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.
Mary wept as she said to the angel, “They have taken
away my Lord.” I think we’ve all had
moments that have shaken our faith to the core.
I think as children we all begin life at a place of innocence, when we
expect that people are good and the world is fair. Maybe when we’re a little older, we may get a
sense, perhaps from television or movies or other entertainment, that there are
good people and bad people, that not everybody is good, that not every
situation is good, but that eventually good will win out. But then tragedy hits , to which there is no
apparent resolution – a beloved parent or family member or friend dies, perhaps
unexpectedly, or we or a loved one are diagnosed with a life-threatening
illness, or pehaps a chronic illness that limits our lives. Or perhaps we or a loved one are victims of
violence, either from others, or from our own violence turned against our
bodies – attempts at self-harm, or our attempts to numb the pain of living
through alcohol or drugs lead us instead to levels of pain we never knew
existed, levels of pain we never knew could exist. Or we encounter the injustice and violence of
society directed either against us or against people we care deeply about,
finding that there are those who would deny us or those we love even such basic
things as physical safety, food, and shelter. It can be doubly hurtful when those causing
the injustice do so claiming they are following God’s will. Instinctively we turn to our faith, and to
the hymns and the words that once sustained our faith, the places where we once
felt God’s presence….but the pain of our loss is still there. We struggle to
feel the closeness to God we once felt.
We may question whether God has abandoned us. Where was God when my loved one died or became
ill, or became victim of violence or injustice?
In these Good Friday moments,
these dark nights of the soul, we may feel that “my Lord has gone away, and I
don’t know where to find him.”
It was in Mary’s dark night of the soul, when she
feared that her Lord had been taken away and that she would never see him
again, that Jesus met her. And even
though Mary was desperate to see Jesus, when she met him, she did not immediately
recognize him. This is a recurring
theme when the women and the disciples encountered Jesus after the resurrection
– they – Mary at the tomb, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, Peter and
the other disciples while fishing in the early morning hours – see Jesus but
don’t recognize him immediately. There’s
an ethereal quality, a sense that Jesus is “there but not there” – or at least
not there in the same way. But Jesus is
there all the same, and there is a moment of recognition – when Jesus calls
Mary’s name, when Jesus at table with the Emmaus road disciples broke the
bread, when Peter and the disciples caught an enormous haul of fish – a moment
when they know beyond a shadow of a doubt, “We have seen the Lord”.
It may be similar for us as well. We want God to relieve our pain. We want God to fix our problems. But Jesus never promised a life free of
tragedy, or pain, or injustice. What
Jesus did promise was presence: “I will
be with you always, even to the end of the age.” We may not always recognize the ways in
which Jesus is with us, and sometimes it is only in retrospect that we
recognize the ways in which God has walked with us, or at times carried us,
through the valley of the shadow.
In her moment of deepest grief, Mary was “surprised by
joy” as she encountered the Risen Christ.
She went to embrace him, but the Risen Christ told her, “Don’t hold on
to me, but go and tell my brothers that I am ascending.” Jesus’ words can also be translated, “Do not
keep clinging to me.” These may be
Jesus’ words for us as well. We want to return to the comfort and innocence
of the past, back to the faith of
earlier, simpler days, but Christ tells us, “Do not hold on to me, the version
of me that you knew in the past. But go
and tell others how you are experiencing me now.”
“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 some 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. The challenge of a living faith in God is to
give thanks for all the places where God met us in the past, to give thanks for
all the people who led us to Jesus in the past, and yet have eyes to see the
new places in which God hopes to meet us, and the new people God is calling us
to meet, today, and tomorrow, and for all our tomorrows.
“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.
No comments:
Post a Comment