First off what we need to do today is to acknowledge that it has been a hard year.
When you think of the losses over the last year,
losses we haven’t really been able to grieve,
we bring that with us coming back together,
ghosts from the past and the way things were in the before times.
What this church family needs now is the good news of the Resurrection.
This congregation needs today’s Easter hope of new life in Christ
more than ever.
And the possibilities of realizing that New Life in the Resurrection Presence of Jesus
are there for those who have eyes to see.
A new life and a new creation,
In our individual lives,
where there has been darkness, even deadness,
where hope and new life is needed,
where there is a turning point,
the possibilities are there if we have eyes to see.
Resurrection is the power for transformation in our lives
especially where we may have felt like failure.
Failure was a big part of that first Easter Day –
Jesus looked like a failure to the disciples – he died!
They did not yet understand him or the purpose of his death.
And what is this word they were being told, about Jesus alive again?
The disciples themselves were a failure.
They had fled for their lives, abandoned Jesus,
and they probably felt that failure most profoundly.
But that sense of failure would be short lived.
The Gospel of John’s account of the Resurrection, just heard,
is full of subtle details
that describe very human responses to this event of Resurrection
and that can be very encouraging for each of us
as we connect with the words of the Gospel
and take in for ourselves the Mystery of the Resurrection.
First and foremost in this Gospel reading is the focus on Mary Magdalene
and her relationship with Jesus.
Here is a person who deeply loved Jesus,
who expressed her discipleship to him,
and her dependence on him that even death could not break,
because, you see,
even after his death Mary still refers to him as her Lord.
And note that at this point she does not know the Resurrection.
Nevertheless, even though she thinks him dead,
she still calls him Lord; “They have taken away my Lord, (she says)
and I do not know where they have laid him.”
Jesus is still her whole life.
Mary Magdalene was the first witness of the Resurrection,
the one who would then be honored as an Apostle by the Church.
Yet in her tears of sorrow and devotion,
she does not recognize her Lord until he calls her by name.
Hearing and recognizing the voice of the Good Shepherd,
we see that she is a sheep of his flock,
following him in loving trust.
But then when Mary recognizes that it is her Lord
there before her and speaking to her, and not the gardener,
she responds with the title for him most familiar to her
and she wants to embrace and cling to him and not let go
now that she has him back.
But that’s the problem.
Mary can’t have Jesus back the way she used to know him.
Never again will it be the same relationship
as before the crucifixion and his death.
That relationship, as wonderful as it was, must go
and now there is a whole new way of being in relationship
with the One who has taken into himself all suffering and death
and who now is Savior,
more than Teacher, more than Rabbouni, “my rabbi,”
as Mary used to call him -- now Savior.
So when Mary goes to embrace him, to grasp hold of him and cling to him,
Jesus says to her, “Do not hold on to me, do not hold me.”
If he had let her embrace and cling to him at this time,
it would have been as if to say,
“Yes, all is as it had been,
back again where we were before this awful death by crucifixion.”
Well, now things are different.
Now there is a new relationship,
now there is more than relationship with another,
now there is new identity to be realized,
new identity of a fullness of life,
of Resurrection Life opened to Mary and to all of us.
For Mary Magdalene, and for us, from now on
there will be a new way of being with Jesus,
a way that goes beyond the physical limits of his body.
Now we live in him and his Resurrection,
like branches on the vine.
This is how we understand baptism:
being united with Jesus in his death and resurrection
so that now we live in him a new life, the life of resurrection.
Now his Spirit lives in us, the Resurrection Jesus present with us
intimately and immediately
when we pause and are silent and can look within the heart.
With the Resurrection
our understanding of our relationship with Jesus must change.
We can know his presence
but we cannot grasp hold of him.
But he can grasp hold of us.
Have you ever seen an Eastern Orthodox icon of the Resurrection?
Typically in an icon of the Resurrection
Jesus is depicted as grasping hold of
someone who has been lying in the grave,
usually identified as Adam and Eve
representing all of us.
In the icon Jesus has a strong hold on top of Adam’s wrist in one hand
and Eve’s wrist with the other,
and he is pulling them out of the grave, out of the abode of the dead.
Jesus is strong, his grip irresistible, his intention insistent.
He yanks us out of death into life.
It is his action entirely.
Adam and Eve are not reaching out to grasp the hand of Jesus.
they are being pulled up.
It’s unmistakable. We do not grasp him. He grasps us.
Follow Jesus and he will yank you out of the bondage and death
that limits life for us, that keeps us bound in suffering
and identified with our suffering.
Follow Jesus and he will yank you out of the known and familiar
in its tomb-like quarantined confinement
out into a limitless openness, an expansion of life.
In the Epistle reading for today, Paul’s first letter to the Church in Corinth
Paul tells how widely the witness of the Resurrection was spreading:
the appearance to Peter, then the twelve,
then to more than 500 brothers and sisters at once,
to James, the Lord’s brother, all the apostles,
and even to Paul, who considered himself unfit to be an apostle,
a failure who had persecuted the Church.
“But,” Paul says, “by the grace of God I am what I am.
and [God’s] grace toward me has not been in vain.”
That grace is the Resurrection Spirit of Jesus at work in us.
There is where our true inheritance and identity rests.
By the grace of God I am what I am,
because of the Presence of Resurrection
because the Spirit of Jesus is at work in me,
is at work in you,
is at work in every heart open to hope, to faith, to love and to joy.
And God’s grace in me and you has not been in vain.
So let us enter with joy into this Easter celebration.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
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