Easter Sunday
Scripture: John 20:1-18.
As I was beginning to prepare this sermon, I had a vision of this moment—this moment when I stand up here and look out at your faces and wonder what you are expecting to hear from me.
We have a story. We are all here in a way because of a story about Jesus, who was executed and entombed, and who when people who had loved him went to visit his tomb a few days after his death, found him to be not there. Risen, it was said. Risen from the dead, it was said. What are we to make of this story? What am I to say about this story?
Of course I could use this time to wrestle publicly with the obvious questions the story confronts us with. Do we take this story literally, or not? Is this story trying to tell us some truth about Jesus that we are supposed to believe? Is it my job, is it our job, to proclaim that truth? Maybe some of you have come today with questions about Jesus and what we are supposed to believe about him, and maybe you are looking for me to address those questions. Maybe you are looking for me to explain what we are supposed to believe in in such a way that it seems possible to believe what we are supposed to believe.
Or maybe there is some grand statement about LIFE that we are supposed to make today. Maybe I am supposed to say that the underlying meaning of this story, whether you take it literally or not, is that life has a happy ending—your life, my life, all of life. You know…somehow in the end life wins out over death, good wins out over evil, love is stronger than hate. Maybe I am supposed to marshal every resource I can think of, including the story of Jesus’ resurrection, to try and fill our spirits with that belief, that love is stronger than death, or that in the end there is “good news”. Maybe you come today hoping to be convinced somehow or reassured that this really is a truth we can turn to in our gloomy moments.
Those are places I have been other Easters. Sometimes I have struggled with what happened two thousand years ago, how this story arose, what it meant then or might mean now to say “He is risen”. Sometimes I have tried my very best to say that I really do believe that the end is life, the end is God, and that the powers of death can never be anything more than temporarily victorious. I am not quite at either of those places this morning.
The real question, at least as it sorts itself out for me this year, is not whether we believe Jesus was raised from the dead, or whether we believe that there is a cosmic happy ending. The question that comes to me is not about Jesus, or about LIFE in general, but about us. Do we believe that we can be raised from the dead? Here and now, in this life, are resurrections possible for us? In a more modest human sense I feel like the people we really want to know about are us. In this light, the person in the story I want to look at this morning is not so much Jesus but Mary, the person identified in the story as Mary Magdalene.
There are several Marys who appear in the gospels, including of course Jesus’ mother, the Mary who had a sister named Martha, Mary the mother of Joses, and this Mary. We don’t know too much about any of these women, but we do have indications in the gospel that there were women who traveled with Jesus, who were part of his entourage, and who supported the group financially as well as in other ways. Mary Magdalene is identified by tradition as the prostitute who Jesus saved from stoning, and the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her hair, in the story we heard last Sunday.
As I say, we don’t really know very much about these women, but we don’t have to know much to be able to guess what Mary Magdalene was feeling. The situation speaks for itself and the way she speaks is revealing.
John reports that Mary Magdalene went to the tomb early on the first day of the week, in other words as soon as she could, after the Sabbath was over. I picture her as completely devastated, going to anoint Jesus or just to visit the grave not because there was any rational reason to do so but just because she had to do something. I picture her arriving at the tomb, seeing the stone rolled away, and having that sinking feeling we have when our worst fears have been confirmed. What is then reported is that she ran to tell the rest what she had seen and said, “They have taken Jesus out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him.”
Others come and look and go away, leaving Mary outside the tomb, crying. She looks inside the tomb herself, sees two angels who ask her why she is weeping. Again she says: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
What attracts my attention in these brief conversations is something that in one sense is just a tiny piece of the story, but which in another sense is the whole story for me. It is the word “they”, as in “they have taken away his body and we don’t know where they have put it.” They. That generalized, anonymous other that we all refer to sometimes. Sometimes we don’t even know who “they” is. We talk about they but we don’t have anybody specific in mind. Sometimes we think we think we know who we’re talking about, but we don’t really, because the “theys” in our lives are always people we don’t understand and who we feel don’t understand us. “They” are “those people”, rarely, if ever, words that we use kindly. “They” are people who don’t share our values, who don’t look at the world the way we do, who don’t feel the same things we feel. “They” are people who are different, and we don’t know them because if we did “they” would not be “they” any longer. And sometimes “they” are not really people at all. They just represent something that is bad, or something that is hostile to us.
In fact, whenever I hear the word “they” used in this way, I know that the powers of death are loose in the world, and that there is work to be done in overcoming the powers of death. “They” always tells me that there is something here that’s not right, something that needs to be addressed. I have been in churches where some members of the church refer to other members of the church as “they”. I hear that and I know there is some hard work ahead in that church. As powers of death go this may not be a big one, but it has to me the sound of death. There is nothing life-giving or life enhancing. It signals not only a problem, but in a very real sense death.
And I don’t need to rehearse with you this morning all the other ways in which “they” can refer in some destructive, spirit-killing manner to groups of people—racial groups, ethnic groups, religious groups. Whenever groups of people, whoever they are, become “those people”, there is work to be done, there is some kind of death that needs to be overcome.
I don’t necessarily hear that kind of feeling in Mary’s words, but I do hear another kind of feeling. For Mary “they” represented whoever it was she thought might have taken Jesus’ body, but also maybe all those people who simply went about their business after the Sabbath, returned to work or to business as usual, having things to do and places to go, and completely unconcerned about Jesus’ death or Mary’s grief, and the fact that she no longer had anything to do or any place to go. At that moment, as far as Mary was concerned, the whole world was “they” for Mary. I imagine her as feeling just very deeply alone in the world. And I wonder if there is anyone in this room who has not felt alone in that way, so that the whole world, and every other person, even the people we love, somehow seem like “they”. I imagine Mary feeling that way, and I can easily find myself in her.
So anyway, Mary turned to some unsuspecting bystander who was there in the garden. She thought maybe he was the gardener, come to water the flowers, and she accused him: “Sir, if you are the one who has taken him, just tell me where he is, for my own peace of mind.” Then the gardener says, “Mary”. And Mary, suddenly realizing who the gardener really is, says back to him simply, “Rabboni”.
This is a moment of recognition, but not just recognition but where that sense of isolation or aloneness is broken through, and where “we”, rather than “they” becomes at least a possibility again. And wherever “we” becomes possible for us in our lives, wherever a “they” is turned to a “we”, I believe we experience resurrection, some new life comes forth where before there was only death.
I know that traditionally the words of Easter have to do with Christ being raised from the dead. Christ the Lord is risen today…Christ is risen. Alleluia. For me, though, sometimes anyway, the words that much more capture what Easter means to me are those simple words of death and life: the “they” in Mary’s words and the “we” that begins to dawn when Jesus calls Mary by her name.
All too often, I believe, the Easter story has been used as a kind of proof or at least as a spiritual support for belief in personal salvation and an afterlife. For me, however, it is a story that points, as Jesus himself did at the beginning of his ministry, to the reign of God. It points toward a time when all the theys in our lives have become “wes”, when we recognize in one another, in every human being, a person who God calls by name.
I’ll be honest with you. Heaven has never played a big part in my real life theology. I have just never spent much time thinking about it. I find no reason to spend much energy either denying it or defending it. But I have felt, empathetically, the tremendously strong emotional power that kind of longing has for people especially who have lost someone they love, and who hope one day to be reunited, or even with people we have been estranged from in this life, people with whom we have some unfinished business. I don’t believe I have ever known anyone who believed fervently in a heaven where we would go after we die to live a life of sheer pleasure eternally but alone. There is always a “we” about heaven. The power that the idea of heaven holds for us as human beings in every case I have personally known has to do in some way with reunion. I understand when people have a vision of being reunited with loved ones. But it is more than that, a vision of God’s whole people being reunited, a place where there is no longer us and them, but only we.
But for me this is not heaven in the sense of a “pie in the sky” place where we go after we die, but rather it is the reign of God that Jesus spoke of from the beginning, and that we, even here and now, strain toward, hope for, pray for, live for.
We were talking about the reign of God in our Bible study recently, and in the course of the conversation Lee Walters reminded me that when I interviewed with the search committee here at Sojourners I read a passage from Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved. I don’t know how Toni Morrison would feel about my calling this passage I’m about to read a vision of God’s reign, but that is what it is to me, and I decided I wanted to read it to all of you this morning. This particular passage is about a character named Baby Suggs, who is the grandmother of the title character in the book. It would take too long for me to place this in the context of the story for you, so I’m going to have to trust that the passage will stand on its own:
“Accepting no title of honor before her name, but allowing a small caress after it, she (Baby Suggs) became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it. In winter and fall she carried it to the AME’s and Baptists, Holinesses and Sanctifieds, the Church of the Redeemer and the Redeemed. Uncalled, unrobed, unanointed, she let her great heart beat in their presence. When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing—a wide open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees.
“After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, “Let the children come!” and they ran from the trees toward her. ‘Let your mothers hear you laugh,’ she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling. Then ‘Let the grown men come,’ she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among ringing trees. ‘Let your wives and your children see you dance,’ she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet. Finally she called the women to her. ‘Cry,’ she told them. ‘For the living and the dead. Just cry.’ And without covering their eyes, the women let loose.
“It started that way; laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got all mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs holy offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives and go and sin no more. She did not tell them that they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine, that if they could not see it, they could not have it.”
In more than one passage, Toni Morrison has helped me to see the reign of God. Jesus has too, helped me to see the reign of God, in fact it was Jesus who introduced me to it. For me that voice that beckons us toward the reign of God is not just a human voice, it comes from this side of the grave and from the other side, from the past, from the pages of scripture, and from the future, from someplace far away and someplace deep within, it comes as a human voice and a holy voice, inviting us to take up the journey again toward the reign of God, that place where we are all “we” again. That journey is not over, in fact has only begun. But it is a joyful journey, if we can believe that resurrections are not only possible, but are indeed our life’s work, and God’s too. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 15, 2001