Risen Here and Now!

John 20:1-18.

The Resurrection of the Lord

March 27, 2016

I.

It is still dark when Mary comes to the tomb.  That little fact itself tells much of the story.  She represents us, still smothered in darkness, still sleepwalking through existence, still expecting the usual, logical, conventional things to happen.  “Walking to a tomb in darkness” is a pretty good, boiled-down metaphor for the several decades most of us get to spend on this planet.  

In our normal, personality-driven, ego-centric existence, this is what we call “life” amounts to.  We think we’re alive and free, growing, learning, making things, and so forth, but we are really more like sleepwalkers, stumbling aimlessly around, crashing into each other.  The picture of people today walking along the sidewalk with their noses buried down in their phones kind of sums up this rendition of human existence.  Each person consumed by a small bubble of self-referential attention, barely looking up to see where they really are or what is really going on.

Mary is taking our walk.  She is fraught with anxiety and grief, bitterly conscious of having lost her friend to what was basically a lynch-mob two days before.  We too are aware of past losses that color our time here, and future liabilities against which we have to provide.  

Yes, we do have joys, pleasures, accomplishments, and satisfactions in this life.  But here we are dealing with someone under extreme stress, in deep crisis.  Because of the terrible events of the previous Friday, Mary is in a destabilized, disoriented, even disintegrated  state.  It is in this condition that we are most open and most ready to receive and enter into something new.  It feels like our life is coming apart; but in reality it just may be about to come together in a new way.

The dead body of Jesus had been taken two nights before from the execution site to a nearby tomb by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, two establishment guys who secretly followed Jesus, and who must have figured it was the least they could do.  They had his body slathered with a paste of spices and wrapped in linen strips of cloth, which made it like a kind of mummy, or, more to my point, a cocoon or chrysalis.  And they sealed it up inside the tomb with a big rock. 

In the natural process called metamorphosis, a caterpillar surrounds itself with a chrysalis, and while inside basically comes apart and disintegrates.  Were we to open up a chrysalis, I am told that we would not find a caterpillar just sprouting wings, but a dissociated mess of goo.  The caterpillar is disassembled and then reassembled into the new thing it is encoded and designated to become: a butterfly.

My point is that it is with Jesus, wrapped up in death, and Mary in her distraught, anxious, stressed out, depressed, grief-stricken, utterly lost state, the ground is cleared for something new to happen.  When we are most disintegrated; when our old self has failed to hold together and, in effect, died; when the normal, usual, standard, familiar forms and habits of our existence completely come apart… that is when something new can start to be born.

II.

Mary sees that the stone at the mouth of the tomb has been removed.  This is the first departure from normalcy, the first inkling or hint that something new and different might be happening.  Something out of the ordinary.  Something that doesn’t completely compute.  Something that strikes us as odd or weird.  The normal rhythm and expected pattern has been broken.

We don’t always see these things.  Too often we only see what we expect to see, what we are prepared to see, what we have trained ourselves to see.  Something happens that doesn’t make any sense, and we don’t even let it register in our consciousness.  Or if it does, we try and cram it into our familiar patterns… which is what Mary does here.  She assumes that someone has stolen the body for some reason.  She assumes the worst.  On top of everything else, she is only prepared to see even worse things happening.  Under stress, in disintegration, this is our normal reaction.  It is a defense mechanism.  Assuming the worst means at least you won’t be disappointed after getting your hopes up… again.

That’s why she doesn’t actually look into the tomb; she doesn’t want it to be somehow even worse than she imagined.  Instead, she goes back and informs Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved, who then race to the tomb themselves.  When they get there they do go in and see the linen wrappings but no body.  Which makes no sense because the fabric had been plastered to the skin of the body and would not have been easily removed if someone wanted to remove it and why would even a grave robber want to do that?  So they shrug and go back home puzzled, although it does begin to dawn on the disciple whom Jesus loved that this might actually be a good thing.

This represents another response to an anomaly.  We just kind of file it away under “miscellaneous weird stuff” and go on with our lives.  Maybe we wait until the rational explanation presents itself.  But we certainly don’t stay with the tension, confusion, pain, fear, and anxiety.  It is not a comfortable place to be.

But Mary stays there, in tears.  It kind of reminds me of one of my favorite illustrative tools, those Magic Eye pictures, where if you stare at the shapes and colors long enough a 3-dimensional image resolves out of it.  But you have to have the patience to keep at it; you have to stay with it.  

This is what Mary does here.  She looks in the tomb again, and this time sees two angels that weren’t there before.  Or at least the men couldn’t see them.  But now she sees them, one at the head and the other at the foot, of where the body had been.  Is she reminded of the golden statues of two angels in the Holy of Holies, with the Mercy Seat, the place of reconciliation and atonement between them?  Does that help her understand what is happening?

III.

She turns around back to the garden and sees someone.  She is still trying to squeeze this experience into the normal hypothesis, which is that somebody stole the body.  But you can tell she is holding on to this with decreasing energy and conviction.  Then the man whom she does not yet recognize calls her by name.  “Mary,” he says.

That is when the whole superstructure of her consciousness falls away and she realizes what is going on.  This is Jesus, who has moved on to a new kind of life.  She stops trying to hold it together.  Something releases in her and she is able to perceive differently; now she sees clearly what before was only a confused mess.  The dissociated mush inside the chrysalis crystalizes into a new and unexpected form.

She turns and says to him, “Rabbouni!” which means “exalted and beloved teacher!”  And suddenly we have before us what we read about in Genesis 3: a man and a woman in a garden.  Then it was the beginning of humanity.  Now it is the beginning of new humanity, true humanity, realized humanity.

In some sense Mary represents us.  All these Marys in the gospels may perhaps be taken as different dimensions and different manifestations of the human response to God, from the hymn sung by Jesus’ mother in Luke before his birth, to her inspiring him to make the water into wine, to the anointing of his body at Bethany before his death, to the 3 Marys who watch him die on the cross, to now: Mary of Magdala, the first one to see him resurrected, the first one to preach the good news, the one whom the church has therefore named “the Apostle to the Apostles.”

It is she who carries the message to the other disciples so they will know what to look for and they will also be able to experience the risen Christ when he appears among them.

When Jesus tells her, “Do not hold on to me,” does it not mean that his visible, tangible form now is of diminishing importance, and that it is his ascended, spiritual presence with and within the disciples, and indeed within everything that God breathes into being at the beginning, that now becomes the way we know him?  It is by finding his voice, and his love, here and now, that we know his living presence.  

Jesus will continue to appear to the disciples for a while.  And after that he will stay with them in spirit, which is the way he remains with us even today.  Blended with the experience of Mary, the risen Christ is born anew in us as we discover, in our own true humanity which we share with him, our point of contact with divinity itself.  Our holy and joyful task is to gather in his name and seek together to perceive his presence, his love, and his words, giving us our life today.  It is to share in his body and blood, and so in a very literal way become him, become his body in the world, become his people.  

IV.

The message of Christ’s resurrection is emphatically not just about something that happened 2000 years ago.  It is profoundly and powerfully about something that happens now, in our hearts, in our world.  It is about our realization of God’s life and light infusing everything, and our participation in this blessing by our living each day according to the love, peace, and justice God gives us in Jesus Christ.

This is happening now!  When we proclaim that “Christ is risen!” we are not pointing backward in history.  The verb is present tense!  We are pointing to something happening within us, among us, and around us.  We are speaking of our own experience or hope; we are expressing our conviction that it doesn't have to be this way, in this world of tragedy and violence, indeed, it isn’t this way at all, not really.  

When we say “Christ is risen!” we are opening ourselves and each other to a new possibility: that our existence is not a long walk in the dark to a tomb.  We may now turn around, with our backs to the tomb, and find waiting there in the garden of creation a partner in life, one who awakens us to our true selves, calling us by name, and sending us into the world with his spirit, God’s Spirit.

When we say “Christ is risen!” we know we are empowered and charged with a mission to show the world by our words and actions that he is risen in us.  That life is triumphant in us.  That death has been defeated, and love wins.  That the living God continues to bring good out of evil and light into darkness; that God continues to banish our fear and transfigure even death into eternal life, for all.

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