Sermon Preached by Jon M. Walton

 

It was the women who stood by him to the end. The way John remembers it, it was the women who stood at the cross and watched him die on Friday, among them Mary Magdalene. Matthew, Mark, and Luke describe a group of women who went to the tomb on Easter morning, but in John’s version it is only Mary Magdalene who makes her way in the darkness before the dawn to visit his grave.

She comes empty handed, with no spices or ointments to anoint Jesus’ body. That had already been done on Good Friday when Nicodemus poured a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes on the body of Jesus, more than they keep in stock in the entire cosmetics counter at Bloomingdales! So a jar or two of salves and oils would have been coals to Newcastle considering what Nicodemus had already accomplished!

We can only assume it was grief and grief alone that brought Mary Magdalene there to the cemetery in the still dark hours of the dawn. I wonder if she had slept all night what with the nightmares still rolling in her mind of what had unfolded at the Place of the Skull. It was enough to make anyone lose sleep!

She had been up close and personal throughout the ordeal, standing at the foot of the cross, weeping and praying for his release, that the end might come sooner rather than later for him, even though letting go of him was the hardest thing she had ever done. Love’s final test, after all, is proved in the awkward contradiction of letting those whose time has come go away from us, to tenderly pass them from our loving arms, to the everlasting arms of God.

Accepting the necessity of that is one thing, but the loneliness of living without him, of letting him go in heart and mind was the harder project altogether.

She went to the cemetery early for the same reason we all go there, to make sure that it had really happened, to look once again at the stone, and the earth all around us, and the sky spread above us, and to weep, inconsolably.

I am so grateful that the gospels remember that part. That losing those we love is not easy, that for all the assurance of believing that they are with God, there is still the emptiness of knowing that they are not with us.

So she went to the garden alone. Grief takes you there, and so does love. To look into the yawning grave and make sure it is so.

Unlike our visits there, when she got to his tomb something was askew. The tomb was open and the stone had been rolled away. Without so much as looking inside, she ran to find Peter and John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, and begged them to come and see what had happened. She screamed her greatest fear… that they had stolen his body, whomever they were; the Romans, the Herodians, the Pharisees, the Temple Police, the usual suspects. They had hidden his body, whoever they were, she knew not where.

So Peter and John raced to the tomb to see for themselves. They knew the testimony of women to be unreliable, and if she had missed something they were sure they would find it. But when they got there, they found it as she had said it would be.

Peter looked in, but it was John who believed. And in what must be one of the greatest and most inexplicable understatements in all of scripture, the evangelist tells us “they returned to their homes.” Not to Easter brunch mind you, not to a celebration part, just back home again, because they really didn’t get it yet. Not yet.

Meanwhile, Mary Magdalene was sitting outside the tomb sobbing until she finally decided to look inside the tomb herself. When she did, she saw two angels sitting on the place where Jesus’ body had been laid.

They asked her what she was crying about. And I have to confess that if I were Mary Magdalene I would have wanted to slap their faces at that point. It seems a cruel hoax that these two fellows act like Dumb and Dumber on Easter morning and play with her head as they do, asking a really stupid question when they knew precisely what it was that was upsetting her. Nevertheless, they pose the question, “Woman, why are you weeping?” And Mary Magdalene, displaying more patience than I would have been able to summon, said, “They have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they’ve laid him.”

Right about that time Jesus appeared to Mary, except that she didn’t know it was him. She thought he was the gardener. And he, too, asked her why she was weeping. Once again she rehearsed the reason for her sadness, and then she said, “Tell me if you know where he is, and I will take his body away.”

What happens next is remarkable. In one of those moments when the scales fall away, and the mystery is revealed, like at the end of one of Shakespeare’s comedies when all the characters are unmasked, Jesus calls her by name. “Mary,” he says, with the same inflection of love and breath of tenderness with which he had spoken her name so many times before.

And in the hearing of her name, her grief turned to joy. She called to him, “Rabbouni,” which means teacher, and as she did, she knew that he was there with her in this place where she had gone expecting death and where now she found life.

What do you do when the joy of your joy is complete, when the ears of your ears are hearing, and the eyes of your eyes are seeing, as if for the first time? She did what any one of us would do. She reached out to embrace him, to take him in her arms and hold him once again, never to let him go.

But that was not to be. Jesus quickly backed away, “Do not hold on to me,” he said, “because I have not yet ascended to the Father.”

The time for holding on to him had passed. It was time for Jesus to return to God who gave him to us. I suppose that’s why John remembers that Mary calls Jesus, Rabbouni, teacher, because now he will teach her what God requires. And as he teaches her, he teaches all of us what it is that we must do to respond to God in the light of resurrection faith.

It’s interesting to note that Mary is forbidden to touch Jesus, while Thomas is invited to do the opposite, to touch the imprint of the nails in Jesus’ hands.

But the response of Jesus is calculated in each case. Thomas is invited to touch because he doubts. Mary is forbidden to touch because she believes. Thomas will not embrace even though he is invited to do so. Mary is ready to embrace and so is forbidden the same. In the end, Thomas believes without touching, which is what Mary is asked to do as well.

Mary is forbidden to touch him because she wanted the old Jesus back, the man she had loved, the man with whom she had traveled the trails of Galilee, the man she loved so deeply, he who prayed more eloquently than any rabbi she had ever heard, he who had lived more fully than any man she had ever known, he who died more courageously than any human being she had ever met.

His teaching, his sincerity, his authenticity, his courageous tenacity were all traits she wanted as her own. So of course, she wanted to hold onto him. Of course, she wanted to freeze that moment and save it forever. She never wanted to let him go. She wanted to take every memory of him press them into the pages of her diary like the petals of a small flower kept as a keepsake forever.

“Do not hold on to me,” he said. Because he knew what she wanted, and he couldn’t go back. He couldn’t undo what had been done. Everything had changed, and Mary must change too, in light of what had happened to him on this resurrection day.

That’s the challenge that the resurrection presents to all of us. It demands that we no longer live in the old way of thinking but that we live with a new reality in our midst, a reality about which we are still learning and the implications of which are still being revealed.

One runs the risk of trivializing a profoundly sad and private agony in commenting on the news that has riveted the news media this past week. But Jesus’ words to Mary, “Do not hold onto me,” seem strangely relevant in the situation of Terri Shiavo whose parents have held so dearly to the hope that some day their daughter might revive and be well again, that all along over these past fifteen years, while she has not been able to communicate with them, they are sure that they have communicated with her. I learned a long time ago that one should never rob another person of their hope. It may be the last thing they have.

Some of you, here, have had to make difficult decisions about whether a loved one should be coded, or revived, or sustained on life supports. Some of us here have given advanced directives on what to do in such a situation should it happen to us.

Suffice it to say that in any such complicated matter, a single comment of guidance is insufficient, yet even so, there comes a time for each of us when the inevitable end of life must be accepted and we, and those who love us, must acknowledge with as much grace as we can muster, the truth that quality-of-life counts for something, and vital signs, and self conscious awareness, and responsiveness to the world around us are about all we have to measure that. I pray that none of us has to live or die or make decisions about those we love with as much scrutiny and criticism to add to our pain as has Terri Shiavo’s husband and her parents.

We are, all of us, still stumbling in the dark much of the time, as did Mary on Easter morning, trying to make our way to the cemetery in the darkness before the dawn, not yet discerning all that the resurrection will mean for us.

“Do not hold on to me,” he tells her. And of course it’s the hardest thing in the world that he asks her to do. Because it’s all she wants… to hold on to him. To have things the way they were once again. To revive the old memories and live them as if they were still present in the moment.

Anyone who has grieved, or who grieves, knows that it’s not just the dying that’s hard; the going-on has its moments too. All you want for the longest time is to hold on to what is gone.

Every ashtray seems to conjure a memory. Every photograph represents a journey to the heart. Every old valentine, and birthday card, and Christmas ornament seems to open the floodgate of memory and, without notice, the thoughts rush in like a tsunami hitting the coastline of our emotions, sweeping us away.

“Do not hold on to me,” he tells her, and in time she will learn to let go. That the memories, treasured as they are, are not enough. She must live into a future of God’s making, trusting that God will meet her on the way.

We all of us hold onto the past and treasure the way things were. We want to remember the kids when they were little and loved nothing better than to sit in our lap and let us read The Cat in the Hat, and The Velveteen Rabbit to them. Now, of course, as teenagers, there is nothing more gross on earth for them than the thought of a good-bye kiss before they go to school in the morning.

We remember the days when our body had better tone, less sag here, less flop there, and you could wake up in the morning and get out of bed, and nothing creaked or groaned or ached at all. But now, what with the schedule at work and the travel and the kids up in the middle of the night and the relentless tyranny of tomorrow, we’re not what we used to be, and the stranger that stares back in the mirror is not the same young Turk we used to meet there in front of the glass every morning.

I feel it most, these days, in my anxiety about the future, and where we’re going as a nation and why, and whether we’ll all get there together. I want to go back and hold onto something that is no longer there.

I wish the war had never happened. The wars in fact. Viet Nam, Granada, Bosnia, Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq. I worry about North Korea and Iran and just about all of the Middle East, the West Bank, the Wall, the terrorists, and what we may do next to act on our fears as a nation. I wish Abu Grahib had never happened. And I wish 9/11 had never occurred, and I still want to turn the clock back sometimes to that first morning when I arrived in New York, naïve. But I can’t.

I think about the church. The Presbyterian Church tearing itself apart over ordination issues, and divestment in Israel, and decreasing membership (not here at First where we can hardly keep up with the growth, but around the country where nobody really wants to be a Presbyterian anymore, not in their right mind, anyway) and I want the old days to come back, the good old days when we were a huge denomination and people wanted to be Presbyterian and you could walk into church and just about see Jesus all the time, because things were so good, even though they never really were that good.

I want to go back, because sometimes the future looks too scary. And I’m afraid of who’s in charge. And then I think of who’s really in charge, which is what this day is all about, if you think about it. Especially if you think about it.

“Do not hold on to me” he says. And what he wants is hard for me to accept; that he will teach me, that he will teach us, Rabbouni, our Rabbi, our Teacher will teach us what we need to know. He will show us what we need to see. He will go with us where we need to go because he’s been there before, and he will go there again, if only we will let our demands of him to conform to the past… go. “Do not hold on to me,” he says for our own good, more than his.

The resurrection that we remember today is not simply one man’s triumph over the grave, but the victory of God over all that would deny God’s power in the world, war, hunger, poverty, ignorance, terror, even death itself. God will meet us in what is yet to be, in the same way that God has met us in what has been. Ours is not to live in the past, but to go forth into the future confident that nothing, not even death itself can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And because of that, those of you who have come looking for hope, there is good news today. Those of you who believe that swords will be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, there is good news today. Those of you who are living with AIDS or Alzheimer’s or fighting Lymphoma or struggling with mental illness, there is good news today. Those of you who are young and who are anxious about where your life will lead you, there is good news today. Those of you, in the latter part of life, thinking of what you have accomplished, grateful for the blessings you have received, there is good news today.

God has turned the darkness of the night into the dawning of the new day. The worst that the world can do has been trumped by the best that God can do. Nothing now can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, not even death itself.

So here is the news you have been waiting to hear, a secret that Gardeners and angels bear, “The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed. Hallelujah.”

 

© Copyright Jon M. Walton, 2005.