A New Day Begun!
the Rev. Dr. DeWayne L. Davis
April 20, 2025 | Easter Sunday
Text: Luke 24:1-12
The late theologian, poet, and monk Dom Sebastian Moore said, “The original disciples were shocked into bliss by the Resurrection—and they never recovered.” That conclusion implies that the resurrection experience forever changed the followers of Jesus, and they lived accordingly.
In a world that suffers from a lack of moral imagination, that fears death and yet has become startlingly proficient in murder, when technology and social media have distracted us and transformed how we interact with each other, when the excesses of capitalism and radicalization of politics have short-circuited any pursuit of the common good, it is time to recapture the shock of the empty tomb and the experience of resurrection. The vivid demonstration of God’s act of rescue and salvation in resurrecting the crucified Jesus, the conquering of death, hell, and the grave, especially in our current context of poverty, violence, illiberalism, and autocracy, has the potential to spark our imagination and help us out of the sense that we are powerless in the face of the relentless inevitability of death and destruction. What are we to do with Easter (the meaning of Easter, the practice of Easter) when it feels like the pain and burden of the cross still weigh us down? How can we witness the resurrection when the threat of death seems ever-present? How can resurrection make a difference in a world that doesn’t believe in it?
Perhaps, we can answer those questions and recover the shock of resurrection and resurrect the power of Easter in our own time by looking at the experience of Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, the mother of James, and the other women in the Gospel of Luke’s resurrection narrative. On the first day of the week, at the dawn of a new day, when the women arrived at the tomb where Jesus was buried, they found the stone rolled away, and the body was not there. In the place where a dead Jesus was supposed to be, they saw two men in dazzling clothes. Now I don’t know who the two men in dazzling garments were, and there is speculation that they were angels, but Luke doesn’t tell us who they are. But what they say to the women is a message that may help us resurrect Easter in a world committed to death: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” This has to be a shocking claim.
Dead people stay dead. When the empire strikes, especially at an oppressed people with no power and no means of defense, the empire always wins. The women didn’t ask for proof and the angels did not offer any. The angels told the women to remember. Remember what Jesus told you. Remember the gospel of liberation and salvation that he preached. Remember the life Jesus made possible. Remember the new life and the new hope he ushered in and promised you. Remember that you are a part of the reign of God, so you can’t experience life by hanging around a cemetery. Remember. Remember. And the women remembered, and it changed everything. They never recovered.
How do we know? Because these followers of Jesus did not act as people usually act when the empire executed their leader. Empires expect that once they have killed the leader of the resistance, the people scatter, frightened and disorganized, weak and dispirited. But once the women saw that empty tomb and got the word that they wouldn’t find the living among the dead, these Jesus people were revived, renewed, and reborn. They did not act like a defeated people. They did not act like people who had lost their place and purpose. They did not act like their hope was gone. The women could have chosen to forget and go home. The disciples could have gone back to their nets and flocks. But their experience of the resurrection changed everything. It changed how they saw themselves and how they lived. That empty tomb confounded and upended the empire’s death-dealing prerogative and prowess, which meant a new day for them and a new way to move in the world. They moved through the world in victory, filled with a determination to bear witness to life and that more abundantly. The Apostle Paul described this as what happens when we join in the resurrection, when we allow Easter to be our lens and guide, as the women did. It is the dawning of a new day, and living as a new creation and an Easter people in a world that fears and deals in death.
It’s worth pointing out that after the resurrection, there is no biblical account of disciples or apostles ever trying to prove the resurrection. There is no attempt to proffer a historical or scientific account of the empty tomb. When the women left that grave and testified to what they had seen and experienced, God’s people lived resurrection. They didn’t just sing about a new day; their lives reflected that a new day had begun. Dietrich Bonhoeffer described this faith as “believing, not with the head or the lips or out of habit, but believing with one’s whole life.” Resurrection is a matter of living, living God’s reality of life and liberation over and against the narrow, greedy, self-protective aims of the powers; living as a people whose lives reflect God’s victory over death and darkness; living God’s dream for the world even as the nightmare of the current age terrifies us.
The women who found that empty tomb had a resurrection experience, not subject to persuasion, argument, or imperial investigation. Their experience filled them with hope, newness, and possibility. They lived resurrection and birthed a movement. “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Cor.15:55). Now is the time for the people of God to resurrect Easter. It’s our time to recapture the ethos of the realization that an empty tomb means a new day has begun. It’s our time to live in such a way that others will know that they were not created to be dominated and oppressed. It is time to see our tears of lament and our prophetic resistance to the worst impulses of empire as our act of rolling the stone away in anticipation of victory. People are looking for the resurrection of hope, possibility, and newness.
In the song, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” dubbed by the NAACP the Negro National Anthem, there is the line we sing, “facing the rising sun of our new day begun.” How could they sing about a new day begun? When the poem was penned in 1900 and later set to music, the U.S. Supreme Court had already held that the Constitution sanctioned segregation, the last Black American elected to Congress since Reconstruction left office, and violence against Black communities became a regular occurrence without anyone ever being brought to justice. But that lyric is the testimony of people who understood that you can’t find the living among the dead, that segregation and discrimination were the failing, diabolical tools of a dying age. That lyric reveals a resurrection effect within an oppressed people: they are singing about a world where segregation, lynching, and white supremacy are destroyed, and they are providing the soundtrack for God’s new world and reality in which “earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of liberty.” That’s Easter’s radical impact and effect… to live and testify to God’s world and victory. This is an invitation to let our lives be what it looks like to face the rising sun of our new day begun.
May we never recover from the power and promise of the resurrection. Resurrection shatters the very idea that change can’t and doesn’t happen. Resurrection upends the prevailing norms and arrangements of a broken world and confounds the confidence of tyrants and autocrats who think their reigns will never end and their death-dealing punishments will protect their power. The world is craving signs of life and liberty. We don’t seek to save or explain the world; we live the world that the women testified to when they found the empty tomb and heard the angels say, “He is not here but has risen.” We live liberated, resurrected lives that know that death, violence, and tyrants have already been swallowed up in God’s victory over the grave. The world around us may hold onto anger, enmity, and violence, but the Easter reality we dare to live testifies to a different way of being. William Sloane Coffin said it this way: “The Easter faith doesn’t ask us to believe without proof, but to trust without reservation. Don’t think your way into a new life, but live your way into an entirely new way of thinking.”[1] Now is our time to resurrect Easter and let our lives reflect God’s reality. It is the reality of resurrection, the dawning of a new day begun, where love is vindicated; hope is alive; justice is done; peace prevails; and all of creation is free. And that makes today a happy Easter indeed.
[1] William Sloane Coffin, “The Human Race Fully Alive,” April 11, 1982.
