Christ is Risen, Alleluia!
Happy Easter! We have travelled together, through the season of Lent, spending time with Jesus in the desert facing temptation, then through the heady entry to Jerusalem, the crowds acclaiming him, a moment that swiftly turns as he is rejected, betrayed, arrested, beaten, and killed. Jesus dies.
We live, from our earliest days as children, with a growing understanding of death. And so we share a common understanding of how this thing called life works. Living things (plants, animals, people) come to life, and we celebrate; every life holds untold potential, the whole of life ahead of it. There are inevitable challenges along the way, but as long as there is the faintest continuing life force, then we hold onto hope for that particular life. Until finally comes death … the end of that particular life on earth. And so, when a loved one dies, grief can feel overwhelming; the loss can seem unbearable.
And this is where Mary and the disciples are at the beginning of today’s Gospel. Mary approaches the tomb in literal and personal darkness. All understanding of this momentous day is, at this point, shrouded in darkness. She has witnessed her Jesus, the one she thought was the bringer of hope, the Messiah, the son of God, being brutally killed, and his body lies, she believes, in the dark tomb of death.
There are echoes of the beginning of the Creation story in Genesis – In the beginning the earth was void; darkness was over the deep. It was chaos. There was no form. Today Mary, arriving at the tomb in the pre-dawn darkness, is confronted by a void. No form. Chaos. Darkness is over the deep. This is the World’s second pre-creation time.
We talk of resurrection as ‘On the third day’, but John’s Gospel says it is the ‘first day of the week’. Again this echoes Creation – God’s first creative act in Genesis happens on ‘the first day’ … ‘Let there be light’. But I’m jumping ahead. Mary is not at this point yet. Arriving at the tomb she finds it open; a frightening and distressing discovery.. She is still in a place of darkness and death. So what does she do? She runs.
The first ten verses of our Gospel this morning are full of running! It all feels panicky – people running everywhere (in fact there are more references to running in these ten verses than in all of the rest of the Gospels put together!) Nothing makes sense, and everyone is running around unsure of what on earth is going on! And, no wonder! Their world has been turned upside down. Again! Mary runs to the two disciples who then run ahead of her, back to the tomb.
The disciple Jesus loved arrives first, sees the opened tomb, and though he bends down and notices the linen cloths, he stops there. But Peter, impulsive Peter, rushes straight in. He too notices the linen cloths but with no apparent understanding. The second disciple then enters, and notices, wonders,and John tells us, he believes. It’s not clear what he believes. Neither of them takes time. Instead they run off. Again. The sense of panic continues. “What is going on?!” we might imagine them asking one another as they run, leaving Mary outside the tomb, in her grief and loss.
Mary bends over, looks in, and weeps.
Oscar Romero, the priest who denounced oppression of the poor in El Salvador in the 1970s, and was consequently murdered while saying mass in San Salvador in 1980, said ‘there are some things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried’. The two disciples looked and saw only discarded cloths. Mary looks into the tomb, weeps, and through her tears, she sees more… she sees two angels.
The angels don’t repeat their usual line , ‘Don’t be afraid’. Instead they see Mary crying, and ask, ‘Why are you weeping?’. In this question they invite Mary to name her loss, and in this naming, her journey of turning from darkness and death towards light and resurrection begins. Mary turns, and turning she sees a stranger. Wondering who this could be, she imagined him to be the gardener, for she is still more turned to darkness and death than to light.
But, in a sense she is right. She is in the place of a New Creation, which Jesus’ resurrection has begun. Chaos is being transformed into order, the broken seed hidden in the dark earth is sprouting new life. But there is pain too – because the resurrected Christ is both all powerful in the new creation, and is the man of sorrows, who is broken. So, Mary turns and sees some semblance of Christ’s light, but not fully, not yet.
‘Mary’ he says. And turning again she sees, and, no longer wondering who this could be, she knows. She realises, who this is. This turning that takes time, and care, and is pain-filled, opens Mary’s tear-filled eyes, and she sees the risen Christ.
In this tiniest of dialogues … ‘Mary’ … ‘Rabbouni’ … Mary knows herself, and knows God.
This is God’s unique gift to every one of us. When we encounter Christ with our brokenness, with our tears, and in God’s love, we become part of God’s new creation.
I love it in our Eucharist liturgy, that as the consecrated host is lifted up and broken we hear the words, ‘The living bread is broken for the life of the world’, and we pray, ‘Lord unite us in this sign’ – we are united with Christ and with one another in our brokenness. Brokenness is the human story. It is our human story. But it is also God’s human story, in the resurrected Christ.
Resurrection is beyond our human understanding and experience. It is beyond time and space … it does not fit with our temporal world. But resurrection is the New Creation. In this incomprehensible event, the world is transfigured – we glimpse, with Mary, something beyond our world – there is in Christ’s resurrection a renewal in the depths of Creation that allows every crumb of creation to enter the world of God beyond death.
The risen Christ tells Mary to ‘go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’’. Hear that again – ‘to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’. Up to this point in the Gospels Jesus always refers to ‘the Father’; his followers he called disciples, servants, friends. But now everything is changed, like a new spring flower that appears overnight.
On this resurrection morning, the disciples are welcomed into this new resurrection Creation where they (and we) can know God as Jesus knew God! We can be intimate children of God; can call God Abba, Father. In this new Creation we, every one of us, are the beloved daughters, and sons, of God, in this confusing, extraordinary, and wonderful new Easter Creation.
Christ is risen, Alleluia!