Andrée Endinger's Easter sermon

Andrée Endinger's Easter sermon: Brothers and sisters, dear friends, this morning I have only good news for us. Doesn't that make a difference to us?

XNUMX centuries after that Passover day, when Mary Magdalene, Mary, mother of James and Salome, after having accompanied Jesus in his death on the cross, leave early in the morning for the tomb in which Joseph of Arimathea had placed the body of Jesus a few hours before. They bought spices to embalm Jesus… perhaps they found some of that nard that an unknown woman from Bethany poured on Jesus' head, thus embalming him while he was still alive!

So on this Easter morning of 2021, I invite you to take this path to the tomb, following in the footsteps of these three women.

The two Marys and Salome advance in silence, prey to a deep sadness. They do not express their distress, which can nevertheless be guessed: in fact, they are going to accomplish this work reserved for women who, just as they accompany birth, take care of death and the last gestures of tenderness and homage to the one who is no more and who was dear to them…

But they express a concern: "Who will roll away the stone from the entrance to the tomb?" A legitimate question and concern, they know that alone, they will not succeed! A question that also tells us that these women, even if they are sad, remain in life and have kept a little grain of hope deep inside themselves. They hope that someone, a gardener, will be there to help them... With courage, they got up at sunrise and took to the road, despite the fear, despite the sadness without letting themselves be locked in despair...

So this morning, let us dare to move towards Jesus, without fear and without complexes, as we are, with our shortcomings, our regrets, our fears, our deaths, our distress, our suffering… I do not know your lives, but what I do know is that for each and every one of you, life brings its share of sorrows, more or less great… Yes, it is with our own questions and concerns that we move forward this morning towards Easter, but also with all the collective uncertainties generated by the very strange health situation that we have been living for a year. The resurrection is not a magic wand, as we will discover with our three companions of the day

"Who will roll away the stone for us?"

The three women are faced with an impossible situation and throughout their walk they have been mulling over this question, without knowing that another impossible situation awaits them at the tomb. Indeed, when they arrive, the stone has already been rolled away. We do not know by whom or how, but it is a fact: the question that preoccupied them on the way no longer needs to be asked.

Do we not find ourselves a little in this experience of Mary and Salome? Do we not often have questions that weigh on us like a lid that is impossible to lift, questions that suddenly become useless because the answer has given itself? And we would not even really know how to say how all these impossibilities of our lives suddenly found themselves possible. In any case, I have already experienced this.

The stone has been rolled away and the impossible has become possible. They enter the tomb and another impossible comes to awaken their fear. They expected death, and it is life that welcomes them in the person of a young man dressed in white. The tomb, guardian of death, becomes bearer of life, opening onto life.

They expected death and what they found was life.

And between these two realities, death and life, between the death of Jesus on the cross and the resurrection of Jesus there is the Sabbath. They observed, as good Jews, the time of the Sabbath and this took precedence over the duty to render to a dead person, even if it was Jesus!

For Jews, the Sabbath is more important than death and mourning. It is the first holiday of Judaism, the day of the week when the Creator regenerates his creatures in rest. Before paying tribute to a dead person, the first duty of the believer is to honor the God of life. The words of Genesis resonate " there was evening, there was morning " the light comes to burst into the night, into the darkness.

And for us Christians, this is as wonderful news as it is for Judaism: life bursts into death!
Between the silence of death and the joy of resurrection, there is this moment when God takes up all the space, when God settles down, rests, and when I settle down in him. To come out of our deaths, we must perhaps take the time to settle down in God, in silence, in the peace of the heart, in prayer… a time of Shabbat to let the word of God reach us and grow in us.

"He is risen, he is not here"

Mary Magdalene, Mary and Salome enter the tomb and are greeted by a young man dressed in white. Is he a man, is he an angel? Mark does not say. He is seated on the right side, the good side, the divine place and we can understand immediately that this is a divine messenger.

In any case, it is he who gives meaning to the event. The rolled stone and the absence of a body in the tomb mean nothing in themselves: the body could have been moved! The words spoken will not explain the event, but give meaning to the emptiness in the tomb.

The first words of this young man are intended to reassure the women who are frightened: " do not be frightened". For them, the vision of a divine messenger immediately translates into fear, a reflex from the First Testament and still anchored in the Judaism of the time.
For us, this word sums up the Easter faith: Do not be afraid! Do not be afraid of life and death, do not be afraid of God and your neighbor, do not be afraid of yourself… Live your life… And perhaps a good way to welcome the message of the resurrection is to question oneself about one's fears, visit them in prayer and oppose them with the great announcement: "Christ is risen!"

This divine messenger then announces the resurrection of Jesus. And the Gospel of Mark does not describe it, it simply announces the resurrection and speaks of an empty tomb and therefore of an absence in that place.
"He is risen" It is God who resurrects Jesus, and to proclaim the resurrection is to recognize, as on Shabbat, the creative work of God who makes life spring forth where man expects only death.

"He is not here"

Jesus did not allow himself to be confined by the tomb and death. He will never be a prisoner of our rites, our liturgies, our theologies, our fears and our beliefs. He is Alive and life never allows itself to be contained.

And this is another wonderful news for us Christians. The tomb is empty and we have nothing to erect as a statue, nothing to possess, nothing to hold on to, nothing to idolize... Jesus cannot be reduced to an idol. He left the tomb empty and a hollow in each of us, a place of waiting, of desire, of hope... of prayer, this hollow in which we can gather a word from God on condition that we keep our hands and hearts open, waiting and ready to give. Our faith rests on a hollow, like a matrix, which can receive and which can give... Our faith rests on a word and the experience that we are called to live is to put on our lips the creed of the young man Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified and risen."

The tomb is empty and Jesus is the Living One...

"He's not here".. but then where is he?

“Go and tell his disciples that he is going before you to Galilee…” Galilee is where it all began. It is the land of the apostles, the land of their childhood, of their childhood, of their encounter with Jesus. The return to Galilee announces a resurrection that does not take place outside of our history, but fully in the history of our lives, in what we are deep within us… It is today, in our Galilee, in the everyday life of our that we are called to be resurrected. The resurrection does not mean that our world is no longer inhabited by the forces of death. Our lives are marked by mourning, suffering, trials… The resurrection means that the reality of darkness does not need to and cannot prevent us from overcoming our fear, from becoming who you are and from living as resurrected people in our Galilee.

May we be, like Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome, overwhelmed by this incredible and marvelous news of the resurrection.

May we move forward despite fear, silence, and incomprehension on the new paths of our Galilee with the confident faith that the Living One precedes us and awaits us there.

 Amen
 

Andrée Endinger's Easter sermon