A sermon by Senior Minister John B. McCall, April 8, 2007
John 20:1-18
Mary was at the tomb early in the morning. It was women’s work to prepare the body with spices and lotions for burial. Even though Jesus of Nazareth had died the hideous death of a criminal on a cross, his friends wanted to show their respect. So they had quickly placed him in a borrowed tomb just before sundown on Friday as Sabbath began.
And now on Sunday morning it was time to face the grim reality.
When Mary reached the garden she saw the stone had been rolled away and the cave stood open. She immediately feared the worst: that robbers had struck in the middle of the night, perhaps removing the body to search for valuables.
In that pre-dawn light Mary saw nothing to give her hope. She wept bitter tears as she peered into the tomb where everything that mattered in her life had been buried. A stranger – whom she assumed to be the gardener – approached her and asked kindly, “why are you weeping?”
What would you answer? Why are we weeping?
• We weep for Angel Rosa and Jason Swiger – our own community’s sons who were killed in Iraq.
• We weep with Jo Coyne of Portland whose house literally exploded on Friday, destroying all her worldly possessions.
• We weep for the chronically hungry and homeless we served yesterday at the Wayside Evening Soup Kitchen.
• We weep for the starving refugees in Darfur whose images we try to push from our imaginations so we can sleep at night and eat at our tables.
• We weep for the citizens of Iraq whose homeland is virtually destroyed by opposing forces – each declaring that it offers the better future.
• We weep for soldiers from every nation who take others’ lives in the vain hope that war will settle something that peace cannot.
• We weep with each other when one of us says: my husband has died; my marriage has ended; my son won’t talk to me in a civil tone; my daughter believes I’ve ruined her life; I’m on the short list for the next lay-offs; every college I really wanted turned me down; my child was born with a congenital defect; my partner has AIDS.
Like Mary, we weep because death seems to have the power to erase the value of our lives.
Woody Allen once remarked “I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” I’ve sat with many who aren’t afraid of death itself but who fear never having lived, never having made a difference; that after a while no one will remember or particularly care that they drew breath. Like the flower we fade. Like the grass we wither, says Isaiah. Then we’re thrown into the furnace to be burned, and death has its way.
That’s what overwhelmed Mary, that and so much more. It may overwhelm us, too. So we weep, or smother the pain with pills or booze, or we bury our feelings deeply then pretend we don’t really care at all. But we can’t escape this way.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has written:
Suffering, it seems, is not optional. It is part and parcel of the human condition, but suffering can either embitter us or ennoble us. I hope that people will come to see that this suffering can become a spirituality of transformation when we find meaning in it.
“Suffering can become a spirituality of transformation…” Like Mary we stand in the pre-dawn darkness and gaze at an empty tomb and fear the worst, and hear the eternal question: “Whom do you seek?” That’s easy: we seek God at work; we seek hope, some assurance that our life matters beyond death.
It’s hope we seek, not just optimism. The difference is that optimism comes from signs that things are going to get better: the stock market is recovering, the kids haven’t been to the emergency room in months, your spouse is talking to you again. Optimism says that we can feel confident because the vital indicators look pretty good.
Hope, on the other hand, doesn’t depend on the evidence or on anything we can measure. Hope comes from outside of the situation, reminding us that God is at work even in times of anxiety and crisis.
Ironically, when we have reason for optimism we have no need for hope. G. K. Chesterton, the British cleric early in the 20th century, observed:” As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength. Like all the Christian virtues, this is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.”
Mary’s experience reminds us that Jesus Christ brings us hope even when everything we see tells us we’re in deep trouble. We learn to hope when we experience the very real presence of Christ in the world and in our own lives.
Mary didn’t recognize Jesus until he spoke her name. “Mary!” he said. “Rabbi!” she replied. With that, the darkness dropped away and was pierced by the Light. She knew! She ran from the place and called out “I have seen the Lord!”
Can you shout the same? I believe in resurrection because I’ve seen it too many times to doubt it: lives rebuilt, spirits resurrected, relationships redeemed, hope restored. I believe in resurrection because in Jesus I have encountered a brother, a companion, but most of all a savior who breaks open my self-centered shell and releases the promise of life – abundant life.
So, like Mary, we hope even when the evidence tells us to fear the worst.
“Why are you weeping and whom do you seek?” These are his questions. Christ gave himself as the answer. Gathering as we do today, many of us have reason to weep. Many of us have reason for optimism.
Easter says all of us have been offered reason for Hope.
Stones rolled away? Death destroyed? Hope in the face of despair? The world outside will smile at us and tell us we can boil down all this Easter talk to simpler examples: crocus bulbs will break through the thawing earth; butterflies will emerge from dead-looking cocoons; the swallows will return to Capistrano and the buzzards to Hinkley, Ohio. That’s all; that’s enough.
But Easter hope is a hundred times the miracle of these amazing events. It tells us that God is the creator and redeemer of all life, and that God’s spirit resists all the powers of darkness and death.
This Easter hope is the answer to all our questions, saying simply that we can live in Christ-like ways starting right here, right now, because we have no reason to fear death. All our mortal enemies have yielded to the love of God. Sin and death can not hold us any more than the tomb could hold Christ. Our lives matter.
We will wonder. We will worry. We will weep. We will fail. We will die. But all of this mortal stuff is swallowed up in God’s great victory of everlasting life.
I wish I could say it as well as Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian clergyman and author. I can’t. So hear this wisdom from his essay “The End is Life.”
Anxiety and fear are what we know best in this fantastic century of ours. Wars and rumors of wars. From civilization itself to what seemed the most unalterable values of the past, everything is threatened or already in ruins. We have heard so much tragic news during this fantastic century of ours that when t he news is good we cannot hear it.
But the proclamation of Easter day is that all is well. And as a Christian I say this not with the easy optimism of one who has never known a time when all was not well, but as one who has faced the Cross in all its obscenity as well as in all its glory, who has known one way or another what it is like to live separated from God. In the end, God’s will, not ours, is done. Love is the victor.
Death is not the end. The end is life: Jesus’ life and our lives through him, in him. Existence has greater depths of beauty, mystery, and benediction than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream. Christ our Lord has risen.
Just as he looked into Mary’s eyes and heart long ago, Jesus looks at us.
And he asks us: “Why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?”
And he gives himself, again and again, as the living answer to all our questions.