April 12, 2009    John 20:1-18

    The young hero in John Irving’s book A Prayer for Owen Meany recounts growing up with a diminutive and provocative boy named Owen Meany.  One incident which particularly stands out in his mind is sitting in church with Owen every Easter and hearing the story of the empty tomb as it is recorded in the Gospel of John.  He says, “I remember what Owen used to say about that passage; every Easter, he would lean against me in the pew and whisper into my ear.  ‘THIS IS THE PART THAT ALWAYS GIVES ME THE SHIVERS.’”

    I suspect that for many of us there is a degree of existential anxiety that comes with Easter - maybe to the point of even giving us the shivers.  Every year as we approach Easter the major news magazines seem to run articles, dealing with the subject of resurrection.  This year there was an article in Newsweek called “God’s Miraculous Makeover” which reflected this ongoing fascination and pointed to some of the current arguments, affirmations, and rebuttals that have recently emerged around the subject.  While 80% of Americans believe they will go to heaven when they die, the article says, there is no consensus about what that means.  And so Jewish scholars, Christian scholars, conservatives and progressives continue to wrestle with one of the great mysteries of the church. 

In his first letter to the church in Corinth Paul says quite explicitly that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day, and that he appeared to Cephas, to the twelve, to many others, and to Paul himself.  Paul goes on to say that if Christ is not raised from the dead, then our preaching and our faith are in vain.  This is what I call spelling the resurrection with a capital “R.”   Walter Wink, the popular professor of biblical interpretation at Auburn Seminary, (along with a large cadre of other scholars) says “the resurrection is not a fact to be believed, but an experience to be shared . . . not a contract for a time-share apartment in heaven . . . [but] the spirit of Jesus present in people . . .”   A colleague of mine defines resurrection as the experience of renewed energy, joy, and love in the midst of the challenges of everyday life.  That is what I call spelling resurrection with a small “r.”   So which is it?  How should we spell “resurrection”?

    While theological wrestling can be exciting and stimulating, I’m afraid that it  will never settle the mystery of the resurrection.  It seems to me that it is another one of those both/and things that are part and parcel of Christianity.  Just as God is BOTH one AND Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; just as Jesus is BOTH human AND divine; just as the Kingdom of God is BOTH now AND later; just as reconciliation has BOTH been realized in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ AND yet remains to be fully accomplished; so it seems that resurrection is BOTH the bodily resurrection of Jesus along with the promise of our resurrection AND the spirit of the resurrected Christ among us today.  

    In the still, early hours before dawn when all is dark and the earth is asleep, Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb, her vision blurred by the dimness of the early hour and by her tears.  She is in mourning, and maybe she expects a private moment to feel her grief and say her good-byes.  But to her dismay someone has rolled the stone away, and the body has disappeared.  Her immediate conclusion is that someone has stolen it.  If the tomb is empty, the only explanation could be that someone has robbed the grave!   She reacts with a mixture of agitation, almost panic, and utmost urgency.  And she instinctively runs to Peter and the “other disciple,” saying, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have laid him!”  

    Do we, too, come to the tomb on Easter morning with our vision blurred, our sight unclear, our expectations low?  There indeed is much that would keep us in the dark shadows of Easter morning, hovering around the tomb with the expectation of nothing more than a corpse.  Someone dear to us takes his own life.   Children go hungry and homeless.  Missiles kill in Pakistan; missiles kill in Kandahar; a new insurgency kills in Iraq.  Gangs infect the internet with worms and lethal viruses.  Disease takes its toll.  Yes, there indeed is much in our culture and world today that would keep us in the dark shadows of Easter morning, hovering around the tomb with the expectation of nothing more than a corpse.

    Mary announces her alarm to Peter and the “other disciple,” who then themselves come running to the tomb.   They want to see for themselves.  They both, in turn, look inside the tomb and they, too, see that the linen wrappings are lying there but that there is no body.  It is, however, the “other disciple” that the gospel says, “saw and believed.”   In this passage there is a wonderful play on the various Greek verbs for “to see,” and by the time the “other disciple” looks into the tomb and “sees,” while he may not yet be thinking “resurrection” in the full sense of that word, he sees and understands that Jesus has triumphed over death.  

    Do we come with our skepticism and doubt, wanting to see the evidence for ourselves?  Do we come to the tomb, see the evidence, and shrug, saying, “Yes, I guess you’re right.  Someone has taken the body elsewhere”?  Or do we come with the eyes of the “other disciple”?  Do you look in and see the linen wrappings and the cloth from Jesus’ head, and then believe - believe not just that the corpse has been stolen but that death has been conquered, that, as Paul says,  “Death has been swallowed up in victory”?

    Virgil Cruz, who used to teach at Louisville Seminary, told a story about going to visit his uncle in upstate New York - his uncle being a person of great faith, someone who has seen and believed and knows that Jesus has conquered death.  For 55 years his uncle lived next door to a man named Jim.  They knew each other very well.  But one day Jim starting acting very strange and was afraid to be alone.  That seemed natural enough.  Perhaps he was afraid of falling and hurting himself.  But, no, Jim was not afraid of falling; he was afraid of dying.  “How could Jim be afraid of dying?” Virgil’s uncle asked.  “How could he be afraid?  When we die, we will be united with Jesus and with the communion of saints.  It will be wonderful.  How could he be afraid?”  His uncle then took Virgil to the family cemetery plot and said he wanted to be placed right there next to his mother.  Then he said there were still ten places left, and he asked Virgil if he would like to choose his plot.  Virgil said he can imagine his uncle at his death saying, “Death where is thy sting?  Where is thy victory?”

    After Peter and the beloved disciple return to their homes, Mary Magdalene remains at the site of the tomb and cries, mourning not only the death of a beloved friend but mourning the desecration of his burial site.  She decides to look once more, and this time she sees two angels in white where the body of Jesus has been lying.  Still blinded by her tears, however, and blinded by her own limited expectations, she sees, yes, but still does not understand - does not understand that Jesus’ body has not, after all, been stolen, but rather in his death a new age has broken in and established the victory of life over death!

    Jesus himself then appears to Mary, but her presumptions blind her again.  She sees what she expects to see - a gardener - and still insists that the body has been laid elsewhere.   Yet . . . when Jesus calls her by name - “Mary!” - then her eyes are opened, and she truly sees and understands.   When she returns again to the disciples, she can now say, “I have seen the Lord.”  Again there is a play on the various words for the verb “to see.”  The form used here is not simply one of visual observation.  This is not just recognition that something more than meets the eye is going on here.  This is sight accompanied by faith which results in revelation and enlightenment.  “I have seen the Lord!”  she proclaims, and as such Mary Magdalene is the first witness to Resurrection spelled with a capital “R.”

    We know, however, that Jesus has proclaimed that , “Lo, I will be with you always.”   Jesus promises to send the Holy Spirit that the Spirit of truth and love and righteousness might be present with us now.

    In his most recent book Izzy and Lenore, bestselling author Jon Katz writes a moving account of hospice work he and his dog Izzy have done.   As Katz and Izzy visited the bedsides of many people very near death, he felt himself transported into a space that was beyond his comprehension, and he was especially awed by the sensitivity of his dog who seemed in touch with something beyond.  Katz says, “At times something so palpable passed between Izzy and these people that it awed . . . me . . .  These were humbling moments, spiritual, beyond my experience or comprehension.  Several times I felt I was in the presence of something much mightier than the two of us . . . I seek to be a spiritual man, but I’m not deeply or conventionally religious.  I was born a Jew; I became a Quaker; I wear the cross.  I don’t know, really, what I am, in terms of labels.  But going into those houses, seeing people moving swiftly toward the end of their lives, I had no trouble feeling and believing in a meaning greater than Izzy or me, or any of us.”  In the mysterious sensitivity of a dog, in the friendship patients would share with Katz as their days were drawing to a close, in the privilege of being welcomed into the lives of these hospice patients, in the depth of the relationships formed within a very short time . . . Katz and his dog experienced the presence of the risen Christ.

    Jesus also enters the world in every expression of love.  I have known the presence of the risen Christ is the generosity of friends, in the embrace of a loved one, in the smile of a child, in the joy of laughter, in the melody of music, in the beauty of nature, in the kindness of a homeless child.  NBC Nightly News has been running a series on acts of kindness to counter all the pain on which they must report.  Last Sunday, Maryanne Tranter witnessed to the grace of God in the most unlikely places as she told us about the work she and other nurses did in the dumps of Honduras where the poorest of the poor live.  In a thousand ways every day Christ enters this world and our lives. 

    But as I close, I want to draw your attention to the poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter”  by John Updike, which is in your bulletin.  I’ve shared it with you before, and I share it with you again.

    Make no mistake: if He rose at all
    it was as His body:
    if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
        reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
    the Church will fall.

    It was not as the flowers,
    each soft Spring recurrent;
    it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of
        the eleven apostles;
    it was as His flesh: ours.

    The same hinged thumbs and toes,
    the same valved heart
    that - pierced - died, withered, decayed, and then regathered
        out of His Father’s might
    new strength to enclose.

    Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping
        transcendence;
    making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
        credulity of earlier ages;
    let us walk through the door.

    The stone rolled back, not papier-maché,
    not a stone in a story,
    but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time
    will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.
       
    And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
    make it a real angel,
    weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
        in the dawn light,
    robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.

    Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
    for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
    lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
        by the miracle,
    and crushed by remonstrance.


Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!