Easter Sunday, April 20th, 2025: "Full to the Brim: An Idle Tale"
The First United Presbyterian Church
“Full to the Brim: An Idle Tale”
Rev. Amy Morgan
April 20, 2025
Luke 24:1-12
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again.” Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.
It was a story no one believed could be true. Not just because it was impossible, but because it was unimaginable. Nobody who knew Jesus, who had seen his miracle-working abilities, heard his authoritative teaching, experienced his powerful presence, could imagine that he would just decide to give up and die, let the bad guys win, and be executed like a common criminal.
And who would want to kill him anyway? Everybody liked Jesus. He was popular, powerful, and wise. But even if Jesus did, somehow, get himself killed, the whole thing about rising from the dead on the third day was really just too much. Even those who believed in resurrection generally knew that you couldn’t predict the day of your resurrection.
But Jesus kept telling this story, again and again, about how he, the Son of God, would be handed over into the hands of sinners, be crucified and die, and then, not immediately, but after spending two days rotting in a tomb, rise again. It was a wacky story. No one really believed him. Every time he told this story, there was an uncomfortable silence, and then someone would abruptly change the subject. “Let’s talk about who’s the greatest disciple. Let’s go for a hike. Hey look – there’s a blind person you can heal!” This story seemed to the disciples an idle tale. It was a story that was both too tragic and too good to be true.
The women who followed Jesus thought the story was so outlandish that they forgot about it entirely, dismissed it from memory. And so, even after living through the first part of the story, exactly as Jesus told it, they were not ready for the fairy tale ending. They were not ready for the story to be true.
Before his execution, Jesus had a philosophical discussion with Pilate, the Roman governor responsible for law and order in Judea. Pilate asks Jesus a question: “What is truth?” The question hangs in the air between them. Jesus never answers.
Philosophers before and after Pilate have wrestled with the question of what defines truth.
Aristotle argued that something is true if it corresponds to observable facts. It is true that the tomb was empty because the women could look inside and see that Jesus’s body was not there. Thousands of years later, we cling to archeological evidence of Jesus’s life and death and seek out physical proof of Biblical events.
A Pragmatic Theory of Truth states that something is true if it is useful to believe, if it leads to a positive outcome. If Jesus’s resurrection brought the women joy and gave them courage, and if it does the same for us today, then it can be considered true enough.
Perhaps truth is merely performative, saying more about the person speaking than the thing that is spoken. Or perhaps it is subjective and contextual. Or maybe truth is really just about what we feel and want to believe. Maybe the resurrection is true because there are people who believe it is true, because we want it to be true, because we feel like it should be true.
But none of these standards of truth could convince the women at the tomb, or Jesus’s other disciples, that the story Jesus had told them was true. What they knew to be true was that Jesus had died. They knew the truth of what death looked and smelled like, what his body looked like when Jesus was laid in the tomb, cold and lifeless. They knew it was true that the stone that separated them from Jesus was too heavy for them to move. These are the things they knew were true. And these truths led them to come looking for death at early dawn on the first day of the week.
Whether we understand truth through the lens of pragmatism, performance, postmodernism, or even post-truth, there are things we know to be true. People get sick and die. Life knocks the stuffing out of us, and we can’t always get back up and keep going. Sometimes when we ask God for help, it feels like we’re talking to a brick wall. Sometimes the bills to pay and laundry to fold and doctors to visit and neighbors in need and news pinging our phones feels a lot more true than a 2,000 year old empty tomb. Sometimes suffering and fear and anger feel a lot more true than hope. Sometimes despair and destruction feel a lot more true than resurrection.
In Frederick Buechner’s little treatise on preaching, entitled Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, he contends that we are “prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible. The good news breaks into a world where the news has been so bad for so long that when it is good nobody hears it much except for a few.” And so we put on our Easter finery and put the ham in the oven and load the family in the car and show up here today in the desperate hope that this story might just be true after all. We pray that this idle tale can somehow feel more true than anything else we know. We wait for someone to tell us a story we can believe is true down to our bones.
Jesus never answers Pilate’s question. The silence following, “What is truth?” echoes off the marble walls and down through the centuries.
But perhaps Jesus doesn’t answer because he has already defined truth for Pilate, and for us. Pilate’s question is prompted by Jesus’s statement, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Truth is testimony, story-telling. Truth is listening and, through listening, belonging. Truth is the story that keeps telling itself until we can tell it for ourselves.
Truth is not where fact or goodness or happiness triumphs. It is where hope triumphs. Truth is, as Buechner writes, “this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary.” It is “the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.”
This is the truth spoken to the women at the tomb. “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again.” They remember, and in their bones they know this story is true. And the story starts telling itself through them. And through Peter’s amazement. And through the apostles’ preaching. The story keeps telling itself through the visions of medieval women and the reformations of 16th-century churchmen, through the prophetic words of Diedrich Bonhoeffer and the prophetic actions of Dorothy Day. The story keeps telling itself because hope keeps overcoming despair in unbelievable, impossible, unimaginable ways.
The story we hear each Easter morning has been told, again and again, for thousands of years. Even for those of us gathered here today, it’s a story that is hard to believe is true. We’ve tried to shoehorn it into some standard of truth that fits our logic, that agrees with our experience, that makes us feel better about ourselves and the world around us. But if, at times, and even today, we struggle to believe it is true, we needn’t feel ashamed. Jesus’s own disciples, the ones who had heard the story from his very lips multiple times, who heard the story directly from the women who first discovered the empty tomb – they didn’t believe it.
But Peter, even though he didn’t believe the story was true, dismissed it as an “idle tale,” he got up – the word in Greek is actually the same word used for “resurrection” – and went to the tomb. He may not have believed the story was true, but he didn’t go to the tomb looking for death. He went looking for life. He went looking for hope. And he came away, not with proof, confirmation, validation, but with amazement, wonder, awe. He didn’t encounter angels, and he didn’t see Jesus. But he had hope that this story could be true.
That is the truth of the Gospel. It is a truth that amazes, that leads to awe and wonder. It is the truth of hope, the truth of a story, a fairy tale ending, that prepares us for the best, the impossible, the good news. It is the truth that resurrects us and sends us chasing down life instead of waiting for death.
When we remember this story – the story Jesus told his followers, the story the women told the other disciples, the story Christians have been telling for thousands of years – we remember that no act of violence, hatred, bigotry, evil or even death itself can keep Jesus down. We remember that Jesus gets the final word, and the final word is life and hope and the power of love. We remember that nothing can separate us from God in Jesus Christ – not heavy stones, not grief, not even death.
It may sound unbelievable, an idle tale. But this idle tale can raise us up and send us out into all the places in this world where we would expect to find death, and we can come looking for life. In the bills and the laundry and the doctor’s visits and the needs and the news, we can look for life. In the suffering and fear and anger and despair and destruction, we can look for life. We don’t even have to believe this story is true. We just have to hope it could be true.. We just have to get up and go looking for life. We just have to allow ourselves to be amazed We just have to listen to the story, and the truth of it will tell itself.
Alleluia! Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Amen.
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