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Easter Sunday, April 12, 2009
Reverend Michael D. PowellJohn 20:1-18 |
Last week we began with the celebration of Palms, moved into a reading about the passion of Christ, then concluded with the Sacrament of Holy Communion. But we wouldn’t have done any of those things were it not for the resurrection of Christ. We are Easter people! The Christian faith was born in the experience we have come to call Easter. Without the doctrine of resurrection there would be no Christianity. Paul says, in 1 Corinthians 15:14: “If Christ has not been raised then your faith is in vain.”
But, resurrection is a mystery. Anyone who says they understand it is kidding themselves. What I do know is that you don’t have to believe in a literal, physical resuscitation of the body in order to believe in resurrection, or to be a good Christian. Even Bishop John Shelby Spong says that when it comes to the centrality of the resurrection as the defining experience of Christianity, he finds himself at one with the most literal fundamentalists. Where he differs with the fundamentalists is in his understanding of just exactly what the Easter experience of resurrection really was. Spong is a Biblical scholar, and he carefully retraces how the earliest concept of resurrection, which was Paul’s idea of a “spiritual body,” gradually evolved into the idea that there had to be a literal physical resuscitation, an idea that did not emerge until the 9th decade of the Christian era.
The resurrection account we read this morning is from the Gospel of John. It’s the last of the four Gospels to be written, and has the most fully developed idea of the physicality of resurrection. Mary Magdalene has loved Jesus, and seeing him now she weeps, longing to “cling” to the physical body of the risen Christ. But it’s not the physical body of Jesus that I want to focus on this morning; it’s Mary’s love.
`In his poem, "Issues of Life and Death," James Montgomery writes: "Beyond this vale of tears, there is a life above, unmeasured by the flight of years; and all that life is love." Our world comes to this Easter day drenched in tears. There has been an incredible spike in violence in our nation in just the past month, not to mention terror and suicide bombings abroad. The death and destruction that dominate our news headlines focus on this side of the vale of tears. But there is a life above, and all that life is love.
In Revelation 21:4 we read a promise: "God will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more . . ." The resurrection experience of Mary Magdalene begins in tears, but it ends with rejoicing!
It's Easter morning. Mary Magdalene is at the site of the empty tomb, and she's weeping. She has lost the love of her life, the one who had made life worth living. All we really know about Mary is that she loved Jesus, she was faithful to Jesus, and she continued to follow him even when the other disciples had fallen away. She followed him all the way to Golgotha where she witnessed his crucifixion.
And now she's come to his tomb, only to find it empty. She's not looking for a miracle. She's looking for his body, which she assumes has been stolen. She loved Jesus. Her heart is broken, and she's weeping. Suddenly the man whom she assumes to be a gardener speaks her name, "Mary," and from that instant on the whole course of human history was changed in so many profound and complex ways that it's impossible to imagine how it would have been different otherwise. Obviously, this doesn't mean there's no injustice, no suffering, no disappointment or that life this side of the vale of tears is forever after sweetness and light. What is revealed to Mary, and what this encounter reveals to us, is that suffering and death are not the end, and that the Lord of all life, on both sides of the grave, is present with us to wipe the tears from our eyes.
We know nothing about what happens to Mary Magdalene after Easter morning. The resurrected Christ utters her name, and that name is never again mentioned in the rest of the Bible. Not in the entire book of Acts, not in all the Epistles of Paul. This woman is the first to behold the resurrected Christ, the first witness to proclaim the Easter truth, the first Christian to have her tears wiped away, and yet she literally disappears from Christian history after this scene. There are some who say that she was just too sexy, too sensual a feminine figure, who stood in marked contrast to the Virgin Mary. The early church could incorporate the Mother of God, but not the Lover of God into its theology.
The essence of Easter is that the weeping Mary encountered the Resurrected Christ, who spoke her name. Many sermons have been preached about the resurrection. I don't understand any of them. Resurrection is a mystery. Some mysteries can be figured out, like a murder mystery. When all the details are known, the truth is revealed and the mystery is solved. But there are some mysteries that don't conceal a truth that you can figure out, whose truth is itself the mystery. Sometimes we have to live the mystery, and to say that God is a mystery is to say that the resurrection of Christ is a truth that cannot be nailed down.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word of God became flesh, and dwelt among us. Words are power, essentially the power of creation. In Hebrew the term dabar means both "word" and "deed." To say something is to do something. When you say, "I love you. I hate you. I forgive you," those words take on flesh. When I say, "I love you," in a sense I do not love you first and then speak it, but only by speaking it do I give it reality. Mary was weeping, longing to hear the Word of Love that would restore her broken heart and open the door of her life to resurrection. Don't we all long to hear our names spoken with love? Don't we all long for the personal touch of God? Mary's tears are wiped away, and her weeping is transformed into rejoicing. She recognizes that Love is not lost. Love is eternal, and death is not the end.
Jesus Christ is God's Word, and there is a personal Easter that can happen for you, when you recognize God's Word of Love, of Peace, of Comfort and Truth calling your name, in whatever way that may happen for you. I don't understand resurrection. It's enough for me to know that it's one of God's great mysteries, but I believe in Easter. I believe that Christ is continually being resurrected, continually wiping the tears from our eyes and is even now turning our weeping into rejoicing. I believe that God's Word continues to take on flesh in the Body of Christ, whenever we love one another, even as Christ has loved us. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Amen.
Frederick Buechner’s books, Peculiar Treasurers: A Biblical Who's Who, and Whistling In The Dark: An ABC Theologized, have helped shape these Easter reflections.