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Easter Sermon Scripture Lessons: Acts 10:34-43; John 20:1-18 In our Easter reading from the Gospel of John a woman, Mary Magdalene, has a remarkable role. She comes early and alone to the garden in which Jesus’ body had been entombed. She finds the stone rolled away from the front of the tomb and Jesus’ body gone. She carries the first word of this to Simon Peter and to ‘the one whom Jesus loved,’ this is Jesus’ youngest disciple, John. Then, she is the first person to whom the resurrected Jesus appears. I have always found the accounting of the role of Peter and John remarkable, but in an opposite way. When they hear from Mary that the tomb is empty, they set out to see it, running together. Each wants to be first, so they race. The writer of the Gospel of John mentions three times that ‘the other disciple’ (this is John) got there before Peter. The stress on who of the two got there first, who saw the body first, who believed first has gotten in the way of my seeing the beauty and the power of Mary. But now, as the saying goes, “I see!” After Mary has reported what she has seen to Peter and John and these two have run to the tomb and gone home, Mary returns to the garden alone. There she yearns, she weeps. Her words are poignant and we can feel the hurt and longing in them. Think how her response to sorrow, her deep and intimate emotion, her courage in breaking convention must have been received by early Christians! It’s hard to imagine. The story goes on: “As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” We have the words of the question and answer in our ears, beautifully read by David, and we heard them repeated in the story. Mary turned around and saw Jesus, whom at first she didn’t recognize—she took him to be the gardener. He asked, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” She answered and then he spoke her name, and she recognized him. When she did, she reached out instinctively to hold him, but he said, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.” The first part of what Jesus said I receive with shock. “Do not hold on to me.” Or in the translation of the Oxford English Bible “Do not cling to me,” which perhaps can be read: “Be ready to let me go.” What can Jesus mean by his warning against cling? A critic asks, “Is he making the point, at this moment of crisis, that all our loves are transitory, always vulnerable to being overwhelmed by death? That we, creatures trapped in our bodies, trapped in time, must cling to nothing, because everything is always in the process of falling out of our grasp?” I find this response too “spiritual.” It denies the rootedness in body that is so much part of Jesus’ teaching. I used to think Jesus was telling Mary, “You can’t hold on to me,” meaning that as resurrected body he couldn’t be held onto—he wasn’t present in a form that could be held, but I have changed my thought. Several of the gospels tell of times when Jesus joined his disciples fully present in body. He ate. Fish. Yes, he passed through solid walls and on the other hand, he ate. One can’t be more in body than this. He ate. When he spoke to Mary as he did, it was that he was on a mission from his Father and he commissioned Mary to join him in mission. “…go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary did as he asked, and in so doing, she broke yet another bound, she had yet another first. She told the disciples, “Jesus lives! I’ve seen him! He spoke with me! That Mary was given the charge to bring to Jesus’ disciples the news that Jesus was alive and tell them all that he had said and that the disciples accepted the help of a woman to make sense out of an empty tomb is, given the time this all took place, miracle. It also links the story of Mary Magdalene with the story of Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary, the Mother of God. Both Marys were, in the culture of their time pretty much nobody, the small ones, the ones on the margin, the ones without voice. Both were trusted by God to carry into the future the deepest meaning of who God is, what God would do for Creation, what God would have Creation be. But the Marys stories would mean little to us if they were not also our stories, the Peter and John’s stories also ours! God uses our lives to tell of his trust of the small ones to bring his message to light. He brings us from the dark place we each know, to light, then commissions us, “Tell of it. Tell of my love!.” I thought and thought and thought of a story I might find in the events of this week to illumine John’s story of the commissioning of Mary and John and Peter, and the story I finally came upon is that of the storm we experienced together on Tuesday and Wednesday. Most of us were here as rain fell hour by hour by hour to overflow meadows and woodlands, wetlands, rivers and streams and by and by yards and basements. Drop by drop. From the near nothingness of a raindrop to the mounting of power almost not-to-be-believed, we experienced it together. I saw it change Beaver Brook. I saw with my family the swollen river our beloved brook became. As we stood on the bank of the risen waters, we were together in awe. Not dread, strangely, though we were to lose a long stretch of our road to the power of the water. With us, rather, was a palpable and strangely comforting knowledge that God was present in the condition of flood. It was only as afterthought that I know the flood as separable into drops. But it’s true. The raindrops hold potential we scarcely notice except when gathered in storm. We hold power we scarcely use. We have power, as Jesus teaches, as the stream-in-flood teaches, to move mountains. The Easter message is, “Believe.” With all of nature singing the theme of God’s resurrecting love, thank God for the knowledge Jesus lives, and bring this truth into the world by how we live the time we are given to live, the blessed time. We can think of ourselves as not much in the infinity of the cosmos. Together we have energy that astounds when applied, when set in motion. We move mountains. When we know this, we gather courage to come together to perform little acts that, taken together, better the world. This is the good news of the day. Jesus lives! In us, in all, Jesus lives.
Amen
Rev. Cynthia Willauer South Lyme Union Chapel
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