Psalm 22 is thirty-one verses long, but it can be reduced to four steps:

1. The author complains about being abandoned and forsaken by God.

2. He (maybe she) tries to praise God anyway, but fails. Why? Because that praise is based on experiences from other people and other times. “They cried to you and were saved. They trusted in you and were not put to shame.” It’s all external. “You took me from the womb [when I was a child and] kept me safe on my mother’s breast.” You see, it’s old hat. But God is not moved by secondhand praise.

3. That disconnect with God makes the poet more anxious and insistent. The one who was comforted at his mother’s breast now throws a two year-old’s temper tantrum. He complains louder than ever. Things are bad, really bad! As bad as being surrounded by wild animals – bulls and dogs (and bulldogs?) and lions … and a host of “evildoers.” (Now we know where George W. Bush got that word.)

4. Redemption finally comes – though we don’t know how – and rejoicing follows. A secondhand experience of God’s saving grace now becomes personal and real. God accepts the prayer and the complaint … and works a reversal. And the once unhappy poet responds with a landslide of praise as majestic as anything anywhere in the Bible. God’s goodness is extolled.

No wonder Old Testament professor Patrick Miller says this psalm “has become the interpretive clue to the … death and resurrection of Jesus.” (“In Praise and Thanksgiving,” Theology Today, July, 1988. Page 184.)

What happened to the psalmist now happens to Jesus. Today, a stunning move is made, carrying him from the “abandonment” of the cross to the rejoicing of Easter. Not only for himself but for the world, Jesus experiences the power of God. Death becomes life. Suffering does not last. Loneliness and heartache and defeats are real and ongoing … 

But God refuses to give them the last word.

The women who go to the tomb on Easter Sunday do not know that. Should they? Could they? Nothing is the way they counted on it to be.

The stone over the tomb is already rolled away – to their great shock. A man sits bolt upright in the tomb where their friend’s body had lain limp. This one wears white robes, while the other had been wrapped in bloodstained linen. And he speaks to them, breaking the silence they expected. He’s a stranger … yet he knows who they are. They do not expect to find him. But quite clearly, he knows they will come.

How could they not be filled with terror and amazement? Or run for their lives?

Mark, however, gives us a clue that the women did not have. He says, “the sabbath was over.” I take it that he’s saying that the day of God’s inactivity – God’s passivity – has passed.  The time when God rested from God’s own labor has come and gone.

God is getting back to work.

Creation’s calendar has been reset, Mark says. We’ve gone from the sabbath – Day Seven – all the way back to Day One, the first day of creation. In other words, though the women don’t yet know it fully, Easter is the beginning of the universe being remade.

Did you read last week about the Jews who gathered to celebrate a once-every-28-years event, when the sun supposedly stands in the exact same point in the sky as it did on the first day of creation? That’s what Easter is for us. A return to the beginning. A new day of God’s making.

 Only, our creation is here. Not with a flaming ball in the sky, but on earth – where one man rises out of darkness to light … and from the grave to the world.

What seemed to the women (and to the men!) on Friday like an ending – a bitter, absolute ending at the cross – in fact has come around, to a beginning.

The One (and only One) who was present at the first creation is present again in the cemetery on the first day of the week … and will do what the women themselves can’t do – the very thing they wonder if anyone can do …

Roll away the stone. God rolls away the stone that separates death from life.

And so, for these women at the tomb, Psalm 22 becomes a defining clue for their lives as well. They are carried from forsakenness to joy. From horror regarding the Jesus they lost, back to the Jesus they love.

But again, as with the psalmist, it’s not a straight line. Before joy arrives, there is more than enough terror and amazement.

I cannot tell you in scientific terms how Easter happens, any more than I can tell you what happened in the middle of the psalm that led to the Psalmist’s great reversal. All I know is that the ones who prayed in agony now testify in praise and trust and joy. A fundamental indicator is given that wonders have not ceased. Miracles have not ended.

Human impossibilities become God’s possibilities. Our limits of reality constitute no limit on God, for God continues to lift up the lowly and put down the mighty … to feed the hungry and give sight to the blind … to heal the sick, comfort the sad, and bring hope where there was no hope.

Easter and Psalm 22 affirm that resurrections are real. Medical recoveries happen for people whose initial diagnosis is extreme, or for whom pain is beyond measure.

And even if such recovery does not happen every single time for every single person, God will not give death the last word. God still works for that day of resurrection.

Grief can be managed and comfort afforded. But even when those things seem far off, God will not let suffering usurp the last word.

Efforts to dismantle weapons, and change human destiny from conflict to dialogue without bending to evil, not only is possible, but it is Christlike. Though it takes generations to achieve, God will not give violence the last word. It will go out with a whimper.

Rebuilding after earthquakes – such as the literal ones last week in Italy or the metaphorical ones in our souls all the time – these too are signs of resurrection and new life from God.

Restoring jobs that impart dignity and put food on the table, or ending racism and other forms of injustice. These too belong to the promise of Easter.

Vanquished dreams, lost hopes, reduced expectations, and the urge to feel like a loser or a quitter, or to say, “I dare you to try to show me something different” – Easter and Psalm 22 stand opposed to all that. They dare us to move from self-pity to selfless praise of God.

When our lives feel hijacked like a ship off the Somali coast, God does not jump ship but gives us a “Captain” who will risk himself for our redemption. (I hope you like that image. I thought of it this morning!)

What seems like an ending may yet be a beginning.

That was true for the psalmist. It was true on the first Easter. And it still holds today.

Annie Dillard writes – and I believe her – that …

There is no less holiness [now] than there was the day the Red Sea parted, or that day in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month … when the heavens opened and [Ezekiel] saw visions of God … There is no whit less might in heaven or on earth than there was the day Jesus said, “Maid, arise” to the centurion’s daughter, or the day Peter walked on water … In any instant the sacred may wipe you with its finger. In any instant [a] bush may flare [as it did for Moses]. In any instant you may avail yourself of the power to love your enemies; to accept failure, slander, or the grief of loss; or to endure torture. (For the Time Being, pages 88-89.)

To which I would add: At any instant, a holy child may be born in a backwater part of the earth to save us all, or a truth might be spoken in your hearing that changes everything for you. A scrap of bread might become flesh for our flesh at any moment. A sip of wine might flow with all the love it took for God to make the universe – including you and me. And a drop of water pressed to your forehead might melt you into a new person altogether.

Easter is all that. And it is more. It is the impossible wonder of the past becoming present, and the present having a future. And it is the comfort of knowing that at any terrifying moment God may break into our world carrying new life.

Resurrection is what we call it, no matter how it appears. And we are witnesses, because we are God’s people, raised by Christ and led by the Spirit. We are the Church in all of our majesty … and our madness.

This isn’t just a day in our life. Easter is our life … in a day. And it is ours for the living forevermore. Or, for as much time as we’ve got.