A father was explaining to his five-year-old son how Jesus died and then, on the third day, was resurrected from the dead. “That’s what we believe,” the father said. “That’s how we know Jesus is the Son of God, because He came back from the dead just as He said He would.”  “You mean like Elvis?” the boy replied.

People nowadays believe just about everything, except that which is most true. We have to work a little bit harder to help people understand the old story of the Gospel.

In our lesson this morning, John tells us that Mary Magdalene is the first person who comes to the tomb.  I find it interesting that Mary Magdalene is the first to discover the empty tomb. Contrary to what you may think about Mary Magdalene, we actually know very little about her. What we think we know is mostly conjecture and legend.

Newsweek magazine did a story on Mary Magdalene a couple of years back. They called her “An Inconvenient Woman,” because she is at the center of so much controversy and yet so little is really known.  One tradition claims she was a prostitute before she met Jesus, but nowhere in the Gospels does it really say this. In fact, the Eastern Orthodox Church maintains that Mary Magdalene was a virtuous woman all her life.

All the New Testament really tells us about Mary is that she entered Jesus’ ministry as he preached throughout Galilee , that she had been possessed by seven demons but was no longer, and that she announced the Resurrection. We never learn her occupation, the color of her hair, if she was old or young, homely or beautiful.

The fact that she is so important in the resurrection narrative and so absent from the rest of the New Testament has led to all kinds of speculation and even conspiracy theories.

Those of you who read “The Da Vinci Code” know that the plot revolves around the idea that the early church sought to suppress that fact that Jesus was actually married to Magdalene and that she bore him a child.

Personally, I prefer to stick to what we know. And most of what we know comes to us in the stories of Christ’s passion and his resurrection. As Jesus hangs in agony on the cross, his life ebbing from him, Mary Magdalene is there.

After meeting at the tomb, Mary Magdalene goes to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” A simple testimony, but one that would change the world.  What is it that God is saying to us through this Easter story?

First of all, God wants us to know that this real. It’s not “made up.”  The last thing Mary expected when she went to the tomb that first Easter morning was to find it empty. She expected to find a gray, lifeless body.

Even Peter and the other disciple who had been with Jesus from the beginning of his ministry were not prepared for what they found that morning.  After they found the tomb empty they were mystified. In verse nine of today’s lesson we read, “They still didn’t understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.”

The religious leaders, who put a guard on the tomb, didn’t understand nor did they expect a resurrection.  They posted a guard to keep his disciples from stealing his body.

Perhaps surprise! is the word that best fits Easter Sunday. No one expected Jesus ­to rise from the dead. If you think the disciples made all this up, it just doesn’t jibe with the record. They were just as shocked as you and I would be if we went to the funeral of a loved one, and suddenly a person who had been dead for three days got up and began to walk and talk among us.

The first thing God wants us to know this morning that that this story is true. It’s not made up.

The second thing God wants us know this morning is that you can’t divorce the resurrection from the cross. Many people today try to do that. In fact, that’s basically what much of the New Age movement is all about, though most of its adherents probably don’t realize it.

It’s Christianity without the cross. Take the love from Christianity, mix it with the joy from Christianity, fold in the hope and magic from Christianity, but leave out the cross.

Penney Schwab’s grandsons, six-year-old Ryan and four-year-old David, were visiting her church for Easter Sunday service. Penney explained to each boy that the pastor would give them a small cross during children’s time to remind them of how Jesus died for them.

At this point, young David announced, “I think I’d rather stand outside with my basket and wait for the Easter bunny.”  Isn’t that just like us adults, too? We don’t want the true story of Easter--the suffering, the sacrifice, the death and despair. We want the warm and fuzzy unreality of the Easter bunny instead.  1

Mary didn’t recognize Jesus there in the garden because her heart was breaking. She wrestled with the knowledge that this man whose very life and nature was love had been crucified in hatred on a cross. The one who had saved others did not save himself. How could life be so cruel? Where was God in all of this?

What she had yet to understand was that without a cross, there would be no resurrection.   And without the resurrection everything that Jesus said and did would be invalid.

So, the resurrection is real, and we cannot separate it from the cross on which Christ died.

The last thing God wants us to know this morning is that the power of the risen Christ is still loose in our world today. Christ is not dead. He is very much alive.

Rev. Brown of New Britain , Connecticut tells about his own faith journey and what he learned in the inner city of New York .   After seminary he was sent by the Mission Board of his church to the ghettos of the city and told that he would represent Jesus to people whose lives had been turned inside out.

In his first week, he witnessed the buying and selling of drugs on the street, he fed barefoot, unwashed alcoholics soup and sandwiches, and he had a conversation with a “retired” prostitute who told him exactly what he could do with his Jesus. He didn’t think that Jesus was anywhere to be found on those streets.

But then, he began to notice something. After the soup and sandwich meal at mission, they always sang.  And someone always requested the gospel hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross.”  It wasn’t one of Brown’s favorites, but the college student working with him could play it pretty well on her guitar, so they always sang it.

He’d been in the city about a month when he first noticed it. As they sang the first chorus of “The Old Rugged Cross,” the glazed look in the eyes of the tattered people who had come to eat a bowl of soup and be warm for an hour began to change. The hardened lines in their foreheads began to soften.

And by the time they got to the last line, the one that goes “I will cherish the old rugged cross, And exchange it some day for a crown,” the expressions had changed.  Where once bitterness, pain and resentment had lived alone; comfort, for just a minute, reigned supreme.  That, said Brown, was the power of Jesus.

But he noticed something else.  When this unlikely collection of parishioners left the mission center, the glazed eyes returned and the lines on their foreheads hardened once more as they returned to hard lives. But Rev. Brown had to believe that what he saw in their faces during that hour was no insignificant thing.

Somehow their lives were changed in that hour.  He knew that next week they’d need to be changed again, and he was OK with that, because he knew that Jesus would be there to meet them.  

He knew that no matter how bad things got, Jesus would be there--not as a miracle cure or a mysterious force that would eradicate drugs, poverty and hopelessness--but as a constant presence in the midst of suffering, a joyful friend in times of celebration, the power in the midst of powerlessness, the only one who, in that particular context, could save those people.

That’s what I believe God is saying to us today. That Christ is alive.  That the story is real.  That it cannot be separated from the pain of the cross. And that its power is sufficient to change people’s lives.

This morning, open your life, your heart to the power of the risen Christ, and see what he can do through you.

Praise God. He is risen!