Easter has become something it was never meant to be. In our modern world, the resurrection of Jesus has been reduced to a litmus test, a believe-it-or-not proposition that sorts people into camps of faithful or rational, superstitious or enlightened. But on that first Easter morning, standing beside the empty tomb, resurrection was not an intellectual exercise or an abstraction to be debated. It was something far more visceral, far more alive. It was an act of defiance.
Consider the full weight of what Mary Magdalene, Peter, and the beloved disciple encountered when they arrived at that garden tomb. They were a conquered people, steeped in the rituals of humiliation inflicted by their occupiers. They had just witnessed the empire do the only thing the empire really knows how to do: deploy violence and pain until no hopeful spirit remains. They arrived that morning in sorrow, in defeat, anticipating death’s familiar presence.
But what greeted them was a reversal. What met them was the discovery that death had not had the final word, that the worst the governors and soldiers could do had not been enough to extinguish the life they had given themselves over to. It was not only life that had defied death, but hope that had defied the empire’s claim on all of them.
“The only response to death mongering is defiance. The only response to violence is defiant peace. The only response to exploitation is defiant solidarity. The only response to division is defiant unity. The only response to hatred is defiant love. The only response to death is defiant life.”
You live in a time of many powerful and violent empires, empires that deploy armies and empires that deploy algorithms, empires that drop bombs and empires that raise interest rates, empires that commit war crimes and empires that commit nothing to the well-being of their own people. The resurrection speaks directly into that reality. It declares that the forces of death and domination never get the final say.
This is why a community like First Plymouth gathers, to make a witness of defiance against every death-dealing empire, to stand defiantly on the side of peace, unity, and the love that Jesus came preaching, and to proclaim with joy that life and flourishing belong to all God’s people.
