Easter eggs (not the chocolate kind)
Since we are still in the season of Easter, I want to talk to you this morning about easter eggs. No, not the chocolate kind; the kind which film critics talk about when pointing out hidden references placed deliberately in a film or a television series for die hard fans to spot.
In Stephen Spielberg's 1989 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Elliott and Michael head out to phone home, using Halloween as a cover to escape. E.T., wearing a sheet as a ghost costume, spots a familiar looking face. The alien points at a child wearing a Yoda mask – from George Lucas’ Star Wars films – and says “home”. George Lucas then returned the favour in his 1999 Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. When Queen Amidala suggests holding a vote in the Senate to appoint a new Chancellor, three members of E.T.’s species are shown. It was Spielberg’s idea to include E.T. and Lucas confirmed that this meant that the Extra Terrestrial species was officially a part of the Star Wars universe.
In our reading from Acts this morning, the author has left us several “easter eggs”—for all of us to enjoy, not just the die hard fans. I’ll talk today about three. #1: Tabitha, who in Greek was called Dorcas; #2: Simon the Tanner; and #3: Joppa, the name of the place where Tabitha was resurrected and where Simon the Tanner lived.
We begin with easter egg #1: Tabitha, whose name in Greek was Dorcas. What hidden message has the author left for us here?
I wonder how many of you know what it’s like to go by more than one name? Sometimes we have a name that was given to us by our parents. Maybe a traditional name representing our culture and ancestry? Sometimes we have an Anglicised name, signifying a move to a predominantly English speaking country. Sometimes we go by one name among friends, another name among co-workers or family. The friends I grew up with call me, “Hel”—a nickname that raises some eyebrows, but brings a sense of warmth and familiarity when old friends are visiting.
Tabitha was known as Dorcas in Greek, which tells us that Tabitha was bi-cultural. She operated both in the Hebrew-speaking world of her upbringing and the Greek-speaking world, which dominated much of the culture, language, and everyday life around her. Tabitha was probably one of the more bi-lingual disciples, able to translate Jesus’ message in more than one setting, able to talk about what it meant for Hebrews to follow Jesus as much as she could talk about what it meant for Greeks. This was a really important skill and maybe why, when Tabitha die suddenly, the disciples call for Peter to come straight away. She’s critical to the movement.
Tabitha is the only woman in the New Testament explicitly called a disciple. There are lots of references to women doing disciple-like things, but Tabitha is the only one explicitly called a disciple. This story makes it really clear that Tabitha, like her male-gender co-workers, shares equally in the business of resurrection.
Just think: who were the people at Tabitha’s bedside when Peter arrives? Widows. Tabitha was well acquainted with death, with people who knew the social impacts of death, and she cared for them in ways that gave them hope—signs of new life.
These aren’t just any widows. These are the poorest of the poor who had no family left to support them, who literally had only God to rely on. Remember Anna, the widow from the story of Jesus’ presentation in the Temple? The widows Tabitha cared for were a lot like Anna. Anna, who was in the Temple fasting and praying day and night at age 84. She’d been there a long time, probably since she was 21 or 22. Like many widows in Anna’s time, the text tells us that her husband died soon after their marriage, likely at the hands of the Roman Empire. The Empire wasn’t keen on young men of military age forming a resistance movement, so there were a lot of women Anna’s age who became widows not long after they were married but before they’d given birth to children who could support them.
I was chatting with Peggy at Clergy Conference this past week. Peggy is preaching at St John’s in Squamish this morning. She was saying that the part of the story she was most taken with was when the widows at Tabitha’s bedside are showing each other the things she had made for them. We do that, don’t we? When someone makes something for us, we treasure it, we hold on to it. I’d love to hear what those things are for you, sometime. If you’ve been in bible study with me on Wednesday mornings, you’ve probably at some point in the colder months had one of my auntie’s blankets laid across your lap.
It’s interesting to note that in both Greek and Hebrew, Tabitha’s name means “gazelle” —which is fitting, isn’t it? When Peter says to Tabitha, “Tabitha, get up,” her eyes pop open and she sits straight up, springing up like a gazelle—an image of resurrection from our animal kin. Tabitha—who went by Dorcas in Greek. Tabitha the gazelle. The author leaving us this hidden message so that we might better appreciate the work of resurrection, what it means to spread news of the resurrected Christ in the world. It often means becoming literate in more than one culture or language, because the ministry of Jesus both includes and transcends many different tribes, languages, and nations. It often means caring for people who live close to death—whether because of their own illness or disease or due to the social impacts of losing a loved one.
Easter egg #2. After Peter’s visit to Tabitha, we’re told that he goes and stays with a man named Simon. But it’s not just any Simon. It’s “a certain Simon, a tanner.” When we hear tanner, we’re not talking about someone lying on the beach soaking up the sun. Tanners—to put it bluntly—were people who worked with dead things. Tanners use tannin, a yellowish or brownish bitter-tasting organic substance you find in bark, plant tissues, and in feces and urine, too, used to turn dead animal hides into leather. If you’ve ever visited a tannery, you know the smell.
Tanneries aren’t typically where you’d put up a tourist hotel, so that Peter chooses to stay in one is significant. The hidden message inside easter egg #2 is this: if we want to experience resurrection, as difficult and unpleasant as it is, at some point we have to get comfortable spending time around dead things, getting used to their smell. Death, whether literal or metaphorical, is where we find the resurrected Christ over and over again. In loved ones we see no longer, or in failed relationships or in low income seniors apartments that have burned down for a second time. It is here that we are called to tend to people, to look for signs of resurrection, to see what can be tanned and worn again but maybe in a different way.
Easter egg #3. The final one for today. The place where Tabitha is raised from the dead, the place where Peter stays with Simon the Tanner, is called Joppa. It’s mentioned four times in eight verses. Joppa is the town where Jonah from our children’s talk this morning boarded the boat. It’s the place where Jonah started running away from God only for the boat that he was on to be caught in a storm and Jonah cast overboard and swallowed up by a really big fish (or a whale, as is commonly told). Jonah spends how many days in the belly of that fish before he’s spit out onto dry land and finally agrees to follow God’s call? Three. The same number of days Jesus spends in the tomb before his resurrection.
It’s no accident that when Tabitha is dead, lying in the upper room—or in the belly of a really big fish, if you prefer—that the disciples call Peter, a fisherman, to come and get her out. We don’t always experience resurrection on our own. In fact, I’d say we seldom do. Sometimes others are called to fish out signs of life so we do not, as the funeral prayer goes, “brood over death, so that it overwhelms us and isolates us from others.” Sometimes we are called to other people’s side, to fish out signs of resurrection for them, to bring meals, blankets, prayer—light. So, let us go and collect our easter eggs and be fishers of resurrection. Amen.
Work referenced and further reading:
Laurel Dykstra, “Sheep, Gazelle and Rock: Easter 4C” in Wild Lectionary on 05 May 2025. Originally published in Radical Discipleship on 09 May 2019.