Easter c 2025; 20 April
Luke 24:1-12; Jack Hardaway
JOANNA
The wicked. They do one thing. And they do it really well.
They are simple people really.
They take advantage of the vulnerable.
That is it. It’s that simple.
That one simple thing, the wicked play it out in so many ways, taking advantage of the vulnerable.
The wicked have a habit of devouring one another ultimately, the psalms like to point this out.
They are slaves to the power of death, they are bound, owned.
Herod, Pilate, the Sanhedrin.
The world is being devoured, the last one to be devoured wins. That is how it plays out.
Woe unto thee if thou dost not play the game.
But what if there is more?
Easter morning hints at there being more. Much more.
A new world.
Where the power of death is broken, and the captives are set free.
Set free for one simple thing, to love, and that love plays out in so many ways.
We are called to examine our own lives. Am I wicked? Do I take advantage of the vulnerable?
Am I serving death?
Or is grace working its way through me, setting me free to love?
There is something sneaky about this encroaching freedom, covert, unnoticed until too late.
It starts early this morning, in the darkness, a group of women arrive at an empty tomb, and sparks like lightening blind them as two unusual messengers arrive.
And it begins.
It begins with those who are easily ignored.
And the unusual thing about Luke’s account is that at the middle of this lightning strike is a woman named Joanna who hardly anyone talks about, but by the way Luke is written it draws all attention to her as the beginning of the message of death being broken. She is where the lightning strikes.
She has been there with Jesus almost from the beginning, it turns out she was a woman of considerable wealth and influence, paying the bills for Jesus and the disciples, her husband was the prime minister of Israel, King Herod’s right hand man.
So we see, from the beginning, the Gospel sneaking its way in to the halls of the powerful and the wicked, infiltrating the kingdom of death and devouring with the freedom that is love.
Joanna is later named in Paul’s letter to the Romans, under her Latin name of Junas, as an Apostle of the Church. The first female Bishop. She may have even been involved in commissioning Luke to write his gospel.
It is easy to dismiss Joanna as an idle tale, as the disciples liked to say, dismissing the unlikely message and the unlikely messengers. Dismiss the intriguing possibility.
But then we miss the amazing witness of the gospel co-opting the powerful in their self-importance. And we miss that Luke puts her right there where grace lightning strikes the world. Luke calls attention to her specifically at the moment where everything begins.
The women are told to leave death behind and look for the living one, the risen Lord.
It is an abrupt message.
Stop acting like you’re dead.
It is time to be alive.
And that lightning caught Joanna on fire.
And she lived.
And the wicked and their world of devouring simply turned to dust, grasping at sand and wind and vanity.
It is a very good time right now to remember how Joanna carried that lightning into her world.
Death is being emptied out from the inside out.
Infiltrated and coopted.
Do the wicked seem to rule the world?
They are collapsing from within.
Join the revolution of Jesus.
Alleluia. He is risen. Alleluia he is Lord.
Love has set the captives free.
We are free to love.
And the wicked have no idea.
Catch the fire. Spread the lightning.
Be alive like never before.