Notes from a Sojourn
April 12, 2020
Easter Day
Easter Day
Sermon for Easter Day, Year A (John 20.1-18)
Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
This is the strangest Easter I have ever celebrated. I suspect that’s true for most of us. Isolation, disorientation, apprehension, sorrow and grief. These are descriptors of our experience in the global pandemic we are living through right now.
The physical distance we are forced to put between one another right now is disorienting – its runs against some of our most basic human needs and instincts; the deluge of daily briefings, projection models, and global commentary generates enormous apprehension; the personal stories of human suffering – our friends, spouses, partners, parishioners, and families – move us to sorrow and grieve.
Historically, our present moment is far removed from the first century , but I can’t help but wonder if we are not emotionally closer to the disorientation and grief of that first Easter morning than we’ve ever been before.
As I see it today, the good news for me and you this Easter Day may be that the darkness of isolation, disorientation, fear, and grief is exactly the place where the Risen Lord first appears.
Next Sunday, we will hear about the resurrected Jesus appearing to his disciples in the darkness of evening – Easter Day evening – when the disciples have hidden themselves behind locked doors. They’ve self-isolated in a house, fearful for their own lives. The resurrected Christ meets them there.
The Sunday after that, we will hear about the resurrected Jesus drawing alongside two sorrowing and disoriented companions on the road to Emmaus. These two disciples are disheartened – their hopes shattered by the experience of watching their friend Jesus suffocate to death on a Roman cross. The resurrected Christ meets them there.
This Sunday, we hear about Jesus’ first resurrection appearance, to his friend and disciple Mary Magdalene, who goes with her companions to his tomb “while it was still dark,” John’s Gospel says. In John’s Gospel, the darkness he is referring to begins the moment Judas leaves the Upper Room to betray Jesus. Mary and her friends are going to the tomb under that same darkness – the darkness of Gethsemane and Golgotha. The resurrected Christ meets her there.
Let’s recapture the scene.
Mary is dumbfounded when she looks for a second time into the tomb and sees two angelic messengers sitting where Jesus body had been laid. They ask her why she is weeping and with tearful eyes she tells them that “They” (the situation beyond her control - Romans soldiers, religious leaders, thieves?) have taken away her Lord. She does not know where he is anymore.
The next moment she turns from them to continue her panicked search and she is startled by the presence of yet another person. Who is this? The gardener? This person asks, “Why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” She pleads the stranger to tell her where her Lord is, where she can find him. And into her panic and grief, the stranger speaks her name, “Mary!” She looks at this person again and in a beautiful moment of recognition cries out loud “Teacher!” Jesus then sends her as the messenger to the others – an apostle – to testify “I have seen the Lord.” And she tells them everything that happened to her.
There’s an important dimension of this scene that means a lot to me right now.
Mary’s mistaken identification of Jesus as the gardener reveals something important about the resurrected Jesus: he has been transformed and can no longer be recongized merely by sight.[1] It’s only when Jesus speaks her name, “Mary!”, that she recognizes him. Only when she hears the word of the Lord spoken to her does she see the Risen Christ standing with her. Her name is the word and his resurrected body the sign: that is enough for her to go and tell everyone, “I have seen the Lord.”
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Hearing the word and seeing signs is the way all of us come to believe that Christ is risen.[2] As a Christian community, St. Lawrence Parish tries to do it’s part to proclaim “the word of the Lord” for this time and in this place. We are called to be hearers and doers of that Word so that people from Ingleside to Bainsville hear the Lord speaking their name through us, calling them to see God’s living presence with them and at work in their lives.
And normally, as a community that participates in the Lord’s Supper regularly, we offer signs – bread and wine – of the Risen Christ’s presence in our midst. But in this extraordinary time of global pandemic, when we are forced to keep physical distance from one another, we are fasting from those particular signs until we are able to all share in them again.
But bread and wine are not the only signs of Christ’s Risen Life in ours.
As we make space in this unanticipated time to listen and hear the word of the Lord addressed to us – through services like these, personal bible study, the daily office, meditative prayer – God’s Spirit will empower us to see signs of the Risen Christ all around us: in the voices of our friends on the other end of the telephone line; in the grocery hamper left on our doorstep; in our correspondence through mail and email; in the faces of our loved ones in old photographs or Facetime or Duo or Zoom.
In all these ways and more, may you, like Mary Magdalene, hear the word of the Lord speak your name and see the signs of Christ’s Risen Life before you. Together, may we with her, proclaim to the world in these times: “We have seen the Lord.”
Colin+
Assistant Curate
The Area Parish of the St. Lawrence
[1] Normand Bonneau, The Sunday Lectionary: Ritual Word, Paschal Shape (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 76.
[2] Bonneau, The Sunday Lectionary, 76.
Image Credit: Noli me tangere (1308-1311), panel from Maesta Alatarpiece of Siena by Duccio di Buoninsegna, d. 1319
