IT HAD TO BE TOLD

Easter Sunrise

            How sad when we don’t get something right.  How foolish we look to others when we don’t understand what everyone else understands.  When everyone else around you gets it, but you still don’t understand, it makes you look foolish.  It might happen as you enter a room.  The other people are talking, and you want to become involved.  As you listen, you pick up on the conversation.  So you start giving your own opinions about the subject.  The others look at you like you just dropped in from Mars.  They’re not talking about what you think they are at all.  Not even remotely close.  You feel your face flush.  You make a quick exit to try to recover your dignity.  It feels awful not to get it right.

            Well, Mary Magdalene had the same problem.  It was the Sunday after Jesus’ crucifixion.  She had come to visit his tomb.  His tomb was empty.  The first reaction you might expect on the part of Mary would be one of unbridled joy.  After all, might not Mary have been in the presence of Jesus when he spoke of himself as the good shepherd?  “The good shepherd,” he had said, “lays down his life for the sheep.”  And he said, “. . . I lay down my life for the sheep.”  Wouldn’t Mary have heard Jesus say, “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.  No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.  I have the power to lay it down, and I have the power to take it up again.”  What’s more, wouldn’t Mary have known about his conversation with Martha, the sister of Lazarus?  Before Jesus raised him from the dead, he said to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life.”  And didn’t Jesus tell his disciples, “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you”?  As he was about to leave his disciples by way of the cross, he told them, “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.  On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”  Didn’t any of these words register in Mary’s mind outside Jesus’ empty tomb?  No.  Instead, Mary was brought to tears.  She was confused.  When she looked at Jesus’ empty tomb, she misunderstood what had happened there.  She thought that someone had removed Jesus’ body.  How sad when you don’t get it right.

            You think resurrection would have been the first thing you would have thought of in Mary’s place?  Imagine that you were the one in charge of the burial of one of your relatives.  You were the one who made the arrangements.  You picked out the grave.  You ordered the headstone.  You took care of it all.  When the funeral was over, you saw that the casket was lowered in the gravesite that you had arranged for.  You knew where to return to see this relative’s final resting place.  One day, imagine, you do return to the grave of this relative.  When you do, you find the grave open and the casket removed.  You see nothing in the opened grave but black soil.  Your first reaction?  Ah, you see, it is much like Mary’s.  You don’t first think of a resurrection.  You think there is some ordinary explanation for what has happened here.  You think someone has come and taken your relative’s body away.  I’ll bet that would make you both confused and sad.  That is exactly the picture we have of Mary Magdalene on that first Easter morning, confused and sad.

            Of course, we who read the gospel get a couple of clues as to what happened.  We have the distance to remember those things Jesus said in the earlier pages of this gospel.  So the clues might help us understand what Mary could not.  Inside Jesus’ empty tomb were his linen wrappings.  Had Jesus’ body been stolen, those grave cloths would have gone along with the body.  There was no body, but there the grave cloths remained.  The theological explanation:  No one had taken Jesus’ body.  God has raised him up from the dead.  “I believe,” Wil Pounds wrote, “I believe Jesus passed miraculously through death into an altogether new sphere of existence.”  John R. W. Stott said, “[Jesus’ body] would have passed through grave clothes, as it was later to pass through closed doors, leaving them untouched and almost undisturbed.”  We can see that, for our eyes are not clouded with the tears of confusion at the sight of the empty tomb.  We know that they point to the reality that the one who laid down his life for the sheep has taken it up again.

            Still, what would it take to be sure that Jesus had risen from the dead?  How about him standing right there before you?  Anthony Bloom could tell you that’s what it took for him.  He came to faith by having an experience of the presence of the risen Lord.  His personal account is amazing.  It was while he was a youngster.  He was reading the Gospel of Mark in order to try to disprove it.  “While I was reading St. Mark’s gospel,” he said, “before I reached the third chapter, I became aware of a presence.  I saw nothing.  I heard nothing.  It was no hallucination.  It was a simple certainty that the Lord was standing there.”  He said, “This was my basic and essential meeting with the Lord.  From then I knew that Christ did exist.  I knew that he was thou, in other words that he was the Risen Christ.”  Anthony Bloom was given the grace to recognize the risen Lord Jesus without seeing him with the eye.  Mary Magdalene saw the risen Jesus with her own eyes!  There he was, standing right before her.  Would that be enough for you?  Imagine you had that powerful experience Anthony Bloom had, but imagine you did see something.  Rather, you saw someone.  What if you saw the risen Jesus with your own eyes?  Would that be enough for you to be sure that Jesus had risen from the dead?

            Too bad for Mary.  Here was another misunderstanding.  She thought the risen Lord was the gardener.  Too bad for her.  It was a case of mistaken identity.  There was a misunderstanding on her part.  She laid eyes on the risen Lord Jesus, but she didn’t recognize him.  He stood there, but she was ignorant of who he was.  There’s no reason for us to be hard on her.  The same kind of thing happens to us.  From time to time, I will see people I know from church in a different location.  When these folks came into the church, I routinely remembered them.  But, when I ran into the same people in a restaurant, I looked right at them, and my mind began searching through its files to try to identify these folks in this different setting.  Does that ever happen to you?  I remember years ago, when I was being trained as a hospital chaplain, I saw someone in my computer charting class who I knew I knew, but I couldn’t figure out where.  She looked so familiar.  During the break, I approached her.  She also thought I was familiar, but she couldn’t place me either.  We asked each other if we had been in this place or that.  Finally, I asked her if she had ever been to Summer Place Camp in Port Aransas, Texas.  She had!  Suddenly, we both recognized each other.  I was her camp director; and she was a camper now all grown up.  If we had seen each other at Summer Place, we would have recognized each other immediately.  But we were both out of place.  Mary wasn’t looking for Jesus in a cemetery.  Not alive, anyway.  Jesus was standing before her.  She was looking right at him.  But she didn’t recognize him.  It was a misunderstanding.

            Of course, not everyone has the same experience.  You may not have had the same experience as Mary or the same experience as Anthony Bloom.  But there is one way that Mary and the apostle Paul each knew that they had been in the presence of the risen Lord Jesus.  He called each one by name.  Did you hear that in our gospel reading?  Jesus called Mary by name.  That’s what it took for Mary to recognize him.  The risen Jesus called her by name.  What was it this same gospel said about Jesus, the good shepherd?  The good shepherd knows his own and his own know him.  He calls his own sheep by name and they respond to his voice.  Jesus said, “Mary.”  That was all she needed.  It was then that she recognized who he was.  The good shepherd knows his sheep by name, and the sheep know his voice.  The apostle Paul heard Jesus call him by name.  He was known as Saul, a persecutor of the Jesus movement.  He was on his way to arrest some Christians, when a light from heaven flashed around him.  He fell to the ground and heard a voice calling, “Saul, Saul.”  It called him by name.  “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”  Paul needed more assurance, so he asked, “Who are you, Lord?”  The risen Lord answered him, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”  Paul left his persecution of the church and became a part of it.  He began immediately to follow Jesus and serve him.  Why?  He was sure he had met the risen Lord.  Why?  The risen Lord called him by name.

            Well, when the risen Lord calls someone by name, that person can expect a big change in his or her life.  When the Lord calls you, it means you are going to be given a task to do.  I can’t think of any account of the risen Lord appearing to someone for the exclusive purpose of that person receiving a religious high for his or her personal enjoyment.  No.  When the risen Lord appears to someone, it is for the purpose of changing that person’s life and vocation.  For Paul, it was to follow instructions and begin to spread the good news.  When Mary saw the risen Lord this was also the moment when she received her commission from Jesus.  She would be the first one to proclaim the good news of Easter to the other disciples.  The risen Lord told Mary, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.  But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”  In the Gospel of John, the glorification of Jesus was one continuous event made up of three parts:  his being lifted up on the cross, his resurrection, and his ascension.  Mary’s task was to announce the completion of Jesus’ glorification, his resurrection and his ascension to the Father.  When Anthony Bloom had his experience, that was the beginning of his life as first a disciple of Christ and then as a church leader.  When the risen Lord comes to a person, you can expect a big change in that person’s life and vocation.

            Only one thing to do with such a commission:  You do as you were commanded.  No time to stand around this scene of first grief and then amazing joy when there is triumphant good news to tell.  What’s more, you can’t hold on to the old relationship with Jesus, the former earthly relationship now that Jesus has been risen from the dead.  The “local” Jesus, the one who walked in a certain location, will now, in the Spirit, be the “global” risen Lord, who is everywhere at the same time.  You can’t hold on to that old way of relating at Jesus.  So neither grief nor a prolonged celebration of joy is appropriate when commanded by the risen Lord to tell of his resurrection.  This is not a private matter of how one feels about Jesus being raised from the dead.  When Mary saw and heard from the risen Lord Jesus, it changed her life.  That was the moment the risen Lord commissioned her to tell what she had seen and heard.  That moment of commissioning was the beginning of a new life for her, for her fellow disciples, and for the whole world.  God raised up Jesus from the dead.  God has the power to raise us from death to life.  God has the power to transform us self-absorbed creatures into new beings who live new life.  This has to be told.  The moment when this new life begins is when one accepts the meaning of God raising Jesus from the dead.  It was to prove that Jesus’ life and death were God’s movement toward humanity in reconciling love.  So when the risen Lord appears to someone with a commission to be a witness to these things, the only fitting thing to do is obey.  After experiencing the presence of the risen Lord, Anthony Bloom became his lifelong servant.  After experiencing the risen Lord call him by name, the apostle Paul began to spread the good news.  And when Mary heard Jesus call her by name and commission her to speech and action, she became first to tell the good news.  She went to the other disciples and said to them, “I have seen the Lord.”  Good news like that had to be told.