Easter: To Really Live

I want you to imagine, once again, being in the shoes of Jesus’s first followers. They’ve been with him through thick and thin and now it seems all has been lost. Our faithful disciple, Mary Magdalene, whom we met at the cross in John 19:25, comes to the tomb early on Sunday morning only to find the stone covering Jesus’s tomb is gone. She does not bring anything to anoint Jesus - because this has been done already - but simply wishes to be as near as she can get in order to grieve. 

Assuming something has happened to his body, presumably, she runs to tell Peter and John who, in response to Mary’s report, run to the tomb and look in. The wrappings and the face cloth that they see are not like those that still cover Lazarus when he walks out of his tomb. Instead, they are folded neatly, left behind; for these wrappings of death will never be needed for Jesus again.

When he sees these wrappings John (the “other disciple”) sees and believes. What exactly he believes we’re not sure and it’s been debated throughout Christian history. Perhaps, as Jesus will say to Thomas who doubts his resurrection, John is one of the blessed who believes without seeing. We’re not sure of Peter’s response at this point. We only know that both John and Peter decide to go home. But Mary, having returned with the two men, stays put at the tomb. She too looks in and she sees two angels, one where his feet would have been and one at his head. Without any skepticism at their presence she openly weeps and when the angels ask her why, she says to them: “they have taken my Lord’s body and I do not know where they’ve put him.” 

The angels say nothing to her, but they seem to be a sign of God’s promise to unite heaven and earth; a promise first encountered in the story of Jacob at Bethel where angels are ascending and descending a ladder between heaven and earth, a passage cited by Jesus earlier in John’s Gospel. God has completed this reconciliation between heaven and earth. Jesus Christ is the one in whom we find the holy of holies, relationship with God himself. The crucified and risen Jesus has opened to all who desire it, life with God. 

Just as neither Peter, nor John, fully understood yet, for they had not yet encountered the risen Jesus, Mary cannot see this yet, because at first, she cannot recognize the man who repeats the angels’ question. But Jesus adds something: “Whom are you looking for?” It is a reminder of the questions Jesus asked his first followers and then the soldiers who came to arrest him, leading him to his trial and execution. “What are you looking for?” Jesus asks Mary, and in asking her, he asks us: Who is Mary looking for? Who are you looking for? A risen Lord who will transform the world, or a dead friend? She wants the corpse back. The empty tomb is still only loss to her. Her mind is still set on the things that she knows of this world, the ways of this world, the certainty we so deeply desire to protect us from the losses we inevitably incur in this world.

Just a moment later, Jesus calls her by name, as he did for Lazarus and the Good Shepherd’s sheep. And like them, it’s only when Jesus calls her that she recognizes him. Faith comes as a gift. It is a gift that can only be received when, like Mary, we are humble enough to hear and see it around us in the people and events we encounter, and be open to the ways it challenges us to see these encounters through the lens of God’s own life with us.

Mary is the first to encounter the risen Lord, she is the first apostle who will share the gospel with others. It is not because of her power or her control. In fact, it is precisely the lack of these things - including being a woman at a time when this would have cast doubt on her claim to have seen him - that creates the opportunity for those who will come after her, including us, to see Jesus overturning the ways of this world.

The Son of God is born to a woman, as a baby; he rides to victory not over Rome, but over death, on a donkey, not a war horse, not with military, political or financial power; he does not kill, strike down, or destroy nations (nations do this to one another); he does not intervene to prevent his execution at our hands, but bears the consequences of our rejection of him and so of one another. And in bearing our rejection of him and one another, he loves perfectly: friend and enemy alike, everyone released from the separation from God which leads to extinction, to death; given the hope of being reconciled, with those whom they love, to God, for eternity.  

Today Mary receives and points us to this astonishing reality: the world by which we so often define our lives provides only a view revealing a kind of shadow puppet show on a wall. To see the world as it truly is - the world God will reveal when all the chaff of this one is blown away from the threshing floor - we must allow God into our hearts and minds. We receive. We can only seek and prepare our hearts, get out of our own heads and our self defined identities to allow God to reshape who we are to, and with, others so that they might also be able to see him. To become the place where God makes a home; to dwell in us, transforming us into witnesses who can bear the uncertainties, trials and tribulations of this world not clinging to worldly power to overthrow our enemies in a world filled with nations, possessions and hatreds that will pass away; but as people emboldened by the hope of the resurrection provoking us to allow God’s love of friend and enemy alike, to pour through us into this temporary world of shadows. AMEN