Scriptures
Acts
10:34-43 Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
I
Corinthians 15:1-11 John
20:1-18
In 2014, the New York City Rescue Mission and the Silver +
Partner Ad Agency set up what had been described at the time as a “stunning
social experiment”. The point of the
experiment was to demonstrate how much we block out the sight of homeless
people. In the experiment, a member of a
family dressed up as a homeless person and sat on a busy street where they knew
that their loved one – a husband, wife, sister, brother, mother, father –
passed by every day on their way to work.
The film crew recorded video to document whether the family member
passing by would recognize their loved one dressed as a homeless person. The results were shocking, depressing, even
disturbing: in the experiment, not one –
not a single solitary one – of the passers-by recognized their husband or wife
or brother or sister or mother or father when dressed as homeless persons. As much as we may love somebody, the
experiment showed that if that somebody is in a context we wouldn’t expect
them, especially when disguised as someone considered undesirable – a homeless
person – we turn away. And certainly
those who actually are homeless, who have fallen through the gaps of our frayed
social safety network, have likewise experienced the turning away of those they
love. We can take it as part of our
mission to do what we can to restore at least some small portion of those
losses, to provide, not only food, but connection to other human beings.
When I read about this experiment, I gained a bit more insight
into Mary Magdalene’s behavior in our reading from John’s gospel. Each of the resurrection accounts in the four
gospels has its own distinctiveness, it’s own “secret sauce”, you might
say. An element of the “secret sauce”
that flavors John’s gospel is the recurring character referred to as “the
disciple whom Jesus loved” – who turns out at the end to be the author. In John’s gospel, it is Mary Magdalene who
goes to the tomb alone, discovers it empty, and runs to tell Peter and this
“disciple whom Jesus loved” what she saw.
The two men engage in an odd sort of footrace to the tomb, the beloved
disciple reaching the tomb first but afraid to venture inside, Peter reaching
it second but entering it first. This
may have had to do with some sort of jockeying for position among Jesus’
closest disciples. So they get to the
tomb, see that, “yup, it’s empty, just
like Mary Magdalene said”, see the grave clothes….and go home. And if it had been up to the guys, that would
have been the Easter story….empty grave, graveclothes wrapped up, something
happened but we don’t know what, have a nice day. Thank goodness Mary Magdalene went back to
the tomb with the guys, presumably at her own pace, since she’d already done
quite a bit of running that morning.
The guys go home, but Mary hangs around the tomb a while,
crying, and eventually poking her head in.
She sees two angels, who ask her, “Why do you cry?” Mary tells them, “they’ve taken away my Lord,
and I don’t know where they’ve laid him.”
Then Jesus himself comes up behind her, and asks her the same question:
“Why are you crying? Whom are you
looking for?” Mary mistook Jesus for the
gardener, and asks him, “Sir, if you’ve taken him away, please show me where
you put him and I’ll take him away.”
Jesus says her name – “Mary” – and something in his voice prompted her
to recognize him. “Rabbouni” – meaning
“Teacher!” – she says. Apparently she
also embraced him and held on tight, because Jesus told her, “Don’t hold onto
me….but go to my brothers and tell them, “I am ascending to my father and your
father, to my God and to your God.” And
Mary goes back to the disciples and tells them what she saw and heard.
As I read this story, two things struck me. First of all is the difference in reactions
to the news of the empty tomb. In all
four Gospels, the women are the first ones to reach the tomb, but only in
Luke’s and John’s gospels do we read about Peter going to see the empty
tomb. In Luke’s gospel, Peter goes
alone, but in John’s gospel, there’s this odd competition between Peter and the
“disciple whom Jesus loved” – John gets
there first, but Peter looks inside first - and after they get to the tomb and
take a peek inside, they go home. It’s
Mary Magdalene who stays, and for her faithfulness is rewarded with appearances,
not only of angels, but of the Risen Christ.
But she doesn’t recognize Jesus. There
are similar accounts in other gospels; Luke tells us about the two disciples on
the road to Emmaus who don’t recognize Jesus over the course of a seven-mile
walk and conversation – a conversation in which the Risen Christ interpreted
the meaning of his own resurrection to these two disciples - until they are at
table with Jesus and he breaks the bread.
Later in John’s gospel, the disciples are fishing - unsuccessfully – and
it is not until Jesus tells them where to cast their nets and they pull up a
big haul of fish that they recognize Jesus.
Would we do any better?
To me, it’s a bit ironic that so few recognized Jesus after his
resurrection, because today, Jesus is
one of the most recognizable icons in our culture. Seemingly everyone has an idea what Jesus
looks like. You know the general look –
long face, white, blond or light brown hair, blue eyes, generally looks
“sensitive”. Or maybe sort of like
Fabio. Even those who don’t go near a
church, even those who hate everything the church stands for, can see a
painting or illustration and say, “Oh, that’s Jesus.”
I’d encourage those of you who didn’t already toss your
bulletin inserts to look in the bulletin at the color insert. There are pictures on both sides of the
paper, and I apologize in advance for the quality of the printouts; for any
interested, I can email the original files.
The one side has four photographs that I took in February, 2015 at the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built over what is said to be the
place where Jesus was crucified and buried – and, of course, resurrected, which
is why local Christians in Jerusalem call it “The Resurrection Church”. I was
there in February 2015, and I can testify that Jesus’ body is not there. The other side of the insert has nine
depictions of Jesus. They are all very
different, and I tried to pick a wide range of images. Some are quite old, others are quite modern. I think the range tells us, among other
things, that when we try to depict Jesus, we consciously or unconsciously end
up putting quite a bit of ourselves into the picture. For example, to our eyes, the image of the
Asian Madonna and Child may look a bit jarring.
On the other hand, given that the real earthly Jesus was a
middle-eastern Jew, almost certainly dark-skinned as in the Roman mosaic photo
I included, born in what is now the West Bank, Palestine, our white Jesuses are
just as inaccurate – and probably just as out of place and offputting in
predominantly non-white cultures. In the
center is a photo of a Salvador Dali painting that in some ways captures the
ethereal quality of some of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. The images on
the right side of the page are all fairly modern, and are strongly shaped by
the perspective of the images’ creators.
There’s a “reward” poster of Jesus that was first printed in an American
socialist publication about 100 years ago, and depicts Jesus as a low-income
worker who hung out with the riff-raff of his society, and was killed by the
respectable, good people of his day.
There’s a drawing called “Christ of the Breadlines” – and this is a
popular motif within the Catholic Worker movement. And then, of course, I couldn’t resist having
a little fun by including a picture of Buddy Jesus from Kevin Smith’s 1999 movie
Dogma.
It is true that our sense of Jesus is shaped by our own
formative experiences, our own views and life experience. On one hand, the Christ of the Breadlines or
the socialist depiction of Jesus may be anathema to some – to say nothing of
“Buddy Jesus” - on the other hand, younger viewers may not resonate with the
more classical depictions. A key
insight of the Quakers is that everyone has “that of God” or “that of Christ”
within them. Will that of Christ within
me recognize that of Christ within you? And will we be alert to the promptings of the
Christ within each of us so that we can recognize when Christ is doing
something utterly new. Or will we mistake Christ for the gardener, mistake the
movement of the Holy Spirit within us for a moment of mental migraine or emotional
indigestion?
The second thing that stuck me was Jesus’ instruction to
Mary, after she came to recognize Jesus, “Do not hold on to me….. but go to my
brothers.” The Greek words for “don’t
hold on to me”, “mi mou aptou” are in a continuous tense, so Jesus is saying, “Don’t
keep holding on to me” or “Don’t keep clinging to me.” Jesus told her that he had not yet ascended
to the Father, but that he would do so, and soon, and he wanted his followers
there for the occasion. But at that
moment in the garden, Jesus was in a kind of transitional state, in flux, in
development, not exactly as he had been during his earthly ministry, but not
yet as he would be after he ascended to the Father. Mary wanted to experience Jesus as she had so
many times during his earthly ministry, but Jesus was telling her, gently,
“don’t cling to that experience of me.
Yes, I will still be with you, but yes, I will be present with you in a
different way.” At the Last Supper in
John’s gospel, Jesus had told the disciples that he would be going away, but
would not leave them comfortless, that he would send the Holy Spirit, the Advocate,
who would remind them of all Jesus had said and done. Jesus was preparing Mary for this change in
the way she would experience Jesus in the very near future.
“Don’t keep clinging to me.”
From our religious instruction as children in Sunday School or perhaps
as teens in confirmation class, we come away from those experiences with some
image or sense of Jesus in our minds. And
it’s very important that we raise our children and confirm our teens in the
faith. But there’s a pitfall that we or
our children can take away a sense of Jesus that is so powerful in that moment
– or others can impose a specific image of Jesus on us so strongly - that it
doesn’t change as we or they grow older.
Perhaps we’ve seen pictures of bees or other small insects preserved in
amber…and at any age, there’s a tendency to do the same thing with our faith,
to take our mental image of Jesus at any given moment in time and freeze it in
amber for the rest of our lives. Perhaps this is why Mary and the disciples on
the Emmaus road and the other disciples fishing on the lake did not recognize
the resurrected Jesus when they saw him, because they were still focused on how
they understood him during his earthly ministry, and they needed time to wrap
their minds around the transformed but ever present Risen Christ. And perhaps this is why so many lose their
faith as they mature into adulthood, because they are still trying to believe
in the same Jesus they embraced as children or teens. That is to say, they didn’t really lose faith
in Jesus himself, but rather in the childish image of Jesus they had been
carrying. But maturing in Christ is a
constant process of letting go of past experiences of Jesus in order to be open
and present to God’s call in the present.
We can give thanks for the past and all it has taught us, and yet be
open to God’s call today.
“Don’t keep clinging
to me.” Mary wasn’t to cling to her
memories of Jesus in his earthly ministry, but in a sense to give Jesus
permission to be present with her in a different way. And so it is with us. We seek relationship with the Risen Christ,
and to be in a relationship is to experience change. We may have friendships that go back to our
early childhood years, but as adults we surely don’t relate to those friends as
we did back then. And so it is with our faith
in Christ. As Christians we’re in the
process of becoming, as Christ works within us, so the insights and
understandings of yesterday may have to give way, over and over again, to the
learnings of today and tomorrow.
“Whom do you seek?”
“Don’t keep clinging to me, but go to my brothers…” May God grant us eyes to recognize Jesus,
ears to hear his call, feet to take us where he is, hands to serve, and a
tongue to proclaim good news. Amen.
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