From “Angels with Trumpet and Incense”, a stained glass window by Louis C. Tiffany, 1912
Where are you looking for Jesus?
In today’s gospel, the three women go to the tomb of Jesus, expecting to find his body there.
But instead, the angel reports that “He has been raised. He is not here.”
Jesus is alive, and he is not here.
The angel goes on to tell them to go and tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus is going ahead of them into Galilee—and there they will see him, just as he had told them.
Jesus has gone ahead of them into Galilee,
The place he had begun his ministry out among the people.
Back to the beginning.
I’ve been asking myself for a while now where Jesus is—
For me, the answer to where I find Jesus does not have one simple answer. Jesus is in scripture. Jesus is here with us in spirit, when we gather together. Jesus is in the bread and in the wine. Jesus is in our hearts.
But if only the old familiar comfortable ways that we know Jesus become the final answer for where Jesus is in our lives, then we can miss out on the fact that even now he is still going ahead of us and wants us to come find him all over again and know him even more deeply and love him even more.
So when we ask ourselves where Jesus is and head out to find him, we set off on an adventure, full of all sorts of discoveries.
Jesus is still, even now, going ahead of us into Galilee, back to the beginning where his ministry began.
How crazy! The map Jesus gives us for seeking him shows that we have to go back to the beginning to get to him at the end.
But these directions are nothing new.
These same directions have already been laid out by God.
Isaiah reminds us that God asks us to return to the beginning in order to travel toward the completion that God has in store—the new heaven and the new earth.
“Has it not been told you from the beginning?”
“Have you not understood the foundations of the earth?”
“The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.”
The Psalmist says that the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it—God established it at the beginning.
How fitting that on the last Sunday of the Season of Creation, scripture reminds us to return to the beginning as we grow toward the end of the story, which in scripture we find in the book of Revelation–
a vision of where we will find God and Jesus at the end of time, when all is completed and fulfilled.
A new heaven and a new earth, God dwelling among us. God wiping every tear from our eyes, death and mourning and crying gone forever, for the hard and painful parts of our journeys will have drawn to a close.
But even at the end of the story, God is still going back to the beginning.
“See, I am making all things new.”
In the beginning, God created the Garden of Eden. And at the end, the new Jerusalem, a city, is where we find God.
But the center of the city holds the garden, our beginning, the living water flowing from the throne, and the trees whose leaves are for the healing of the nations line the banks of that crystal life giving stream.
The Garden of Eden, our first home, is at the center of the ending.
On the throne sit God and the lamb, the lamb being Jesus, who was crucified. Life and death and new life, all held within God, the One toward whom we journey.
So here at the end of the Season of Creation, I encourage you to go out, by going back, seeking Jesus in Galilee, out in the world where he has gone before us—where there is hurt, need, destruction, war, blood spilled, death—Jesus has been there before us, and expects us to follow, and to do what we can to be his healing presence as we pass on our journeys through the valleys of the shadow of death.
As we seek Jesus and travel back to Galilee and toward the heavenly city that is our ending and our beginning, we will suffer as Jesus did, and Jesus will be present in that suffering, because Jesus never leaves us to travel alone.
Even as we seek to know him more completely, in the easy and the hard parts of our journey, he is already with us, traveling by our sides.
I also encourage you not to forget that at the beginning was the Word, and through the Word God called all things into being, and made all things good.
Creation, in all its magnificence and in its enrapturing beauty and unfathomable power, is our constant reminder that God is the one who never grows faint or weary.
God, who is constantly breathing and speaking new life into all of creation, will renew our strength and give us wings like eagles for our journeys to God, who is our beginning and our ending and our beginning again.
Amen.