Resurrection of the Lord: Easter Day, April 20, 2025

I have struggled to write this commentary. I know how strange that sentence may feel, but I’m not exactly sure what else to say other than “Proclaim the Resurrection, Preacher!”

With plenty of death in our world, we need to hear about life!

I doubt that I am the first person who has been advised to not try anything too flashy, new, controversial, or hot-button on a High Holy Day. Especially when the pews are packed with folks who might not be the most regular attendees, your sermon can become a lightning rod for feeling. The wisdom of hospitality and invitation is important counsel, and we should heed it. As we do, we must also practice discernment between a hospitable invitation and playing it safe in front of a big crowd.

Process preachers ought to be attentive to the many influences that come to bear on the emergence of any moment, and the nexus of moments that is the worship service is crucially important for our craft. You know that you will have visitors to the church community. You know that you will have some family of faithful members who are only around a few times per year. You will have faithful members whose life in Christ has borne witness to your own and enlivens our ecclesial life together.

Like every week, they each bring their own lives, their own hopes, and their own needs into our liturgical life. Your homiletic hospitality matters.

John’s gospel resounds the hospitable chord.

Three of the most important disciples for the Johannine community open our pericope. Mary Magdalene, the Tower of the faith; Simon Peter, an important figure even beyond the Matthean Petrine fidelity; the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved and whom, we can speculate, was a significant ancestor for the inheritors of John’s gospel, come to the empty tomb. The men, upon witnessing the linen wrappings lying there, returned to their homes. Mary stayed, weeping.

If there is anything that is particularly processual about this opening vignette, it could be the significance of those three people on the identity of the Johannine community. As ancestral influences, what possibilities have these three witnesses opened for the gospeller’s audience? What possibilities have they opened for us?

Their responses to the empty linens, rolled up and lying in the tomb, are understandable. How grief-stricken have you been, Preacher? What has been your ministry of presence with the grief-stricken in your parish? in our world? When you stand at the holy desk to preach this week, do you see Simon Peter, the Beloved Disciple, and Mary Magdalene sitting in the pews?

Sure, they may not be breathless, confused, afraid, or weeping this Sunday, but your pastoral life has witnessed their tears, held their confusion, tended their fear, and breathed amid their breathlessness.

Don’t reinscribe the grief or the trauma of their own encounters with Death and loss, but recognize that and how we are not alien to these three faithful gospel witnesses in our ecclesial life.

With homiletic hospitality, invite the congregation–your siblings in the Body–to consider their experiences of Death and how they might know Simon Peter, the Beloved Disciple, and Mary Magdalene in these moments.

Then, invite them to remain with Mary Magdalene with pastoral presence. There’s no need to be voyeurs to her grief, nor can a two-millennia-old triumphalism ignore her tears as merely necessary for the greater story. Her vulnerability, her love, her agony, her presence, her tears, her witness swirl in that moment and make a way for her to notice angelic attendants.

The conversation with them heightens her awareness, and she notices someone else without abandoning her vulnerable grief.

Each sensation and moment intensifying, nuancing, and creating with the influences of each passing moment, Mary must have been near overwhelm with the stimulation of it all.

Who in your pews is near overwhelm? Is the nearly overwhelmed one in the pulpit?

I think there is a temptation to make Easter an unquestioned triumph. The Resurrection is certainly a beautiful, creative, and zesty rebuke of Death’s claims to ultimacy, but it is not a Pollyanna tale of something that happened once a long time ago and has been promised for some far-off “end” of time. The Resurrection and our Easter celebrations are not about some revelatory intervention from an Other World-Other Time-Other God that will come on the clouds one of these days.

Mary’s experience in John’s gospel proclaims the Resurrection as a theological claim that Jesus Christ refuses to be without us.

Jesus, faced with Mary’s tearful love, names her, calls her, ordains her. We can only imagine the gasp that accompanied Mary’s “Rabbouni!” exclamation, but there may be some in your parish this Sunday who need to hear their name spoken in divine, life-giving love, too. We can only imagine Mary’s urgency to embrace Jesus in her midst, but there may be some in your parish this Sunday who need to be called into the ascendent, intimate mission of God, too. We can only imagine Mary’s boldness as the first gospeller, the first preacher, the first evangelist, the first pastor, the Apostle to the Apostles, but each of us in every one of our parishes this Sunday need to be sent forth to participate in the Resurrection and the Life.

God loves us too much to be God without us! Jesus Christ brings us abundant life and lives to live with us! The Holy Spirit in-spires us to live our life-in-Christ together into theosis, into the resurrection of all creation!

Alleluia! Amen.

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Tom is an ordained United Methodist Elder and process theologian. He earned his PhD from Boston University School of Theology, where he developed a process theology of Holy Communion in a sacramental ecotheology. Currently, he serves as the Acquiring Editor at Orbis Books, an affiliate faculty member in Wesleyan and Methodist theology at Memphis Theological Seminary, the Lecturer in United Methodist History and Doctrine at Yale Divinity School, and on the steering committee of the Open and Relational Theologies Unit of the AAR.