This Hope is No Bastard, Cheat, or Tease

If you appreciate the work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

My friend Ken Sundet Jones preaches the chapel sermon today at Grand View University.

Here is the text:

And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people. When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”

My wife Mary has always believed that, in spite of it having 28-ish days, February is without a doubt the longest month of the year. It’s when you really start getting fed up with the cold, the wind, the snow, and those teeny steps you have to take to avoid slipping on ice. You begin to long for bright winter sun to turn to late spring car-windows-down-and-music-blaring sunshine and heat, blessed heat. Just one little sign would help you get through February.

For about a dozen years my faculty office was in the basement of Jenson Hall, that old former Danish nursing home next door that itself nowadays qualifies as elderly. At the end of a February day I’d bundle up and head out to my car in the lot behind Viking House. I learned through the years that toward the end of the month I ought to keep my eyes open for the sign that late-winter’s interminable-seeming winter might be done.

Usually around the last week of February little bits of green would peek out of the unlandscaped grass and weeds at the back of Viking House. Over a few days they’d develop into distinct blades, and one glorious day I’d find pink and purple crocus blossoms. I’d always snap a pic and text it to my wife, saying, “Our long, dark season will have an end. The crocuses have sprung up!”

Today's reading is a passage about Jesus‘ crucifixion that rarely gets read in worship in church. Preachers, including this one, have a curious aversion to this version of the story of our Lord‘s self-sacrifice. The good news is there in all four gospels, and Paul sums it all up in his letter to the believers in Rome: “For God proves his love for us in that, while we still were sinners, Christ died for us.”

That’s clear in Matthew, but right in the middle of telling us about that holy, last, desperate breath on the cross and the first moment of divine silence, he tosses in these details about the earthquake, the curtain temple being torn in two, and tombs being cracked open like a neglected textbook the night before an exam. What are we to make of these curious details?

If Matthew had been writing today, when he got to the part about holy people who had died being raised up, he probably would have added a “Spoiler alert!” in big bold letters. He’s stealing the thunder from the end of his own story when the seal on Jesus’ tomb is broken open and the corpse of the carpenter who became what his executioners named him, the King of the Jews, gets raised with a new body.

Anyone who’s stood next to a loved one’s coffin and gazed with heartache at their loved one's lifeless body knows how unnatural and impossible it seems that this person whom they knew as alive and breathing is so stiff, cold, and unmoveable. But it seems just as impossible that anything different could come of death. Sure, we’ve heard rumors like what Matthew reports, but they’re only something we might nod at. For us, a corpse opening her eyes and stepping out of an opened coffin is only possible as a jump scare in Nosferatu and countless other cool horror movies for teens. But when an actual death has gut punched us? It’s a mere hope on the far horizon that we dare not let in, lest we add the salt of disappointment to the injury of death.

Fifteen years ago the quirky musician Ben Folds teamed up with the equally quirky novelist Nick Hornby to write an album of songs. One of them, “Picture Window,” is about that fear of opening up yourself to the possibility of an unlikely future. The song is sung by the mother whose cancer-stricken boy lies in a British hospital on New Year’s Eve. She looks out the hospital room’s picture window at the fireworks exploding with the hope of new starts on a new calendar year. Ben Folds sings, “You know what hope is / Hope is a bastard / Hope is a liar, a cheat and a tease/ Hope comes near you, kick its backside / Got no place in days like these.” How can we hope against hope for the unlikeliest end of our most dreaded stories?

And yet, there it is in Matthew: even before Jesus’ own resurrection, the divine power present in him from the beginning of the creation does something. It starts with the sound of a few threads at the top of a thick thirty-foot tall curtain that veiled the holiest room in Jerusalem’s ancient temple. Snip. Snap. And maybe even a twang. And it gathers force until the ripping joins with the rumbling of the earth. I experienced a 5.3 earthquake last summer in Tokyo, and I can you tell that these things are really loud. Matthew says the earthquake at the death of God was so loud and powerful that the little rip extended the thirty feet of the curtain down into the bowels of the earth, so that the stones sealing tombs were like mere eggshells and the closed eyelids of corpses opened and sealed mouths gasped open to breathe again. The long, dark season is over. The crocuses have sprung up!

The implications may be too great to hope for, like some fireworks seen from a pediatric cancer unit. But there is a smaller tomb that this announcement has even greater bearing on. It’s the one buried inside me and inside you. It’s the empty tomb buried in the deepest recesses of my very being that I fear can never actually be filled with anything resembling life and goodness, a grave full of shame and sorrow where I lie powerless to fix my messes and mend the stupid irreparable history I have behind me.

You know that tomb inside yourself. It’s the grave that is a close cousin to the Jerusalem tombs of the holy ones. What happens to Jesus on Good Friday and Easter isn’t just a story from history. It’s the very power of God breaking in from the future Last Day, a power so great and uncontainable and uncontrollable that a curtain is torn, a ripping is begun backward in time to first-century Jerusalem and to your own life this day.

The rift is aimed at opening your own grave that you’re powerless to unseal. It’s the promise that the God who once was sequestered behind a curtain is loose and looking for a grave like yours whose seeming solidity he laughs at and flings wide open. You think you have stuff inside you that can’t bear the light of day? Get ready, because Jesus has his sights set on you. This hope is no bastard, cheat or tease. The evidence lies in Matthew’s holy ones who are its first recipients. If the foundations of the earth tremble at his death and resurrection, your flimsy excuses and the cheap tin lock on your heart can’t keep him out. He’s set on opening you, too. And when he says, “Wake up, sleeper! Rise up from the dead!” I suggest you open your eyes, put forth your arms, and reach for the sun — or better yet, the s-o-n Son and his new dawn. He’s already named you holy, and the benefits of his death and resurrection are yours today. Your green blade arises right along with Good Friday’s risen ones, you human crocuses. And you are the sign, the blessing to the sin-sick world and to all beleaguered souls that their own long, dark season is at an end. Amen.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app