Easter Day: Waiting and Searching for Resurrection

Acts 10:34-43

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

1 Corinthians 15:19-26 


John 20:1-18 


I first visited Jerusalem in 2007 with  a group of other British clergy who’d been invited to a nine day seminar at Yad Yashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial.  For many of us it was our first time in Israel, but we were extremely fortunate to have among us wonderful leader and veteran traveler to the Holy Land, Jane Clements.  We arrived at Ben Gurion Airport in the middle of an early April morning before dawn, and were driven through dark Israeli roads and higheways to a hotel in West Jerusalem.  Few of us could sleep, and for many all we could think about was, of course, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre containing within its ancient walls both the place of Jesus’ crucifixion and the tomb hewn out of rock in which his body had been laid.  On our second day, some of us arranged to get up very early in the morning, before the scheduled activities began, and go into Jerusalem to visit the Sepulchre.  We arose before dawn and took cabs to the Jaffa Gate.  On arriving we entered on foot into the old city itself and Jane, the only one of us who’d been there before, led us down the darkened, ancient streets towards the holy site.  The narrow, sometimes covered streets of old Jerusalem are hardly a fine example of city planning,  and in only the dawn light even someone like Jane, a seasoned visitor to those streets, can get turned around as they make their way through them.  For myself, I was surpisied: surely, the Church of the Holy Sepuchre must be one of the most important buildings within the old city’s walls.  I expected that even above the crowded rooftops we should see its tower; that even in the early morning we should hear its bells.  Still, we took several wrong turns, and passed parts of the city we never intended to see that morning, but finally walking down a very narrow street – almost an alleyway – I heard Jane’s voice ahead saying, “I found it.  We’re here.”  As I walked past the alley’s end I found myself surprisingly in an open courtyard, the “plaza” – for lack of a better word – in front of the church’s main doors.  It was a thrilling experience, and one of my fellow travelers reflecting afterwards said how it brought to mind for him the first Easter morning with a woman in the semi-light discovering and leading the way to the surprising reality which had unfolded in the night.  “We’re here.  Alleluia, the Lord is risen”.

As many of you know, I am not wont to tell stories in my sermons, much less personal ones.  I leave that to people who’ve had more lively and interesting lives than myself.  But this Easter this one came to mind; perhaps on account the feast’s early date this year, and hence the mornings being not fully bright, or perhaps because recently in going through some papers I came across a card Jane gave me when I left England.  I am not completely sure.  But, nevertheless I am struck by the story’s themes of light and darkness, of searchng and finding, of being surprised by where we have traveled, even when the way is one already familiar from previous walking.  I am struck by the ways in which these themes play out also in the resurrection narratives, and how they manifest themselves as we try to live out the resurrection life. 

For many in our world, Easter is full of color – decorated eggs, pastel-hued dresses, brightly be-ribboned baskets.  But those who make even a cursory reading of the resurrection narratives in the Gospel, discover how different is the setting of that first Easter, and that it cannot be separated or understood apart from the events leading up to it, the events we commemorated throughout Holy Week – Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, his betrayal, his crucifixion and death.  Moreover, that coming into a resurrection faith was not instant for any of Jesus’ followers.  They all seemed to grope in the semi-darkness of their minds and experiences in order to be able to appropriate this radically fresh understanding of God and of salvation.  And while the revelation of the resurrection life offered in Jesus is all grace, all free from a gracious God, we may sometimes have to search for it, even hunt for it.  It is not obvious, because it often flies in the face of our conditioning and expectations.  When such an event, is so far removed from our received paradigms, it is sometimes easier to believe that it has not happened at all simply because it has not happened as we expcted, than actually transform our hearts and minds to see the really new thing God is doing.

Of the gospel narratives it the Gospel of John – the one proclaimed this morning – with which people are most familiar.  In it we see so clearly the themes played out of conditioned expectations, of things seen only in the dim light of morning, of searching and of a willingness to search.  Peter Simon and another of the disciples are summoned by Mary Magdalen to the tomb after she discovered it empty, but they context blinds them.  The see their hope for a victorious king who would deliver his people as dying with Jesus on the cross.  Undoubtedly, what they saw and witnessed that morning certainly had an effect on them.  Still, while the gospel writers records that one of them went into the tomb “and he saw and believed” (John 20:9), the exact nature of this belief is ambiguous, because, as the writer of John continues, “they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (John  20:10); and then the disciples returned to their homes.  Still, in the dark, physically and spiritually.  Only Mary stays, and she stays weeping.  Only Mary is willing to wait and see this through.  Her difficult life may have taught her that people do not return from the dead, that while she loved Jesus and followed him, love is not necessarily stronger than death.  All she knows about the world tells her to move on.  Jesus’ enemies have won.  They have not only betrayed, humiliated and killed him, but they have now even desecrated his burial place and his body.  And when she meets him she remains faithful, albeit blind.  She persists in looking for him, looking for him as she expected: a cold dead, body.  Still she is willing to serve and minster to a dead Jesus and says to the supposed gardener: “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” (John 20:15)  And then it happens, Jesus’ voice, Jesus’ words fall on her ears, and somehow she believes.  Believes in way entirely different than did the other disciple, because she calls Jesus by his familiar title among his followers, Rabounni, Teacher, and she carries joyfully the news to her fellows, announcing to them, “I have seen the Lord”, and telling them all that Jesus had said to her. (cf. John 20:18)  Mary not only believed, but unlike the other disciple she also incroporated the resurrection reality into her being, and because she did this she was able to not just return home, but return home with a message, with the Good News of what God was doing among his people.

What Mary discovers is that resurrection is not a magic trick, it is not something which hits us across the face, but rather seems to be something which happens in the dim and the dark, which we sometimes have to wait for and sometimes have to search out for.  It is something which usually surprises us and plays tricks on our expectations.  At the same time, it is more glorious than we could have expected, because there is no fantasy about it, there is only the stark reality of being; and in our world we are so very rarely privileged a glimpse into the really real.  The resurrection is the invitation to live in the real and to affirm life wherever we find it, no matter how much we may have to search for it, or wait for it.  It is the invitation to be surprised beyond our expectations.  We know this because in the resurrection of Jesus God shows us how he brings life out of the darkest of events and conditions, out of the most unexpected of places and reveals it to the most unexpected of people.  Christian belief is not simply belief in the resurrection of Jesus, but in Resurrection; that resurrection – new life – is the pattern of creation, the narrative of God’s world.  Christian belief in resurrection, in new life, compels us to constantly seek for and celebrate new life wherever we find it.  This belief manifests itself in the willingness to sit in and with the darkness, because we know the truth about new life and God’s victory over all opposed to life in all its rich diversity.  A ressurrection faith resolves itself in the willingness to share the truth of that new life not by proslytezing, but by living it.

I began this morning speaking of a trip to the Church of the Holy Sepuchre, and a search in the early morning through the dimly lit streets of old Jerusalem.  It was Jane’s insistence that the sepulchere was really “just around the corner” which at every turn kept us moving forward and which brought us eventually to the reality of the magnificently holy and strange place.  It was not at all what I had expected.  It was smaller, dirtier, more rundown than my imagination had conceived.  But slowly my presuppositions were converted and transformed by the reality of the place.  Crouching into the chapel of the tomb as have done millions of pilgrims through the ages, I became acutely aware of the God who brings life in the smallest, darkest and most cramped of  places and of the many millions who have colloborated with him to discover and reveal it in the small, dark, cramped places of their world.

The great question of Easter, is not so much “Do you believe in the resurrection?” but “What are you doing to reveal the reality of the resurrection already present?”  After all even the un-named disciple believed, but he just went back home; to business as usual, we can only assume.  It was Mary who would not let go; who wept in the darkness by the tomb and who searched out where Jesus might be even when it meant questioning a stranger.  And it was Mary who in the end led the other disciples to the reality which none had really thought possible, the reality which overthrew so many of their ideas and conventional expectations.  It was she who led them into a place of naked being – that overcame all forms of non-being.

May we be worthy ourselves not only to believe the resurrection, but to live resurrection; to search out for and reveal life in the dark and most unexpected of places and, as one of the Easter Vigil collect says to “let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made.”