One Sunday morning long ago
Says the Gospel of John:

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.’

Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet.

They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.

Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?’

Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’

Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’

She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ (which means Teacher).

Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”’

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her. John 20:1-18

Will Willimon, one of my favorite Methodist authors, tells of an interview he gave to a student reporter for the Duke University campus newspaper. Easter was approaching. So was Spring Break, which ended on Easter weekend that year.
“I'm doing a story on fun things to do during Spring Break,” said the student-reporter, “and thought it would be cool to mention the Chapel.”

“Okay,” said the Reverend Willimon.

“Dr. Willimon,” the student said, “what is the goal of Easter?”

Willimon said he had no ready answer. A horrible thought went through his mind – an image of a headline, “Preacher says Easter is pointless.”

When people arrive this morning at their churches they will come by automobile and then sort of lumber to their seats. None of us will come running. None of us will run toward Easter - which is curious because, according to the Gospel of John, there was a great deal of running around the first Easter. First Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and, finding the stone rolled away and the tomb empty, ran away. She didn’t know about Jesus’ resurrection yet; she figures someone had swiped the body and she wants to know where they took it. So in the pre-dawn darkness she runs to tell the other disciples that Jesus' body is gone.

She meets Peter and the beloved disciple. She tells them Jesus is missing, and they run, too. But they run towards the tomb instead of away from it. Moreover, it appears they race each other to the tomb. They see the grave wrappings and believe. What they believe isn’t really clear, but we’re talking about Mary at the moment. The disciples leave the scene.

Mary lingers and comes upon a man whom she assumes is the gardener. Maybe he moved the body. It’s worth a try, so she asks him whether he did.

Someone pointed out to me once that there is an unclothed gardener in this story somewhere. Either that or Jesus found an extra set of work clothes in the tool shed. If it was a TV movie, the scene would cut to a bound and gagged gardener, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts with polka-dots on them, his wrists taped together, lying behind the rose bushes. A screenwriter might dress Jesus in a flannel work shirt and bib overalls. Mary sees a man in such clothes and figures he must be what he appears to be. She judges him by his clothes.

Such thoughts remind me of how we dress Jesus in our own minds. We "remember" Jesus, we "remember" the Gospel story, we "remember" first century Palestine dressed up in cloak after cloak of church tradition and two millennia of misunderstanding and ideological interpretation. We freeze Jesus into a postcard picture, and never let him out. We might as well be wrapping him up in yards and yards of graveclothes. “This is where you belong, Jesus, and this is how you're expected to behave!”

We certainly don’t expect Jesus to dress like a gardener! We’ve got him typecast wearing a robe and sandals. And there is Mary, never expecting to see Jesus in a vertical position again, looking like a working stiff rather than . . . just a stiff. Even after she discovers who this apparent gardener really is, she doesn’t realize that things have changed. He is no longer Jesus of Nazareth, not really, but has become the Christ, the Risen One. She calls him teacher when he is now Savior. She reaches out to hold him but he pushes her away. She tries to pull him back to the way things were, but he can’t go back. The old relationship he had with her and the others isn’t possible any more. The Christ would not worry about protocol or dress codes. He would appear to his disciples, but he wouldn’t hang out with them any more.

Jesus has been raised from the dead, and he's different. Okay, we can live with that, I can even preach it. But not so easy to accept that because Jesus is different now, we have to be different, too. That’s scary.

We can imagine the half-naked gardener, looking frantically for anything that resembles his old, familiar overalls. But Jesus has taken his old, stained grubbies away. Such it is for us. We have been washed in the blood of the lamb now, and are supposed to have put on new clothes of righteousness. We mustn’t go scrounging around for those old comfortable clothes, because Christ has taken them away.

Ever since, say, four-thirty a.m. that first Easter morning, we have been raised to new life. We have become new persons, a white-robed member of the heavenly choir, and the old stained grubbies don't fit any more. It doesn't matter how hard you try to go back to the way things used to be. Those old clothes don't fit. You have a new identity now. You are an Easter person. You died to you old life, and now you live in a new one. And that is really good news!

by Donald Sensing, 3/27/2005 05:53:00 AM. Permalink |