before killing his chances.  I wish his grief and remorse had not made him so hopeless so soon.

I wish this for him especially when I read what happened to his sisters and brothers, to the disciples who also betrayed Jesus—who denied him angrily and fled in terror at the first sign of trouble. They had reason to be ashamed too, and I expect they were. I just wish Judas could’ve been there with them when what happened to them happened.

When Christ came to them from the dead. When he came to them alive, and did not say what you would have expected him to say, what we would have granted him every right to say—“Why did you rat me out? Why did you run away? Why did you swear up and down you never knew me?”

I wish Judas had been there when Christ came to them from the dead, without uttering a single recrimination, without punishing or shaming. Instead, it was as if he’d just been away for a little while praying or teaching or healing, and had come home to a happy reunion. I wish Judas had been there to see that Christ was so eager for the friends who betrayed him that he passed through solid doors to be near them.

And I wish Judas could have been with the other disciples too, the ones who thought the reports of Christ’s rising were nonsense, and went home to pick up where they’d left off, to be fishers of fish again, not people.

If he had been there with them, he might have learned that there is no place any of us can go that Christ will not try to be with us, nothing any of us can do to repel him.

If he’d held on two more days, he might have seen Jesus walking on the beach in the dawn mist. He would have smelled smoke from a charcoal fire and tasted the fish Jesus was grilling for them on the shore.

He might even have seen Jesus take Peter aside—Peter, who had denied him again and again and again. And he might have overheard this impossible dialogue:

Peter, do you love me? Love me more than these? Do you love me?

I love you. Yes, I do. Lord, you know everything—you know I do.

Then you, Peter, feed my lambs.

In the Easter stories there is not a word from Christ about the past. He does not chide his disciples for their fear and cowardice when he was dying; if he chides them at all, it is for their reluctance to believe that he is living. They gave up their great hope so quickly; but they believe in its resurrection only slowly. They balk, even when it is standing in front of them with open arms.

But no matter. The arms do not close. They will not. No matter what. I wish Judas could’ve known that.

I wish he could’ve known that God had fashioned a new song out of tuneless death. I wish he’d been able to stand at the grave and hear creation sing it. The song in spite of everything—because of everything. The song that is nothing but love. For him. And if for him, then also for everyone, and for us.

From the damage of international violence to the damage of domestic violence; from the revenge of the dissed gang-banger on the streets of South Central LA to the honor-killing of the shamed husband in the villages of rural India; from campaigns of war to campaigns for the White House; from bedroom to boardroom, the human impulse, the natural and normal thing, has always been to feed on grievances and point the finger at the other, until the last sword has come down on the innocent neck of the last scapegoat.

In our human experience there is no such thing as a world free of blood-letting, a world that is not structured for blame. In the world we know, to exact one’s due is the very thing that makes sense of life. Does a victim of war offer a ceasefire? A victim of hate speak a syntax of love? What victim of injustice plans a meal, not revenge?

Yet this is precisely what our tradition claims, that Easter inaugurates a world free of shame and reprisal. Easter is the down payment of a new world structured in mercy. Easter claims that God is creating that new world even now, fashioning a new thing for us in the image of the Innocent One who returns without blame, who does not require satisfaction, and whose love for us pours from the empty tomb.

If Easter is true, it carries a potent ethical and political charge. It posits a way of relationship, intimate and global, that is a far cry from the age-old, score-settling way of mayhem. It changes everything.

The implications of love’s relentlessness are so staggering that we can’t cope with them. We prefer death itself and all the violence of the past to such an Easter. And to ward it off, a voice in our sensible, fair, and moral heads is always protesting, ‘But where is the justice in this? Do you mean to say that all the wicked villains get off scott free? Does God just look the other way? What about Hitler? What about… Judas?”

This is where it gets hard. This is why they call it faith. Here is where the leap is required, the relinquishment of the trust we’ve all placed, knowingly or not, in the commonsensical structures of this age. This is the part the world scoffs at. The part we scoff at. The thing that infuriates us. The thing even good Christians hate—the unfailing divine response to our demand that things be set right: “My love for you pours from the empty tomb.”

It bothered medieval Christians that none of the four gospels records a post-resurrection appearance of Christ to his own mother. That just didn’t seem fitting, and so they let devotion fuel their imaginations and invented lots of “true” gospel stories about a joyous reunion of mother and son. 

Dear friends, if Easter is true, if no one and nothing falls outside its indefatigable mercy, why not let our devotion drive our dreaming too? If Easter is true, then maybe this story is also true. It is only fitting that it should be.

It must have gone something like this:

Before sun-up on the day of his rising, before the women arrived with spices, or any of the other breathless disciples peered into the tomb, Jesus got up and went first to Judas.

The betrayer was curled up in a small room lit dimly only by the fading stars. He was still weeping. He had wanted to die, but in the end he had decided not to grant himself that mercy.

When he saw Jesus, he cried out and shrank against the wall, fending him off with his hands. But Jesus knelt beside him and gathered him in his arms.

Judas tried to speak. To explain, to beg.

“No, no. Don’t say anything,” Jesus told him. “Not a word. Let me tell you. Let me tell you who I am.”

“I am the Christ of eternal mercy. The unimaginable God. I formed you from earth. I exalt you beyond the stars.”

“O my Judas, my tenderness for you overflows. My love for you pours from the empty tomb, like song.”

Alleluia.

This sermon was followed by the Easter cantata, “Amor meus tibi ex sepulcro vacuo effundit”, by First Church composer-in-residence, Patricia Van Ness. The English translation of the text is as follows:

 

You who sought me before dawn

with spices in your hands;

Magdalene;

And you, disciple loved above all disciples,

who lay close to my breast at the table,

and whose heart is one with mine,

My love for you pours from the empty tomb,

like song.

To the two who paused in sadness

walking to Emmaus;

To Simon Peter, warrior and child;

To the Centurian;

To Pilate;

To Judas,

I am the Christ of eternal mercy.

I am the God of compassion.

I am the unimaginable God.

I am the Rose of Sharon.

I have formed you from earth.

And exalt you in the heavens beyond the stars.

My tenderness for you overflows

and pours from the empty tomb,

like song.

Alleluia.

Amen.

 

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