We all understand jokes like this. It is a creative way in which we know-it-all human beings try to take the edge off the unexplainable mysteries of suffering, and even death. How many "A guy dies and goes to heaven..." jokes have you heard?

They're great jokes. I love to hear them, and I love to tell them. But they don't take us very far when it comes to the very real pain and doubt of very real people who are struggling with very real suffering.

In his book entitled Night, Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Nazi's "final solution," recounts an event which occurred while he was a teenager in one of the concentration camps. All the prisoners were called out into the yard to witness a triple hanging. One of them was a young boy. Wiesel writes:

The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. "Long live liberty!" cried the two adults. But the child was silent. "Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. "Bare your heads!" yelled the head of the camp. His voice was [harsh]. We were weeping... Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive... But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive. For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying a slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look at him full in the face... Behind me I heard the same man asking, "Where is God now?" And I heard a voice within me answer him, "Where is He? Here he is. He is hanging on this gallows."

A husband or wife gazes with longing tears at the one s/he has loved as s/he has loved no other person in life, who has now died. It doesn't matter if death came after a long illness, or if it came suddenly on a day like any other day. Whenever and however it comes, we are never really prepared for the death of a loved one.

There is nothing nonchalant or pie-in-the-sky about Easter. Let's face it: unless we want Easter to simply be a celebration of spring with a little feel-good religion thrown in for good measure, the only way to get from Palm Sunday to Easter is by going through Good Friday, to journey with Jesus through the very heart of suffering, through human decadence, and satanic evil.

Anyone wearing a hollow rock around your neck, or dangling from your ears, or pinned to your lapel this morning? More likely, you are wearing a cross (pointing around chancel...) cross, cross, cross. If we make so much of Jesus' resurrection, why is the cross rather than the empty tomb the dominant symbol of the Christian faith?

Because Jesus doesn't reign from the empty tomb. Jesus reigns from the cross. Jesus, God in human flesh, came into the world and to be rejected, to suffer, to die. The agony of Jesus gathers up the agony of all who have suffered, or all who ever will suffer, including Elie Wiesel and the little boy on the gallows, the anguished parent, the grieving spouse, you and me at some time or other. Here is God, the Suffering Servant who is "despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." (Isaiah 53:3) Jerusalem believes a heretic is being removed from its midst. Rome believes they have rid themselves of another pitiful Jewish rebel. The world looks at the crucified and bleeding, groaning and dying Jesus, and believes it has done him in.

Yet, Jesus reigns from the cross. Earlier in John's gospel, Jesus says, "I lay down my life, that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again..." (John 10:17-18) When Jesus "sets his face toward Jerusalem," (Luke 9:51) he moves toward his own death with an unnerving deliberateness.

When, on the cross, Jesus utters the words, "It is finished," he is not saying "all is lost," which is what his grieving disciples thought. He is proclaiming that the work God gave him to do has been done. Jesus reigns from the cross. Listen again to the way John describes Jesus' last moment: Jesus said, "it is finished;" and he bowed his head, and gave up his spirit." (John 21:30)

He has not been vanquished by human depravity, nor crushed by the power of evil. He bowed, he gave -- these are both active verbs; they express the final triumph of the Crucified over the crucifiers. Being God, after all, he could have snapped his fingers or spoken a single word and avoided the whole ordeal. The soldiers come to break his legs in order to hurry his death along. But Jesus had already, literally, given his life over to death. He didn't grasp at life, or wrestle against death to the very last minute. He died because he gave up/handed over his spirit. He commands the ending of his life and, in so doing, disarms, death, cheats death of its chance to overcome God, denies death its longed-for victory, and overcomes its tyranny over God's creation forever. Having gathered all the pain and suffering, sin and death of humanity to himself as he was lifted up on that cross -- with his dying breath, he makes all things new.

Now, even in the midst of suffering, of anguish, of grief, we can go on living. Life in Christ now has a quality to it which we call "eternal" -- not that this life is never-ending; rather, life in Christ is so utterly sacred that death cannot destroy it. I have known people in this very congregation over the 2-1/4 short years I've been here who, in the face of their own suffering, have "gone on living" in the strength of their faith and their absolute trust in the promises of Jesus. They knew that, in Christ, their own death was only a door to the new creation, the new heaven and new earth, John calls it in Revelation. Death had truly lost its victory, its sting for them; because Jesus reigns from the cross.

Jesus accomplished all of this, and he hadn't even been buried yet, much less resurrected!

Ok, so what about Easter? Easter is not about suddenly breathing after not breathing for a while. That's resuscitation, not resurrection. It's not about the immortality of the soul, some invisible divine spark that endures after death. That's Plato, not Jesus. It's not about God as a personal, private, inner experience. Easter is about God who creates a way where there is no way; God who raises Jesus to make sure the world knows who really holds the power.

And God demonstrates God's power in ways human beings still have trouble comprehending. On Easter, God made the cross a means of triumph. Jesus took all the worst we could do and didn't just overcome it, leaving it dead in the dirt. On Easter Jesus went even further than that: Jesus leads us out from death to life.

• Jesus was raised from the dead to forgive the very disciples who had betrayed and abandoned him, the very men who unjustly condemned and killed him. God's power is about forgiveness, it seems, not vengeance.
• Jesus picked up a piece of bread and ate it, and you could see the nail prints in his hands. God's power is about life, it seems, not death.

In the light of Easter, now we can go on living -- not only with, as Paul describes it, "a sure and confident hope."

Twenty-eight years ago tomorrow, Monsignor Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador, was executed by government soldiers with a single poisoned bullet as he stood at the Missionary Hospital chapel altar celebrating mass. Just eight years ago, twenty years later to the day, some 40,000 people gathered in the Mission Hospital Compound in the heart of San Salvador where he had been killed, and marched from there 4-5 kilometers to the front of the city cathedral. Having been a tireless and courageous advocate for human rights and justice to a corrupt and violent government, he had been loved and respected not only by Catholics of El Salvador, but by Christians all over the world. Among the marchers were families and friends carrying banners with the names and pictures of the "disappeared" -- that is, of civilian men, women, and children who had been kidnapped, imprisoned, or killed during El Salvador's bloody years of repression in the 1970's. The otherwise silent walk was interrupted frequently with shouts of "Romero viva! Romero viva!" (Romero lives!") And when the names of the "disappeared" were called out, everyone shouted in unison, "Presente!" (Present!)

That kind of confident hope and the will to go on living is the fruit of Jesus' death and resurrection. We could do the same thing as we come forward to receive the Lord's Supper "with the Church on earth and the hosts of heaven," calling out the names of our loved ones who have died in Christ -- my mother, my babies, your father, your husband, your wife -- and shouting together, "Presente! Present!"

Because of the cross, our neat and tidy God-in-a-box ideas about Jesus are given over to the real Christ -- the One who death couldn't keep on the cross, the One who wouldn't stay dead in a tomb, the One who is both small enough to climb into our hearts, and big enough to save all of creation.

Death no longer reigns on the cross, or on the gallows, or on cancer wards or in cemeteries. Now, because our risen Lord and Savior reigns from the cross, and has crushed death underfoot, we can on living. Amen.