By Sam Adams
Text: John 20.1-18
Easter Sunday is a day for rejoicing, of being reminded of the glory that is the empty tomb. It is the day when the church enters into her joy, fully embracing the greatness and the promise that lies at the heart of the Christian faith. Easter is the celebration above all celebrations. If Advent and Christmas have a dark side it is the anticipation of the cross. But Easter is our celebration where we see clearly with John that, “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.”
But for us, for those of us on this side of the grave, Easter never comes without the hard reality of Good Friday. The grave lies before us—each one of us--and so the church keeps remembering the cross; with every celebration of communion we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. We are an honest church. At Easter, the “until he comes” takes center stage: Easter is that celebration of what his coming is like.
Yet, in the mundane everyday reality of life, the rule of death is everywhere. We deal with sickness, we deal with pain. Loss of friendships, of friends; loss of family members, and the stark reality that the light of life finally and definitely is snuffed out by the darkness of death.
The world is full of the rule of death. In my occasional job as professor of theology and social justice I am confronted with profound stories of injustice…an unexpected downside of the job. I have spent significant amounts of time with students discussing the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, Apartheid in South Africa, the Israel/Palestinian conflict, Lynching in the American South, the horrors of the slave trade, and the racism and hubris of colonialism.
As I teach theology I am constantly aware of the fact that for the Christian faith, theology is good news. But good news is always proclaimed in a world that is locked in a bitter struggle with death—and death appears to have the upper hand. (I listened to an interview this week with two grown sons of well-known Christian leaders. One kept his faith, the other is now a humanist chaplain. The latter spent years working in an inner city and over years of praying for change and not seeing it, finally lost faith in God.)
In our text from John this Easter, we begin reading in the midst of an unfolding story, one that narrates the harsh reality of the world closing in on the disciples.
From the seeming hopefulness of the triumphal entry, the disciples were quickly pulled in to a very strange week. The buildup of anticipation must have been exciting as they made the historic pilgrimage to Jerusalem— this time with the Messiah! What a marvelously hopeful event—even if it was a little ambiguous what this would all mean—the ambiguity would all be resolved in Jerusalem, right? It would all work out.
Then, in Jerusalem, no one meets them at the temple. Jesus has to drive out the money changers and by doing this he gets attention, but not the right kind of attention.
The week progresses. Mary Magdalene spends a fortune anointing him—and he claims it’s for his burial! Judas Betrays him. He is arrested, then tortured, mocked and finally brought outside of the city and crucified. A cursed death. Not the death of the Messiah. There was no way to spin this. He confronted the empire, the religious leaders, and was simply overwhelmed. Peter—the ‘rock’—denies him in the midst of all this. His friends abandon him.
Most surely in all this we see a failure of hope. Not that the disciples didn’t have hope, but hope itself was powerless to change the situation. The disciples didn’t fail to have hope, hope failed the disciples.
Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair.
Here they were, at table with the one whom Jesus had raise from the dead! Talk about hope!
The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
Here we can only imagine that Mary’s hope in the Messiah must have been shaken…no matter how much she or the other disciples hope in him, it still turns out he is on his way to his own burial.
In this next episode, we see Peter, the one who is the rock of the church, the one who models faithfulness, who jumped out of the boat to meet Jesus walking on the water; we see with Peter how faith fails him at the moment of trial.
Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus. Since that disciple was known to the high priest, he went with Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest, but Peter was standing outside at the gate. So the other disciple, who was known to the high priest, went out, spoke to the woman who guarded the gate, and brought Peter in. The woman said to Peter, “You are not also one of this man’s disciples, are you?” He said, “I am not.” Now the slaves and the police had made a charcoal fire because it was cold, and they were standing around it and warming themselves. Peter also was standing with them and warming himself.
Now Simon Peter was standing and warming himself. They asked him, “You are not also one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.” One of the slaves of the high priest, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had cut off, asked, “Did I not see you in the garden with him?” Again Peter denied it, and at that moment the cock crowed.
Peter’s faith failed him.
And Mary, even her love for Jesus is powerless to overcome the power of death. Love fails in the darkness of the tomb.
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him."
Mary clearly loved Jesus. But no matter how much love she had, it didn’t do any good.
Faith, hope, love…none of these will get us very far in the harsh reality of life on earth. The world still closes in. Darkness comes. We learn in all this that we are powerless. We learn it again and again and again.
Yet we are often told that we need to have faith, we need to have hope, we need to have love. These are the cardinal virtues. And our religious work, our spiritual work is directed at making us more loving, more hopeful, more faithful. Yet all the love in the world, all the hope, all the faith…none of it would bring Jesus back from the dead. The darkness in our lives, like the darkness of that Friday so long ago, closes in and proves us powerless in the end.
Those old theories that some came up with regarding the resurrection, that Jesus’ resurrection was simply the wishful thinking of the disciples…a kind of mystical experience brought about by the gathering together of the disciples so that he ‘appeared’ among them…this is exactly not what the disciples experienced. Their hope, their love, their faith turned out to be completely powerless at the precise time when they needed it the most. And so it might be necessary at times to preach a sermon against faith, hope, and love.
Darkness closed in on the disciples. It overwhelmed them, settling in. It settled in for Saturday. I saw a painting of four disciples on holy Saturday sitting down, the cross in the background, and the caption to the painting read, “waiting.” Right. No one was waiting on Saturday. There was no waiting. What would they have been waiting for? Waiting implies hope, implies a change is coming. Jesus was dead. And nothing they could have done would have made a difference…no hope, no faith, no love.
But then. But then there was Sunday morning. John tells us that Mary went to the tomb while it was still dark. In that darkness of crushed hopes, a light pierced through that morning as Mary went to the tomb. She didn’t know what had happened. The hopelessness turned to accusation as she assumes that those responsible for Jesus’ death had stolen the body. Peter and John hear the news and go running on ahead to the tomb… We are told that John believed, but that they still didn’t understand what had happened.
Peter and John leave. Mary must have followed them, for there she is, left alone, and she is weeping. For some reason she bends down to look inside and there are two angels in white and they asked her why she is weeping. Her response, I can only imagine, is choked through with tears, hollow but perhaps stunned by the presence of the angels: She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” She then turns and sees Jesus, but again, she does not recognize him.
Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
Again, Mary does not see what is happening. All the faith, all the hope, all the love in the world will not make the dead rise; death will not be defeated by us.
But then, Jesus said to her, “Mary!”
Jesus speaks. In his words the darkness is broken open and the light comes flooding in.
She turned and said to him, “Rabbi!”
Her eyes are opened! Not by her, not by her effort or virtue, not by her character or her particular faithfulness, but by Jesus. Jesus opens her eyes. His words pierce the darkness.
It is not us who raised Jesus, but God who raised Jesus from the dead.
It is from the side of heaven that heaven breaks through and death is defeated. In this breaking-in, this irruption of heaven into earth, the faith, the hope, and the love of God find their proper place. In the darkness of despair, in the surety and the finality of death, in the impotence of human efforts to secure a hopeful future, the faithfulness of God breaks in and light floods into the place where once there was only the manufactured promise of a dimly lit—because humanly determined—future.
Jesus said to her, “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.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
Faith, hope, and love. The mystery of these ‘virtues’ in the Christian life are grounded here, in the resurrection, in the witness of Mary to the risen Lord. These come back to the disciples, not as human virtues, but as gifts of God, grounded in the priority of God’s action, grounded in the finality of life, the life of the God who raised Jesus from the dead, the God who created the world out of nothing, the God who took the forsakenness of human existence into himself, and transformed it into a new possibility in Him.
Faith is our confidence in the faithfulness of God, proven in the resurrection.
Hope is grounded not in our feeble imaginings, but in the hope that even in the face of the darkness of Saturday, sorrow is turned into a hopeful waiting, a waiting made hopeful by the God who raised Jesus from the dead.
And finally, love. Love is re-grounded by the resurrection: not that we loved God, but that he loved us!
And in the gift that is God’s great reversal, he enlists Mary, of all people, to bring the good news to the disciples, the ones who are called to bring the good news. She becomes the preacher to the preachers. And this initiates the beginning of the great news of the church, the joy that is Easter, that in the resurrection of Jesus, in the loving faithfulness of God, the powerless are made powerful, the weak are made strong, and death is not the final word.
“What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”