A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
20th April 2025 - Easter Sunday
Luke 24.1-12
Isaiah 25.6–9
Isaiah 25.6–9
At early dawn,
on the first day of the week,
some women went to a tomb.
They were carrying spices -
carefully prepared,
lovingly chosen,
perhaps with tears -
and they were expecting to find a dead body.
A still form,
wrapped in linen,
lying in the cold darkness
of a rock-cut tomb.
But what they found instead
was absence.
The stone had been rolled away,
the body was gone,
and the tomb stood empty.
And this, my friends,
is where the resurrection begins -
not with singing,
not with celebration,
not with joy -
but with confusion.
Perplexity.
Grief intensified by uncertainty.
And, crucially,
with absence.
Luke’s Gospel doesn’t give us
a resurrection appearance on Easter morning.
There’s no Jesus waiting in the garden,
no scars being shown,
no voice calling gently by name.
There is only emptiness.
And a question:
“Why do you look for the living among the dead?”
And perhaps
that is where many of us find ourselves
this Easter morning.
Because this story is not merely about something that happened then.
It is also about what is happening now.
It is about us -
here, today -
trying to make sense
of a world full of suffering and hope,
of death and life,
of endings and beginnings.
It is about what it means to be faithful
when God seems absent.
It is about how we live
as resurrection people
in a Good Friday world.
And, crucially,
it is about what - and whom -
we choose to remember.
On Friday at our Good Friday service
we explored what it means for us to be eternally remembered by God;
as we reflected on the words of the criminal crucified alongside Jesus,
as he asked Jesus to ‘remember him’.
And today I want us to stay wit this theme of remembering,
and how our remembering of Jesus,
and his remembering of us,
contribute to our experience of resurrection.
do not reveal a new truth to the women.
They do not share a secret
or deliver a new message.
They say: “Remember.”
“Remember how he told you,
while he was still in Galilee,
that the Son of Man must be handed over…
and on the third day rise again.”
The resurrection, you see, in Luke’s telling,
is not something the women are seeing for the first time.
It is something they are being called to recall.
To re-member.
And so Luke makes this profoundly theological move:
memory becomes the first act of resurrection faith.
Before seeing,
before believing,
before proclaiming -
there is remembering.
The preacher Karoline Lewis reminds us
that remembering is not passive.
It is not merely recalling past events.
Rather, it is a form of faith
that reconstitutes meaning.
It makes the past alive in the present.
It shapes who we are
and what we do.
To remember Jesus’ words
is to reconnect with the pattern of his life:
his commitment to those on the margins,
his courage in the face of empire,
his refusal to compromise the gospel
of God’s reign of justice and peace.
To remember Jesus
is not to recall a lost teacher
but to re-align ourselves
with the radical call to discipleship he embodied.
And so the women remember.
And that remembering transforms them.
They leave the tomb,
and they become the first apostles.
This matters.
Because Luke is careful - deliberate, even - to name them:
Mary Magdalene,
Joanna,
Mary the mother of James,
and the other women with them.
It is no accident
that these women are the first to proclaim resurrection.
They had followed Jesus in Galilee.
They had provided for him out of their resources.
They had stood at the cross when others fled.
They had watched where he was laid.
And now they are the first
to see the signs of resurrection
and the first to tell the story.
These women are not incidental to the gospel.
They are essential to it.
But the apostles - when they hear this story - dismiss it.
“An idle tale,” is what Luke says they think they are hearing.
The Greek word is lēros -
nonsense, delirium, madness.
In today’s language we might say “hysteria.”
A word long used by men
to discredit the speech of women.
And so even here,
at the dawn of resurrection,
patriarchal patterns persist.
The voices of women are ignored.
Their witness is not believed.
But there is something more
we need to say this morning.
Something that perhaps
we don’t always say loudly enough on Easter Sunday.
And it is this:
Resurrection is not only a promise to be remembered.
It is also a protest.
Not only consolation -
but confrontation.
Not just comfort for the grieving -
but resistance to every system
that deals in death.
We sometimes speak of resurrection
as if it is only about life after we die.
As if it is only about going to heaven.
As if it is a personal reward for private belief.
But in Luke’s Gospel,
resurrection is not just the conclusion of a story.
It is an act of divine reversal.
It is God saying: No -
No to the cross,
No to the violence,
No to the empire that crucified love.
And it is God saying: Yes -
Yes to Jesus’ way of peace,
Yes to his solidarity with the poor,
Yes to his challenge to the powers.
As Rolf Jacobson puts it,
the resurrection is the moment
when “the whole story of Scripture
turns toward hope.”
Not escapist hope.
But grounded, embodied, public hope.
Hope that says:
God is not neutral
in the struggle between life and death,
between empire and the poor,
between domination and dignity.
Hope that says:
the crucified one
has been raised.
And this means something
for how we live now.
The resurrection
is not the end of Good Friday.
It is God’s response to it.
As Joy J. Moore reminds us,
this isn’t just about a new day.
It’s about a new way.
A way of life that remembers Jesus’ ministry
as the template for Christian resistance:
• resistance to the silencing of women’s voices
• resistance to state-sanctioned execution
• resistance to the abandonment of the vulnerable
• resistance to every tomb we have sealed to keep the world as it is.
The women at the tomb
are not just first witnesses -
they are the first resisters.
They resist despair
with memory.
They resist fear
with proclamation.
They resist patriarchy
with persistence.
And that resistance is resurrection-shaped.
Karoline Lewis calls this
a “theology of holy disruption.”
She reminds us that Luke’s Gospel
begins with women
proclaiming hope that kings will fall
and the lowly will be lifted.
And it ends with women
announcing that death itself
has been overthrown.
These are not separate stories.
They are one story.
They speak to the story of a God
who resists every form of domination
with the power of love.
So when we say, “Christ is risen,”
we are not making a doctrinal claim alone.
We are making:
a political claim,
a prophetic claim,
a pastoral claim,
a communal claim.
We are declaring
that the powers of death
do not have the last word.
Not in Gaza.
Not in the City of London.
Not in halls of Westminster.
Not in the prisons.
Not in our streets.
Not in our own hearts.
Resurrection declares that the powers of death
do not have the last word.
And if we need a vision to carry us forward -
a glimpse of what resurrection hope looks like beyond the tomb -
then let us turn, as Jesus so often did, to the prophets.
Isaiah speaks of a day
when God will prepare a feast for all peoples.
A feast of rich food and well-aged wine.
No one excluded.
No one forgotten.
A table of abundance,
where there is enough for all.
And on that mountain, says Isaiah,
God will destroy the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet of death that covers all nations.
God will swallow up death forever.
So can you hear it?
Can we hear it?
The death that crucified Jesus is undone.
The mourning that weighed down the women is lifted.
The disgrace of empire is rolled away like the stone from the tomb.
This is not a private afterlife.
This is a cosmic reversal.
It is a divine protest
against the domination of death.
A table prepared
in the presence of all nations.
Tears wiped away.
Justice made flesh.
Grief given over to joy.
And when that day comes - says Isaiah - it will be said:
"This is our God; we have waited for them."
"Let us be glad and rejoice in their salvation."
This is the promise that carries us.
This is the mountain we are climbing.
This is the vision
that breaks open our tombs
and sends us back into the world
with trembling hope.
To live as Easter people
is to become people
of holy resistance.
To name what kills
and to work for what gives life.
To remember Jesus’ words -
and then repeat them with our lives.
To carry spices to tombs
and leave bearing gospel.
To be witnesses,
whether we are believed or not.
To say - again and again - with trembling faith and rising courage:
He is not here.
He is risen.
And perhaps this too
is part of the resurrection story.
Because resurrection is not only about Jesus.
It is about what Jesus’ resurrection
makes possible for us.
It is about how resurrection
creates a new world
in the shell of the old.
A world in which the voiceless speak,
the lowly are lifted,
and the dead live.
So I wonder, as we gather on Easter Sunday,
what does resurrection mean for you?
It’s tempting
to reduce Easter to comfort.
A soft affirmation
that everything will be all right in the end.
That death is not the end.
That there’s life after life.
And of course,
that’s part of the promise.
The hope of resurrection
is that death does not get the final word -
not for Jesus, and not for us.
But in Luke,
resurrection is not simply consolation.
It is disruption.
It disrupts the finality of death.
It disrupts the expectations of power.
It disrupts the logic of empire.
It sends women preaching.
It sends disciples running.
It sends fearful followers into the streets
with courage they didn’t know they had.
And this is where we come in.
Because if resurrection is only a doctrine to believe,
then it makes little difference to the world.
But if resurrection is a story we live,
a memory we embody,
a hope we enact -
then it changes everything.
It changes how we face death.
It changes how we challenge injustice.
It changes how we see one another.
It changes what we dare to hope for.
So this morning,
in the light of resurrection,
let me offer this invitation:
Do not look for the living
among the dead.
Do not look for Christ
only in the rituals of religion
or the certainty of doctrine.
Look instead for Christ
in the struggle for justice,
in the sharing of bread,
in the work of healing and reconciliation.
Do not be surprised
if those who speak most clearly of resurrection
are not always the ones
with titles, or robes, or platforms.
Rather, those who speak of new life
may be the ones whose voices have been marginalised,
but whose lives testify to grace and courage.
And do not be afraid if resurrection begins
not in joy, but in confusion.
If you find yourself
at an empty tomb,
unsure what to make of it all -
remember.
Remember the words of Jesus.
Remember the way he lived.
Remember the people he loved.
Remember the justice he proclaimed.
And then - go and live
as if it is all true.
Because it is.
Christ is risen.
He is not here,
but he is everywhere.
In the breaking of bread.
In the telling of stories.
In the remembering of truth.
In the work of the Spirit.
In the community of faith.
And this is good news.
Hallelujah.
Amen.
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