Scripture: John 20:1-18
Easter Sunday, 2019
In those moments between dark and light, in that time in the morning in which, at least some of the time, the chill of the morning breezes still can cut straight to your soul, under a canopy of stars and moonlight, Mary Magdalene begins the horrific task of making what she must imagine is the first of many pilgrimages to the tomb of her departed teacher and friend. It is not hard to imagine the swirl of emotions that are pulsing in her mind, darting back and forth from one side of her brain to the other as she relives the previous week’s events. The lingering trauma of watching the one that you love so dearly convicted in a trial whose result was never in doubt. Flung into the middle of the Roman guards to be beaten and spat upon, whipped and paraded around as if he were the king and the jester all at once. Watching the blood run down his head as the savagery of the guards is enacted on the one you love over and over again. To watch him walk that line between alive and dead as he is pushed towards the place of the skull with the chief instrument of torture sitting across his lacerated back. To see him hung in the same manner that thousands were hung as she no doubt found herself wanting him to be alive and dead at the same time. And as she walked alone, were those memories, so fresh in her mind, brought together with past times when things were better. Had she sat up late into the evening more times than she could count talking to this man, gaining new insights, new ways to view the world and her place within it. Had she watched from the side as he preached up and down the Galilean countryside. He she seen him heal the sick, feed the hungry, bring the dead back to life? Could she allow herself the slightest smile to pass over her countenance when she thought back to those times before it had all coursed out of control. In the immediate aftermath, when it was clear that the Romans had little issue with killing anyone who they believed represented a challenge to their authority, and the disciples ran and hid for fear that they might be next, did she run and hide with them? Had she huddled up with the other women in the group? Those who no doubt surrounded Mary the mother as she sought to understand the violence and hatred meted out against her child. From birth he had been so special, the angel foretold of the gift of God that was her child. When he started to speak it was as if his words came from some other realm, his mind constantly being brought back to the God of creation, his actions, an inspiration of love for all those around him. And yet, such love, such language, such an ability to see the realm of God unfolding before his eyes rendered him unable to give any credence to the rulers of this world, to the religious leaders of his time. From the moment that he rose out of the Jordan River, his cousin John baptizing him into a new life, there would never be one moment of his time that was not both magical and chaotic all at the same time. The magic brought people to him by the thousands to hear of the love of God for the world. The magic allowed him to cast his vision of those thousands and choose to feed them. Five loaves of bread and two fish, a virtual cornucopia of blessing for those gathered before him. The magic allowed him to peer deep into each person’s soul and see both the chief impediment to experiencing the love of God and the one word, the one action, the one experience that would break that dam wide open and drench the sinful in redemption. But it was the chaos would be his undoing. Never able to recognize the authority of the earthly powers and principalities, he would forever be on the outside looking in. Always on the run, never stopping anywhere for longer than absolutely necessary, lest the temple authorities devise a plan to silence him for good. The chaos would surround him when he returned home and tried to preach in the synagogue where only by some miracle did he walk out alive. The chaos would fill the temple as he declared that the house of God would not become a den of thieves as he flipped tables and drove all the moneychangers out. As Mary of Magdala walked along the path did she think back to the Passover meal that they had all just shared. Had it not made any sense when he had taken hold of the unleavened bread and ripped it apart and said that this was like his body as he gave pieces of it to all those around the room? Had it made less sense when he took the cup and dipped the bread into it and said something about it being his blood shed for each of them? Was it all too clear what he was talking about now? And she walked along.
It has been said that the trajectory of one’s whole life really comes down to a handful of moments in which the presumed outcome is turned on its head and something radically different happens. So it is for Mary as she walks along the road and turns the corner towards the tomb. With the stone rolled away and the tomb empty she experiences a whole new level of confusion and despair. She runs away and goes to the disciples desperate to have someone to share in her confusion and despair. You can almost hear the breathlessness in her voice as she manages to get out, “The rabbi has been taken out of the tomb. We don’t know where they have put Jesus!” It’s not clear if confusion, horror, or excitement fill Peter and the other as they tear off down the streets of Jerusalem in the early morning hours. The scene in the tomb does little to settle this question. The other, the one whom Jesus loved “saw and believed,” but its not clear what he believed as the narrator reminds us that they did not yet understand that Jesus must rise from the dead. And further, they soon go home leaving Mary, who had followed them back, still confused, heartbroken, and afraid. And here the whole of the story takes on an intimacy and poignancy that Mary was experiencing in that moment. As she bends down to look in the tomb she sees the two angels dressed in a dazzling white sitting at the head and feet of the place where Jesus had be laid. And the angels looked at her and felt compassion, “woman, why are you crying?” And maybe this was just the last straw, maybe her emotions from the day that had transpired, from the week of ups and downs and torture and death and crowds for you and crowds against you and now this empty tomb with two people in dazzling white clothes asking her why she is crying, maybe all this simply became too much and so she turned to leave almost immediately walking into the person standing behind her. But her grief, her confusion, maybe just the tears in her eyes clouded her vision to the point that she had no idea who it was that stood in her midst but, presuming him to be the gardener, begs him, implores him, “Sir, please. Sir you have to help me. Look, if you have taken away the body, if you have moved him somewhere else because he is too much trouble to look after here, just tell me where and I will go get him.” Jesus, with the all too familiar look of compassion that all who had grown to know him, but especially Mary, had grown to love, looked down at her and all the love that had dwelt in his whole being and he pours everything, all of that into one single word, “Mary.” And just like that, the light that the other two disciples had seen came streaming into her eyes and into her soul. The light which had been obscured by darkness since the middle of the day on Friday now beamed with so much intensity that it seemed like all the world was bathed in its holiness and beauty. The light that had been covered by the darkness had been revealed. And the darkness could never, ever overcome it. “Mary,” he said. “Rabbouni!,” she responded. And all the weight that had been weighing her down, all the weight which had been weighing down all the world, all the brokenness and pain, all the frustration and doubt, all the death and hate and violence and discontent and brother against brother and father against father all that became awashed in the light of redemption, in the light of holiness, in the light of love until all that was wrong with the world, that all continues to be wrong with the world becomes made right in this simple two word interaction. “Mary.” Rabbouni!” And after being told to let the others know, she departs having been forever changed. The world had been forever changed.
The Lenten season is a period in the Christian calendar in which a lot of time is set aside to think about death both symbolically and in terms of our own human death, that process that steals into our living like a thief in the night, and, too often, draws to a close a story that we are not close to being done composing. A gathering together of days in which we think a lot about the ways that we are called to die to self that we might live in Christ, in which we think a lot about darkness. And that is an important part of the process of redemption. Before Advent we must be the people who dwelt in darkness and at lent we must cling to the idea that light has to shine in the darkness and that the darkness is never able to overcome it. In every lifecycle from the rising and setting of the sun to the flowers that bloom for a season and then pass away only to bloom once again there is birth, there is death, and there is rebirth and each stage is essential in the process. And just as we see the night swallow the day each evening only to be conquered by the new day we realize that you can’t get to Easter without Good Friday, you can’t have redemption without sacrifice, you can’t have resurrection without death. But, you also can’t remain in that place and in that time. You can’t remain in the dark when you have been blinded by the light. You can’t be Lenten people when you have touched Easter, you are not called to be dead, but rather, to be alive!
In the shadow of the cross and in the light of the new dawn of resurrection, our new calling is to be people who are alive in Christ. We have all died to the self that we might be alive in Christ but the next step is the most crucial part, we must live as those who are alive. Throughout so many times in our day and our lives we get the message that we are somehow incomplete, somehow lacking in the eyes of the world. We are told we need the newest thing to find meaning in life, we are told that we need act a certain way, or look a certain way or dress a certain way, or talk a certain way and absent that, we are found to be lacking. We are truly born free and everywhere else in chains. And yet, we can get off that never-ending journey to nowhere, we can stop the constant search for meaning in the stuff of the world, we can reclaim that freedom that is our birthright in the hollowness of the threat of death in the face of new life. We are Easter people with an Easter faith that tells us that because that tomb was empty, because Jesus was alive, we are alive, too. We are alive with the spirit of love and redemption that courses through the whole of the world, the whole of creation, until all we can see are people, the earth, the cosmos teaming with little sparks of God’s grace exploding all around us, a dazzling display of hope in the midst of a world of despair. The world comes alive in the post-Easter moment that replicates itself over and over again throughout all of time and space. The same feeling of joy and excitement that Mary felt when she heard the resurrected Jesus speak her name is the same joy and excitement that we are called to feel about our faith in the present.
It’s not always easy to be Easter people. In fact, it rarely is. Because Easter people are called to hold on to faith when all hope seems lost. To bear single candles flickering with a single flame in a world that can, at times, feel as if it is subsumed in darkness. To offer the love of the resurrected savior to a world that would just as soon have him stay in the tomb this morning. This morning isn’t solely about being joyful, or happy, or content with our faith and our story. It is not solely about a guy who walked out of the tomb some two thousand years ago and declared the power of life to overcome the stone silence of death. Easter morning can never be solely a practice of looking back into the past moments of our story as if we take a Sunday each year to look at a museum of Christian history. Our story of Easter morning, of resurrection, of redemption, or reconciliation with the God who is the source of all love must always be about the present moment and casting our vision into the future. To hold that the possible can emerge from the impossible. To believe that there is nothing that we, as followers of Christ cannot do if we will but follow the Holy Spirit wherever she blows. To stare boldly into the face of death and proclaim life eternal. Simply put. Easter morning calls us all to be alive.
And here is the best part. Just outside these doors is a world that is teeming with life that doesn’t know that it is alive. A world of the redeemed who continue to walk around with the yoke of sin across their backs that have no idea they have been made free. A world of those lost in cycles of despair and morosity and we get to tell them they are alive, that they don’t have to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders, that there is no reason to struggle against the gathering storms of sadness. Christ is risen and because of that we are made whole, we are redeemed, we are awashed in the love of God, and it is a never ending fount of every blessing.
The great preacher and mystic (and teacher of Martin Luther King) Howard Thurman once wrote, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” The world needs people who are alive and ready to go out and feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, release the captive and give freedom to the oppressed and give sight to the blind. Folks who open their lips only to declare the year of God’s favor for all people and to preach Jesus Christ and him crucified. The world needs people, the world needs the church, the world needs us to be redeemed, and resurrected, and reconciled. The world needs us but it only needs us when we are ready to be to be alive. When we are ready to take up our own cross, when we are ready to take our place in the great line of believers that stretches as far as the eye and see, when we are ready to let go and let the Spirit of God carry us wherever she will, when we are ready to move just a single inch in faith and see what God can do in us and through us, when we are ready to climb out of the cave of what we have always known with shadows of ourselves cast against the cold, indifference of a cave wall and truly stand in the blinding light of the Divine, when we are truly prepared to be united as this small group in this place, ready to change the world well aware that it is the only thing that ever has. The resurrection is not about small changes, or actions, or faith, or visions, or dreams, and exactly no one in scripture who encounters the risen Christ, whether on the road to Emmaus or the road to Tarsus or in the arrival of a new heaven and new earth is ever the same and neither should we be. This day reminds us that with the sunrise of each day arrives, too, our chance for rebirth, for new life, for hope, and for love. Each day beckons all of God’s children to awake from their slumber and be alive! And so thanks be to the God of the living and glory be to God in the highest and on earth, peace amongst all God’s children. Alleluia, amen!
*-Giovanni Bellini, Resurrection, 1475-1479