Scripture: John 20:1-18
When Julie Hughens’ father died earlier this week, it summoned up memories for me of other Easters I have experienced. There have been times, many times, at Easter where death has seemed to fill the air. I feel like this has happened quite often to me over my years in the ministry, that people who were part of my life or the life of the congregation I was serving seemed to die disproportionately right around Easter. I have spent more than a few Easter Saturdays or Easter Mondays involved with funeral services. There have been many Easter Sunday worship services where a grief was still being felt by the whole congregation because of the recent loss or the impending loss of a member and a friend. My mother died on Good Friday, ten years ago. I wasn’t feeling much like celebrating when Easter arrived a few days later.
I know these are very subjective feelings. A mathematician might very well tell me that the frequency of deaths I have experienced around the time of Easter has no statistical significance. And maybe it’s true that people don’t die any more often around Easter; maybe it just seems that way to me. But it is true that it does seem that way to me, and maybe one of the reasons it does seem that way is that the dying or the grieving stands out just a little more because of the contrast with what we usually think of as the spirit of Easter. Here, at the time of year when flowers are blooming and hopefully the weather is beginning to lift our spirits out of whatever winter doldrums we might have had, here at a time when religiously speaking we are supposed to be shouting alleluia and proclaiming the victory of life over death, here comes death itself, taking the enthusiasm out of our alleluias and daring to suggest that maybe the proclamation of life’s victory over death is premature. The appearance of death at Easter time is incongruous and stark. So it stands out. Maybe that’s why it seems to happen that way so often.
Then again maybe there’s a positive message to be gained here as well. Maybe there’s something more here than the contrast between the reality of death and the presumed message of Easter. Maybe it’s a reminder that in order for the Easter message to be real, in order for it to be authentic, it needs to come from out of the midst of the powers of death, not apart from them, a reminder that it needs to come in deep awareness of the world’s brokenness, not in casual obliviousness.
When death and life seem to be in such stark contrast at Easter, that is in one sense the way it is supposed to be. Death and life are joined at Easter as they are so often in life. And the power of the Easter message is most real when it grows from out of the midst of death. If that means the message is somewhat muted by the realities all around us, that is the way it is for us. If it means that the joy of celebration is tempered by the sorrows that belong to us as human beings, that is the way it is for us much of the time. And of course the other way of putting all this is just as true: that no tomb we live in can be sealed against the presence of God, no song of love or praise can be silenced altogether.
Sometimes instead of clear, unequivocal messages written across the sky, we will need to be content with hints that more is possible than what our earthbound minds tell us is reasonable to hope for. Sometimes we will need to be content with whispers rather than loud shouts and proclamation that some new life awaits us beyond what we can see at the moment. Sometimes we will need to be content with signs of new life rather than promises or proofs. And when I read the Easter stories in the Bible, I read them with this kind of attitude. I don’t expect to find there any reasoned explanations of resurrection. I don’t expect any descriptions of Jesus rising from the dead. (There aren’t any, whether I expect them or not.) I don’t expect to find there any magic words that will dispel doubt or disperse all sorrows. I do expect to find there suggestions, signs, images that bring some part of me to life and that turn my soul toward some hopefulness or promise of new life. Here are a couple of images that have drawn my attention this year.
The first is an image I have of Mary Magdalene that comes mostly from the reading from John. The story in John’s version has Mary coming to the tomb early in the morning, discovering the stone rolled away, going to tell the other disciples, two of them running to see what she’s talking about, checking out the empty tomb, then returning to their homes. But Mary stayed. She stood outside the tomb, it says, weeping. I picture her staring into the tomb. Letting a thousand thoughts cross through her mind. Wondering where “they” have taken the body. Wondering what this all means. Wondering, just wondering, and weeping. Letting the grief roll over her. Feeling the loss, her loss, but maybe the world’s loss too, sadness for the world that couldn’t even find a place for Jesus. I picture her staying and staying and staring and staring into the darkness.
Every time I read rich suggestive scriptures like this one, I am apt to find something different. And this year it is this image of Mary staring into the tomb. That image conjured up more personal images for me. I mentioned that my mother died on Good Friday ten years ago. Of course following a death there is some cleaning out to do and my father wanted my sister and me to do it. Closets to be emptied, decisions to be made about what to keep and what to give away to relatives or to the Salvation Army, pictures to be looked at, even some written things, saved postcards, notes scribbled in margins, thoughts about books she had read she wanted to remember, and more, nothing too personal, but somewhat, hoping she wouldn’t mind, realizing that there was more to my mother than what she revealed to us children, recognizing that parents have a right to lives of their own, have a right to have secrets from their children, but feeling sad that some stories that might have been told weren’t, and wondering what they might have been, wondering what stories might have been attached to those faces smiling at us from faded photographs.
I think there must have felt like there was a connection between my staring into the back parts of closets and staring at old pictures and words and Mary staring into the tomb, because the one brought the other to mind for me. The image of Mary staring into the tomb brought to my mind the images of me and my mother’s closets and that brought to mind all the stories we have to tell each other, all the truths we have to tell each other, not truth like THE TRUTH, but the truths we have to tell, and all the ways we are connected to each other, and not connected, the stories we don’t know, the stories we haven’t told.
One way to deal with the untold stories of our lives is to say to ourselves that they may be lost to us but they are not lost. I remember a phrase from a short story I once read that stuck with me for some reason. A mother was telling her son about things that happened many years ago, and the son said something like, “How do you remember all those things, ma? And she said, “That is the job of mothers, to remember. We are the keepers of the heart’s dusty corners.” I just liked the phrase at the time, but it has since become for me one of the ways I imagine God. I imagine God as a mother who is a keeper of our hearts’ dusty corners, and all the untold stories that lie buried in shoe boxes and closet corners, stories that lie buried under the years. It’s just a kind of a fanciful, if not poetic, image, but then all our images of God are fanciful and poetic, and I imagine that somehow, though of course I am not sure how, I imagine that what is lost to me is not lost to God.
But I also am led to entertain the thought that there are stones that seal us off from one another, locking us inside ourselves. Isn’t Easter about rolling away those stones too? What if we pushed those stones aside, or God pushed them aside, and suddenly our hearts and our mouths were set free for the telling of our stories, and our ears were set free to listen. What if, for us, Easter takes place as we roll aside the stones of our seclusion and tell one another the stories we have to tell, and find in one another ears and hearts ready to listen? Isn’t there something life-giving, life-renewing, and holy about breaking out of the tombs we have chosen to live in? Isn’t that one of the things that resurrection is all about?
Which brings me back to Mary. My favorite version of the Easter story has always been the one in the gospel of John, at least the part of that version where Mary has this conversation with the person she presumes is the gardener. For me, the Easter moment is not the discovery of the empty tomb, or the angel saying to the women or the disciples, “He is not here. He is risen.” The Easter moment is when Jesus, the gardener, speaks to Mary, calls her by name, and she responds: “teacher!” It is the moment of recognition, when the isolation, the loneliness is shattered, and she is no longer alone. It is that human connection if you will that speaks to me most strongly of resurrection.
I don’t want to criticize the male disciples too much for leaving. We don’t know what they did. The story doesn’t focus on them. The story focuses on Mary. And what she did was to stay and stay and not run away and not hide from the grief and not seek a means of escape. She looked into the darkness—for us it might be some darkness inside, some part of a relationship in need of mending, some sadness in the world around us—she looked into the darkness and kept on looking, didn’t look around for some distraction, didn’t flick off the TV, didn’t shut down her mind or heart, just stayed there in that hard place until the gardener came along. And even then it was not shouts and jubilation, but a dawning that the story’s not over, there’s more of it yet to be told, more of it yet to live.
And that brings me to the second image in the stories I wanted to mention this morning. In Matthew’s version that began the service today, an angel came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. That’s my other image: this angel sitting on the rock. This rock had once signified that Jesus’ words, his thoughts, his spirit, his vision, his movement—that it was all over, decisively, definitively, definitely over. And then all of a sudden the rock is not where it’s supposed to be, and there is this angel sitting on the rock like it’s a park bench. There’s more to the story after all. More to the story than whatever of grief there may be that swells up inside us. More to the story than whatever there may be of loneliness or wounded relationships. More to the story than whatever there may be in the world that causes us to weep and to lose heart. It’s all still there, everything that stone might represent. And it was a big stone, they say. The story says they tried to seal the tomb as securely as they possibly could. A big stone. And it’s still there. The violence and the poverty don’t go away. The fear, the sadness, the hurt feelings, the regret, the anger, the self-doubt, the failure, the…none of it goes away just because it’s Easter. But there is the image of the angel sitting on the stone, and it is rolled away, and it no longer blocking the way to new life, and it is no longer sealing us off from one another, and it no longer crushes the spirit. It is just there.
Easter Sunday can for some people actually be one of the hardest days of the church year, not so much because people may have problems believing the story, but because the powers of death are so strong in our own lives. I know people have problems with miracles. I do too. But I don’t think with regard to Easter that that’s where it’s really at. There are interesting questions surrounding the resurrection story: Is it theoretically possible that something like that could happen? What in reality lies behind these ancient stories? How do you begin to describe what might have happened? Interesting questions, all of them. But for me they are not the real questions, the questions that I feel in my bones. Those questions have to do with whether there will ever be an end to the violence, and so often my gut says no. It’s just going to go on and on and on. It keeps getting worse and there doesn’t seem any way to stop it. The question is do I give in to that thought, that feeling. The real questions for me have to do with fear. It can so easily take over our spirits. It takes so many forms. There have been times when fear has controlled me. The question is will I let any of the various things that threaten me, will I let them control me? You see what I’m getting at. It’s not the question of miracles but the question of hope that is at the heart of Easter.
The angel sitting there on that rock in the garden is not a trumpeting of immortality, a philosophical proof of life after death, or anything of the kind. But he is a sign, a sign that—how shall we put it?—that death does not have the last word? That it is not time to give in to the powers of death or to give up the journey of faith? That there is more of the story yet to come—Christ’s story, your story, my story, our story. There’s more of it yet to come. And Christ, as the angel said, has gone ahead of us to Galilee or to wherever our journey may take us. He is not a memory, nor a heavenly being we are supposed to believe in and worship from afar, but a presence along the road. May we discover new life for that journey. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 11, 2004