"Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition!" (An Easter Sermon - I promise!)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday April 20, 2025 – Easter Sunday
Scripture:  Luke 24:1-12


Any Monty Python fans here this morning?  If you aren’t familiar with Monty Python, they were a British comedy troop who used a lot of absurdist as well as physical comedy.  One of their most famous sketches is The Spanish Inquisition.  The set-up is a conversation between two family members, and one of the family members says, “I wasn’t expecting a Spanish Inquisition.”  Cue three men, wearing red clerical robes bursting into the room and one of them loudly proclaims “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”  The same thing happens over again a couple of times, with different details in the set-up, but always resulting in those three members of the Spanish Inquisition bursting into the room, proclaiming, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

It is absurd.  It is hilarious.  If humour is found in the difference between expectations and reality, nobody expects people to burst into a room proclaiming “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” There are multiple layers of unexpectedness in one short skit!

So what does this have to do with Easter?  On a certain level, everything.  A group of women go to a tomb.  Just two days ago, they bore witness as they watched their teacher and their friend nailed to a cross and left there to die.  They watched his body carried away and laid in a tomb.  They saw a heavy stone rolled across the entrance to the tomb.  They went home, and prepared the spices and ointments that would prepare his body for its final rest; then yesterday, on the Sabbath, they rested.  And now this morning, they take their prepared spices and go to wash and prepare his body.  But when they got there, the stone had been rolled back from the entrance, and there was no body to be found.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.  Nobody expects an empty tomb.

The whole world has been tipped sideways and off-kilter.  They say that the only things that are certain in this world are death and taxes, and now we can’t even trust death any more.

It is a great, absurd cosmic joke.  And from the inside of the joke, those women going to the tomb aren’t able to make any sense of it at all, at least not at first.

It is interesting to notice, in this story, what isn’t present, alongside what is present.  There are no trumpets, no Hallelujahs, no angelic choruses proclaiming “Jesus Christ is Risen Today!”  We don’t even have Jesus present in this moment – his dead body isn’t present, and neither is his resurrected body.

Instead, we have a group of bewildered women who will be the one to bring word of the empty tomb back to the other disciples; and we have two… beings… in dazzling clothes chiding them, saying, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here, for he is risen!”

The risen Christ isn’t going to appear to Jesus’s disciples until they leave the tombs, until they leave the realms of death and go back into the land of the living.  Their hallelujahs aren’t going to ring from their lips until they start to expect the empty tomb, until they start to trust that death has been defeated.

And so the message of Easter is that maybe we should expect the Spanish Inquisition.  Or, at least, we should expect graves to be empty and death to be defeated and Jesus to be risen from the dead.  Because if this is possible, then it means that the end of the story is never really the end of the story; it means that love is always stronger than death; it means that Good Friday is always followed by Easter; it means that new life and new beginnings are always possible.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition; but we all expect the grave to be empty.  And that is the place from which we sing our Hallelujahs.  And that is the place from which we draw our hope.  Amen.