When I was 15 years old my parents sat us kids down and told us we were moving.  I knew it couldn’t be possible. We had only ever lived in this one little town. My father had an established business there. I knew every street and ball field. All our relatives were in the neighborhood.

We were moving, they told us, to a city ten times the size of our little village. It would be exciting and expansive, full of opportunity and new experiences. But I still thought they must be kidding. Even at 15 (maybe especially at 15!) I just wanted people to leave me be. I was not at all interested in moving from one world to another, no matter what that new world might hold for me. I remember it was the sight of the moving truck that jolted me into reality.

After the execution of Jesus, and the whole uproar in the political and religious world, a lot of people just wanted things to settle down. The trial had been ugly and contentious, the Grand Guignol of public torture, parading the condemned through the streets carrying their cross beams. The disciples just wanted to pick up the pieces and move on.

The religious authorities also wanted this thing over and done with. They had been nervous about some guerilla squad of disciples stealing the body and staging a “resurrection,” so they’d posted armed guards. And any hint of a pretender king made the normally implacable Romans uneasy. Everybody in the city just wanted to move Jerusalem back from the tipping point, back to its calm stasis.

It had been a wild weekend. Jesus was lying in the sealed, guarded tomb, but now it was Sunday morning. That’s like our Monday morning. The Sabbath is over and now it’s back to work, back to the daily grind. Get on the bus, get on the train.  

That’s when, Matthew says, the earthquake struck. At dawn the earth trembled and the rocks split. The great stone sealing the tomb of Jesus heaved, buckled and rolled away. No one was expecting this. Just as everybody was getting showered and having a Monday morning cup of coffee, just as everybody was packing a lunch and getting back to business as usual, God announces the end of the old world of alienation and death, and the birth of a new world—a reign of reconciliation and life.

Jesus stands in the morning breeze beside the shattered rocks of the ancien régime as a living sign of God’s will for this new world. Death and its thousand fears will not reign.

“When we celebrate Easter,” says Archbishop Rowan Williams, “we are really standing in the middle of a second “Big Bang,’ a tumultuous surge of divine energy as fiery and intense as the very beginning of the universe.”  A new world is born in this Big Bang, and no one really expected this on Monday morning.          No one really wanted this. Because we all want resurrection life . . . but we want it in the world of yesterday.*

Reminds me of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. The old world of the ante bellum South has been rolled up like an old shirt and thrown in the laundry. It’s over. Sherman marches to the sea and Tara, the great O’Hara Plantation, is ruined, gutted. The slaves are trying to figure out what it might mean to be free. But every time she’s confronted with the new—anything unpleasant—Scarlett has this stock, comic response: “I don’t want to think about that now,” she says. “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” We want to say, “Scarlett? Hello? Your old world is gone.”

She keeps postponing reality. Meanwhile, she marries three men she actively dislikes—whatever it takes to get Tara back up and running. Because even though it’s not really working, she just wants her old life back. And in that famous last scene after Rhett Butler has walked out on her for good, she collapses on that stately, sweeping staircase, lying there for dead. But she manages to crawl back to life and deliver the final line: “Tomorrow’s another day!” What she really means is, “I’ve got one more chance to bring back yesterday!”

That’s all of us, which is why Scarlett O’Hara is an icon. We all want resurrection—yesterday. We don’t really want to live in a new world.
But we want resurrection. We may not call it that in our everyday parlance; we say we want peace and happiness, an end to depression or anxiety. We want to know for sure that we’re living the right life, that we’re making the right choices, that it’s all going to work out. We want to know there’s life after addiction, life after cancer . . . . . after Alzheimer’s.

There are a lot of people who are numb to Easter this year. They’re going through the motions at home and at church, but all they can think of is, “What if I lose my job?” “What if my investments drop any further?”  “What if I can’t sell my house?” They want to feel a sense of assurance.

All these “wants” are really desires for resurrection life, the life that cannot be threatened again. The life where nothing—not even death—can touch us anymore. That’s what we want.

Today the risen Christ holds out the promise of something more. It’s possible to experience a life that is deeper than the superficial, the material; deeper than the roller coaster of Now I’m ok, and now I’m afraid I’m not successful. It’s possible to experience a life that’s deeper than all the commotion of our fears and anxieties. And once you’ve been there, you know: Down here, it’s all ok. “All will be well,” as Dame Julian said, “and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.” She’d been there. She knew.

But you can’t get to that deep place hanging onto the roller coaster world up here. The resurrection assures us that whole life, that whole world is dead. Let it go. Just like Jesus. God has raised the only beloved Son and promised the same deathless life to anyone who will let go. God’s even tossed in an earthquake to help break us away from that old life, that old world.

You could be like Scarlett. “I don’t want to think about that right now. I’ll think about that tomorrow.” Or you could think about it. Right now. “What am I doing clinging to a dying world, crumbled by the quake of resurrection? Why would I hold on any longer?

* I am indebted to William Willimon for this
perspective on the earthquake at Matthew’s Easter.