John 20:1-18.
I.
Mary comes to the tomb in darkness. Her walk to the tomb reminds me of our human existence generally, without a second birth. We’re born, and even though we imagine that we see fully and live completely, we actually kind of sleepwalk blindly through a few short decades, and we arrive at a tomb. This is our life.
Like Mary, maybe there is a sense in which we expect to find Jesus in the tomb. After all, we Christians believe he “died for us”, so it makes sense to think that the one resting in the tomb that was intended for us is supposed to be him.
Maybe sometimes we come to church unconsciously seeking to make sure Jesus is still in there. The world, and even many Christians, have a great interest in Jesus being and staying dead. The Romans and the religious establishment want him dead because he was making trouble for them, teaching people that there is another way to live, not under their control.
Some Christians want him to stay dead because then he can be controlled, his message can be defined and reduced to self-serving words on a page which can then be interpreted as the leaders please. We seal him up in a “tomb” of doctrines, rules and regulations, values, morals, habits, traditions, liturgies, and so forth. Then we don’t have to deal with him exactly but just all this other stuff we have invented, which is way easier.
Because if he’s not safely in that tomb, if it is open and empty, then that grave might be waiting for us, and we don’t want that. Even more alarming, it would beg the question, “Then where the heck is he?” Did Jesus get loose? Or did someone else steal him so they can claim him and put him in their own tomb of doctrines, traditions, liturgies, and so forth? He’s supposed to belong to us! He’s supposed to be in our tomb! Other people can’t just take him!
When Mary gets to the tomb, she sees the large stone removed from the entrance, and she imagines the worst. Even though she does not actually look inside, she worries that some people have taken Jesus’ body and hidden it somewhere. So she runs back to the disciples’ headquarters, the upper room where Jesus had washed their feet a couple of nights before, and tells this to Peter and another unnamed disciples whom Jesus loved.
Then they run to the tomb. The other disciple arrives first. He only peers dimly into the space to see the linen cloths that had wrapped the body, but no body. Peter arrives and impetuously runs into the tomb itself, and he also sees these cloths, and the head wrapping rolled up separately.
All of this indicates that this is not the work of grave robbers since these cloths would have been quite plastered to the skin of the body with myrrh paste, and could only have been removed by a painstaking and lengthy process, which robbers would scarcely have time or energy for.
II.
The disciple-who-isn’t-Peter enters the tomb, sees all this, and, we are told, believes. Perhaps he remembers that Lazarus, at his resuscitation, came out of his tomb still wrapped-up mummy-like in linen cloth. Clearly something different is happening here, and it occurs to him that this could actually be a very good thing, even though he still doesn’t understand the Scriptural prophecies about it. The two male disciples go back home, no doubt in some confusion.
Mary stays there, in tears. When she looks into the tomb she sees something the men did not. She sees two angels dressed in white, sitting on the shelf where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and one at the foot. This would have reminded her or any informed Jew of the most holy place in the Temple, and the Ark of the Covenant, which used to be in there, and how it had over it’s lid, two carved angels, and between them was a flat surface called the Mercy Seat, or the Throne, which is the space where God literally dwelled. It was the holiest place, inside the holiest place, inside the holiest place, in the world.
In other words, she looks into the tomb and has a vision of the Holy of Holies, the place where Atonement happens, where sin is taken away. As we read in Leviticus 16, the sins of the people are ritually placed on the head of a goat and taken away, driven out to the desert. That is how John identifies Jesus back in chapter 1, the one who takes away the sin of the world. The tomb of Jesus is the new Holy of Holies.
Mary notices that Jesus’ body is missing, and the way she expresses this is to use the same word. She says that it has been “taken away”. So like the scapegoat in Leviticus, Jesus, whom Paul describes as the One who was made to be sin (2 Cor. 5:21), upon whom the sin of the world is inflicted in his subjection to terrible violence, injustice, and humiliation in his being lynched at the hands of the Romans and their religious collaborators, is also “taken away.”
He is taken away bearing our sin, that is, carrying the consequences of our separation from God and enmity with each other, our blindness and paralysis. All the sour, poisonous spawn of our shattered, sleepwalking existence, all our darkness and fear, anger and shame, he takes away with him and neutralizes. Like the scapegoat driven into the wilderness, Christ, the creed tells us, “descended into hell,” basically destroying the place and liberating the souls entrapped in it.
That in itself is spectacular good news, on one level. But it’s not the end of the story. Still not completely comprehending what is going on, Mary continues looking for Jesus’ dead body. She turns around, steps out of the tomb and sees a man, standing there, out in the garden.
III.
Mary thinks the man is part of the landscaping crew. But we remember way back to the beginning of the story in the Bible. How there is a man placed in a beautiful garden to take care of it, who names all the animals, who lives in peace and partnership with all. The primordial “man in a garden” is Adam. Which means that now we move from the world of redemption, forgiveness, and atonement of Leviticus 16, to the world of creation, blessing, and partnership in Genesis 2 and 3. For if the old world began and then crashed with a man and a woman in a garden, so the new world will begin and emerge with… and man and a woman in a garden.
Mary still expects Jesus to be dead. She still thinks he can be managed. She still thinks he is an inanimate object to be moved around. She still thinks he can be controlled, defined, taken care of, guarded, preserved. So she tearfully says to the man in the garden, “There was a body in this tomb. If you took it out for some reason just tell me and I will go get it, and we won’t say any more about it.”
But the man in the garden turns around and names her. “Mary,” is all he says.
The text then says that she “turned.” She has already turned away from the angels in the tomb, but apparently she keeps on turning, which reminds me that the Hebrew word for turn is shuv, which also means repent. Not only is she literally turning her body, but she is also turning into someone else. She’s turning from a soul still in darkness and expecting death, to her true self in the light, able to see what is really here. And she keeps turning, she keeps changing, she undergoes this metamorphosis, which involves growing new eyes, and finally she responds, “Rabbouni!” It is a word which means much more than “beloved teacher.” It means super, ultimate, great, extreme, and awesome teacher or rabbi. It means supreme teacher, virtually identical with God!
Our response to Christ’s taking away of our separation, alienation, enmity, and the consequent fear, has to be a continual repentance, a constant turning to the truth and away from falsehood and lies, violence and retribution. Repentance is not something we do once and then proceed as if we have been permanently readjusted. No. It is more like a continual practice that gradually opens us up to the truth. We have to keep turning, we have to keep cultivating the new mind that Jesus reveals within us. Our need to turn to God never stops in this life, and if we do stop turning we quickly fall back into darkness, like the way on a bicycle you fall over if the wheels stop turning.
The life of repentance is the life of discipleship, in which we live according to the justice, non-violence, generosity, equality, inclusion, openness, and love of the Lord Jesus, in which we gather in community with others sharing the same awareness and commitment. This is what is means to be alive.
IV.
Then Jesus says something even more remarkable. Mary, in her wonder and joy, is apparently about to embrace him when he tells her, “Do not hold on to me,” because he has not yet ascended. He instructs Mary not to grasp him in any form short of his original/ final ungraspable, spiritual, wild, everywhere form with and in God.
This may disturb us because we often think that “holding on to Jesus” is what faith is all about. And on some level it is. But Jesus is here saying that trusting him is more about not holding on to him, especially in his historical, mortal form, and letting him go.
Faith is about releasing Jesus Christ, in the form of our testimony about him, into the world. Faith is about trusting in him and witnessing to him. Faith is about letting him flow and shine through us into all of life, by our keeping of his commandments, which are all about love. But any Jesus we can hold onto, any Jesus we can define, own, master, control, or even fully grasp in our own minds, is not the real and true Jesus Christ. To hold on to him is in effect to keep him in the tomb, dead, inert, unchanging, and domesticated, like a figure in a diorama in a museum, subject to the arranging of the curator.
Instead of holding on to him, cherishing this beautiful moment in the garden, kind of like how Peter wanted to memorialize the Transfiguration, or even like the hymn so many of us love, Mary is instructed to “go.” She is sent. Mary is “the apostle to the apostles.” She is to testify to them what she has experienced of the risen Lord.
Jesus refers to the disciples as “my brothers.” Earlier he calls them his “friends.” Mary is to go and tell them that Jesus is ascending to “my Father and your Father, my God an your God.” In other words, Jesus announces a new familial relationship in which all are siblings together, equals in the household of one common Father and God. It is as if Jesus says, “Don’t hold on to me; but in my name hold on to each other. You’re going to need each other. You’re going to need community. The new life cannot be lived in isolation. I have called you into a new birth into a new family.”
V.
Mary goes and reports to the apostles that she has “seen the Lord!” Not the dead, domesticated, doctrinally defined, historical body of Jesus, but the living, wild, uncontrolled, Presence of the Christ, the Word of the Father, the Wisdom of God, the Light of the World. He is ungraspable; not even a tomb can hold him!
And because of him, no tomb can hold us either. He shows us our true selves, our true humanity. The empty tomb is not our future, it is not there waiting for us. The tomb, the grave, is not our destiny. Rather, Jesus Christ shows us that our empty tomb is in our past; it is the existence we have been called out of when he calls our name and calls us into his new community.
In Jesus Christ, the Creator calls us out of our blindness, our brokenness, our alienation, anxiety, and even our death. God takes all this away, revealing our true selves, and then draws us into union, peace, blessing, and hope. This is the message of this Day of Resurrection, that in Jesus Christ we are all gathered in from death to life eternal, and sent out with this good news to all the world.
+++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment