Easter Sunday – Bill Harkins
The Gospel: John 20:1-18
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself…
Birds flying high, you know how I feel
Sun in the sky, you know how I feel
Breeze driftin’ on by, you know how I feel
It’s a new dawn
It’s a new day
It’s a new life for me, yeah
It’s a new dawn
It’s a new day
It’s a new life for me, oohAnd I’m feeling good
Good morning, and welcome to this glorious day of the Resurrection! In the Gospel reading for today, we heard one of two Resurrection stories within scripture. In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the images are quite similar. In the Gospel of John, the story is in some ways quite different, though the theology they share—the central message of these Gospel texts—is essentially the same; we, too, have been raised with Christ. I want to say a word this morning about both versions and the implications of each for our lives together.
In the Gospel of Luke, we hear what the women at the tomb learn at about this time of day—Jesus is already gone. And since we, too, have been raised with Christ, the question then becomes whether we will miss our resurrection; for it is at the tomb that we discover the truth about ourselves, questions that have occupied our thoughts this season of Lent. At the sight of the empty tomb, we find all these questions coming together as one. To become what we practice, as Jesus teaches on Ash Wednesday, is to become new.
To recognize the prophetic nature of what it means to follow the prophet Jesus, as we discover at the Transfiguration, is to begin to act differently. To understand, as the farmer did about the fig tree, that life is about slow, untimely and unlikely growth—and not about perfection—is to think in new ways about the nature of our spiritual lives and the potential for redemption in each moment. To love those who are sometimes unlovable, in reckless ways, as does the prodigal parent, is to travel through life with life-giving insight.
Like the women who go to the sepulcher on Easter morning to bless the body, because their lives had been changed, we have been preparing together for six weeks, in various ways, to answer this last, momentous question: Will we ourselves, touched by Jesus, now rise and live life differently? And what is the essence of that difference? It is living into the Christian life as a journey of transformation. Hence, Jesus’ question, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Like the women who went to the tomb expecting to find the grave blocked, we must not allow our fear of grieving our losses blind us to the possibilities, and to silence our hearts. The resurrection to which Easter calls us—our own—asks of us that we prepare to find God where God is by opening ourselves to the world around us with a listening ear, a compassionate heart, a spirit of wonder. This means that we must prepare to be surprised by God in strange places—sometimes in ways that make us uncomfortable. We must allow others to open our hearts to things we do not want to hear. It presumes that we will reach out to the other—stranger though they may be—and seek out Christ in the face of the stranger, especially those relegated to the margins.
Lent is not, therefore, my sisters and brothers, a series of behaviors, but rather a series of questions. Easter is not simply a day of celebration, but a day of decision. In the Resurrection story from the Gospel of John, we see this emphasis on decision borne out in a remarkable way. Faitful, steadfast, resilient Mary Magdalene wants Jesus back as she remembers him, which is so human of course; failing that, she wants his body in a definite place, she wants a grave she can tend. Jesus appears to her in what Rowan Williams, our former Archbishop of Canterbury, calls one of the most moving moments of the whole Bible—and her first instinct is to think yes, he is back as she remembers, yes, she has hold of him after all. He has not disappeared; he has not been taken away to an unknown destination. But Jesus warns Mary: he is being taken away to a destination more unknown than she could imagine. “Do not cling to me,” he tells her. From now on, there will be no truthful way of speaking or thinking of him except as the one who lives alongside the source of all things. These simple words already contain all the mysteries we celebrate when we say the creeds, and when we break the bread of Holy Communion.
Resurrection is not so much a matter of believing things about Jesus as about believing in Jesus. Believing, in this sense, does not consist of giving one’s mental assent to something, but giving one’s heart at a much deeper level. It involves a transformation from having heard about Jesus with the hearing of one’s ear to being in relationship to the spirit of the Living Christ. For ultimately, Resurrection means that Jesus is not a figure of the past: hence the Gospel texts say, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” and “Do not cling to me.” Rather, Jesus is with us, among us, is us, in the form of the church that is the resurrected Body of Christ. This means we cannot have Jesus just on our terms. After the resurrection, with its demonstration that Jesus’ life is as indestructible as God’s life, we simply cannot go back to the Jesus who is humanly familiar, as Mary had wished. And clearly, we can’t have Jesus as a warm memory, a dearly departed whose grave we can visit. Easter asks us to consider where and how we might want to cling, what we are unwilling to grieve, and where we might want to turn away from the journey, what we might be refusing to hear or to see. The Gaelic say that there are ‘thin places’ between heaven and earth. Perhaps it is so that the very young and the very old or the very ill among us recognize this best of all. If we have walked alongside those who are dying, we have watched and listened as visions are experienced and conversations are held with others who have long since died, as though they were gathering right there themselves. Those of us who are still so very bound to this earth cannot see or hear them, but we find ourselves convinced that there is something more in the room than what we can possibly comprehend. And spend time with children, and one soon realizes they notice things we sometimes miss, often, the sacred in the mundane. As the poet David Whyte has written:
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterablythemselves.
Everything is waiting for you
And yes, there are other times and places, too, when we sense the ‘holy’ in extraordinary ways. When I’m cooking, I feel the presence of my grandmother, who taught me to cook. Every year at the Peachtree Road Race I feel my dear friend Mark, who died of melanoma at age 39 and encouraged me to keep running for us both, running alongside me. Occasionally, running on the trails, I feel the presence of our beloved dog Sadie, whom we lost two years ago, and who loved to run…and on and on, the mystery of those thin spaces in our lives, just as Mary experienced in the garden. Could there have been a place more ‘thin,’ than that first Easter Day when the women made their way to the tomb to find it empty? Although they could hardly believe it and no doubt struggled to find words for it, mustn’t they have known that they were standing in a ‘thin place’ when they were reminded that it was foolish to look for the living among the dead? It is no surprise, of course, that Peter and the other apostles could not take in what the women hurried back to share, even as we shook our heads so long ago to hear the youngest among us point to something so wondrous. And yet, one must believe that they knew there was something more afoot as in Luke’s account, Peter ran to the tomb himself and left somehow changed – amazed at what he had seen.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep.
And so I wonder now, on this Easter Day as we gather in song and praise surrounded by the fragrance of spring and the sounds of beloved hymns, how it is that we will experience these places, our lives now, as ‘thin.’ I wonder how and where heaven will meet earth this year. It is all a mystery, of course. The sort of mystery that words perhaps cannot quite capture. And yet we seek to speak to them still. Like the women at the tomb to so long ago, we, too, have been captured by this mystery and though our words may stumble, how can we not speak of it? And in the speaking? By God’s own doing, perhaps others will find themselves in a ‘thin place’ as well. Oh yes, maybe through our words, heaven will be brought just a little bit closer to earth. Indeed, maybe in the telling, others will sense the presence of the Risen Christ as well. It is so that birth and death, living and dying is fraught with mystery. And how much more mysterious is that which we are called to proclaim on Easter! For you, what words, what stories best capture and convey this mystery? This Gospel text is filled, dear one’s, with abundance from the smallest of things, miraculous transformations, and images of choices that ask of us nothing less than that we exercise our responsibility to choose God’s way—the pearl of great price—which may take us on our own distinctively sacred pilgrimage. Look around you, friends, at the purple coneflower on the trail, the raven tending her nest, the homeless man on the corner, the light in the eyes of your loved ones. Look at your grandmother’s quilts, waving in the breezes of your memory, and use your imagination—that God-given, sacred, imagination, which is the power to creatively engage this world in faith, and considering the Good News. Then pay attention to the nearness of the kingdom of heaven, here, now, and your place in it, the pearl of great price, the treasure in the field. “The Incarnate word is with us,” Wendell Berry wrote, “is still speaking is present, always, yet leaves no sign, but everything that is.” And ultimately, dear ones, this means that we are the Body of Christ. The incarnation did not end after 33 years. The word did not just momentarily become flesh and dwell among us—it became flesh and continues to dwell among us.
I want to invite us all, in this coming Eastertide and on into Pentecost, to be a good friend to others. As Joan Chittister remindws us, “Mary Magdalene is the woman whom scripture calls by name in a time when women were seldom named in public documents at all. She is, in fact, named fourteen times—more than any other woman in the New Testament except Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus, herself. She is clearly a very important, and apparently a very wealthy woman. Most of all, she understood who Jesus was long before anyone else did and she supported him in his wild, free ranging, revolutionary approach to life and state and synagogue. She was, it seems, the leader of a group of women who “supported Jesus out of their own resources.” And she never left his side for the rest of his life. She was there at the beginning of the ministry. And she was there at the end. She was there when they were following him in cheering throngs. And she was there when they were taking his entire life, dashing it against the stone of synagogue and state, turning on him, jeering at him, shouting for his death, standing by while soldiers poked and prodded him to ignominy. She tended his grave and shouted his dying glory and clung to his soul. She knew him and she did not flinch from the knowing. The “Magdalene factor” as Chittester calls it, especially in friendship, is the ability to know everything there is to know about a person, to celebrate their fortunes, to weather their straits, to chance their enemies, to accompany them in their pain and to be faithful to the end, whatever its glory, whatever its grief. The Magdalene factor is intimacy, that unshakeable immersion in the life of the other to the peak of ecstasy, to the depths of hell. Let’s be that kind of friend, here, to one another, and to those we meet in our work as the Body of Christ in the world…“Practice Resurrection,” our wonderful poet Wendell Berry says. And in the words of Teresa of Avila, “Christ has no body now but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion must look out on the world. Yours are the feet withwhich He is to go about doing good in the world. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now. Alleluia, Amen.”