Sleepers, Awake!

Resurrection Sunday at West Richmond Friends Meeting, 20th of Fourth Month, 2025

Speaker: Brian Young

Scripture: Luke 24:1-12

He has risen!

Luke 24:1–12, NRSV: 1 But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they went in, they did not find the body. 4 While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. 5 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. 6 Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7 that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” 8 Then they remembered his words, 9 and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. 10 Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. 11 But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. 12 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.

“He has risen”—so goes the traditional greeting on this morning, in many churches. It’s actually not widely practiced among Friends. But even if we are not used to it here, there are countless Christians all over the globe who have been greeting each other in this way this morning. Now, it is perhaps an easy thing to say, for us on the long end of two millennia of tradition. Every year we read the story of the empty tomb, we rejoice in the good news—Christ is risen, yay! Then we can celebrate with a big meal or an egg hunt or something, and life goes on.

(I will say that Iglesia de los Amigos Cuáqueros had the mother of all egg hunts here yesterday, if you weren’t here to see it—they had filled hundreds of plastic eggs, and I helped to hide them outside as we prepared for the party. But there were so many that we eventually ran out of hiding places, and some just ended up clumped on the ground. Of course, once the

kids arrived, they found all of them; it didn’t really matter how hard we had worked to find hiding places. I’m almost certain there are none left for Friends School kids to discover...)

Anyway—it’s important to remember that “he has risen” was not an easy thing to hear, that early morning in the garden two millennia ago. It didn’t make sense. Rather than an occasion for joy, it was an opportunity for fear, for perplexity—not for praise, not yet. The male disciples don’t even believe the news, when the women tell them. And when at the end of the passage it says that Peter returned from seeing the tomb, “amazed at what had happened,” this isn’t really the good kind of amazement. Some translations use “wondering” rather than “amazement,” but one commentator suggests that something like “astonishment” is closer to the meaning of the Greek word—this same word is often used when Jesus’ opponents react to his deeds. So rather than amazement, which for us implies joy, or grateful surprise, this is confusion, incomprehension, disquiet; Peter and the rest are confounded. It’s not understanding; it’s not celebration; it’s certainly not yet faith. That doesn’t come until later.

Now, this Resurrection Sunday morning, Friends, I have to confess that I’m not quite ready for “he has risen,” either. Today, my mind is still very much on Good Friday, so please forgive me. On Friday evening, some of you were here as we read through the Passion story as Luke tells it, from the moment that Jesus goes with his disciples to the Mount of Olives to pray, to the point just before this morning’s passage, when Joseph of Arimathea has laid Jesus’ body in the tomb and the faithful women are waiting for the end of the Sabbath, to go and care properly for his body.

And there’s a phrase from the first scene of that part of the story, when Jesus is praying on the Mount of Olives, and praying so hard that some manuscripts say his sweat was like drops of blood. Then he goes back and finds that his followers are all asleep. Chapter 23, verse 45 says that the disciples were sleeping “because of grief,” or sorrow. This is one of those details we only find in Luke; Mark and Matthew just report that “their eyes were heavy” (Mk 14:40, Mt 26:43).

As we read that on Friday, it stuck in my mind. What does it mean to sleep “because of grief”?? I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty hard for me to sleep when I am upset. Intense sorrow, or indeed any strong emotion, is more of an occasion for tossing and turning and staring at the ceiling for hours. But then I thought of a time earlier in my life, in my first or second year of college, when I was in danger of failing a calculus class. I had ceased to understand what was going on in this class maybe about halfway through the quarter. I could have gone to the professor’s office hours, or met with the teaching assistant, to ask for help and improve my understanding at least a little. But instead I avoided the problem and neglected the classwork. Then it came to the final exam, my last chance to pull my grade up. I crammed as best I could the night before, and then went to get a couple of hours of sleep before the test. And—you guessed it—I slept through the whole thing.

That I wasn’t able to be awake at the right time was more than just being tired. It had to do with my emotional state overall; it had to do with my perfectionism, which meant I left most assignments unfinished when I couldn’t get things right; it had to do with some degree of uncertainty that I was really in the right place, at the extremely competitive University of Chicago. In truth, I was probably pretty depressed at that point in my life. All of those things together kept me asleep the morning of that exam.

That experience of many years ago might be something like what it means to “sleep because of grief.” Having found myself not up to a challenge, I simply gave up. Rather than waking up to struggle and probably still fail, I didn’t even show up. And that might be something like what was going on for the disciples, “sleeping because of grief” as their Master prayed.

You might remember that staying awake is something we hear about in a number of places in the New Testament, not just in that moment on the Mount of Olives. Jesus emphasizes its importance, for example in Luke 12, when he tells his followers to “be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks,” (12:36). Then there are other parables and similar sayings that liken the church to bridesmaids waiting for the bridegroom. Usually, these come up when Jesus is speaking of the end of the age—the Gospels and much of the New Testament were written with the expectation of Jesus’ imminent return, so it was important to be ready. That this counsel to stay awake shows up repeatedly must mean that it was a live issue for the early church, for the people for whom these words were first written. It was not easy to live in a state of constant readiness, and so they needed to be nudged. Perhaps quite a few of them, weighed down with worldly cares, were “sleeping because of grief.”

Outside of the Gospels, one place in the Bible that comes to mind where awaking from sleep isn’t quite so much about being ready for the end of the age; this in the letter to the Ephesians, in chap. 5:

Therefore it says,

“Sleeper, awake!

Rise from the dead,and Christ will shine on you.” Ephesians 5:14

If you look this passage up, you’ll see it follows verses where the followers of Jesus are called “children of light”: “Walk as children of light, for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true” (5:9–10). “Children of light,” of course, is one of the names that George Fox claimed for the first Friends. But I also love this image of Christ shining on us, awakening we sleepers who are almost dead, visiting our half-closed eyes with the light of a new dawn. It reminds me that just as we awake from sleep each morning, we also need to awake to the presence of Christ in our lives each day. It is a constant practice, a regular discipline.

And keeping awake is not just a spiritual imperative; it’s also become prominent in our social discourse in recent years. Beginning at least with the Black Lives Matter movement, possibly before, racial justice activists have called people of conscience to “stay woke,” to remain engaged in the struggle against racism. And of course, in the past couple of years, there’s been a tremendous backlash against this call; “woke” or “wokeism” are now bywords that the politically powerful are using to condemn any and all attempts to maintain equality and diversity in public life. For in any struggle we might engage in, whether it’s an inward spiritual one, or an outward activist one, there are forces that want us to stay asleep. There are powers and principalities who ruled in Jesus’ day, and who continue to rule today, who seek to dominate and control human lives and human destiny, and whose ends are best accomplished when we aren’t paying attention—when we’re asleep.

And really, who can blame anyone today who is sleeping “because of grief”? There is so much around us to grieve us and weigh us down. There is so much needless suffering, so much of it coming from heedless cruelty and the pursuit of power at all costs: from tens of thousands killed and wounded in Gaza; to hundreds exiled by our government without due process, to an El Salvadoran prison; to an atmosphere of fear in our country for countless

immigrants, people of color, and queer kids. It is so much easier to shut all of this out, to turn away, to close our eyes and sleep.

The challenge for us, as Friends, is to remain awake to all of this suffering, and not to be overwhelmed. That will happen far too easily if we isolate ourselves. We need each other as companions on the way. We need to encourage one another to keep going in whatever piece of this enormous struggle we feel led to engage. I won’t stay awake unless you nudge me now and then.

And we can’t do any of this without the daily presence of Christ, shining on us, calling us from sleep. For the One who left the tomb empty is the one who is present among us today. Earlier I said that the women at the tomb were not ready for the news, “He is not here, but has risen.” But what about us? Are we ready for this news?

For in fact, he is here, for he has risen. This is the good news. Christ has come to teach his people himself. Christ is present here, calling us from sleep, calling us to keep awake to the suffering of others, calling us to support one another in the ministry of compassion.

Let us hear again, today, this good news of the empty tomb. Hallelujah!

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