The lectionary passage for Easter Sunday morning is John 20: 1 - 18. You might like to read it slowly before you suffer my rambling on it.
We have reached Sunday morning. This is my 21st Easter as a minister. I’ve tried this week to say something helpful every day in this blog but I’m struggling to know what to say about Easter joy this year.
I’m writing this on Saturday and I’m surrounded by images of death. The numbers who passed away in this country in one day between Thursday and Friday from coronavirus was just under 1000 people. Today’s total is slightly less. On Friday there were shocking scenes of mass graves in New York for those with no next of kin, and of queues of refugees in northern France desperate for food. The daily government press conference has a different minister in the cabinet who come out every day to say this is far from over. We must stay home and we are likely to be told to do that for much longer. Is it that death has the final word this Easter?
Have I anything to say about Easter joy? Well, yes, if I think about it, because of where Easter begins. It begins surrounded by death like we seem to be. It begins in darkness and desolation. It begins in a place we think we will never get out of. It begins with tears and heartbreak and fear. God does Easter in us just where we find ourselves.
So I’ve no idea what I’m about to write but let’s see if Mary coming to the tomb in the darkness, in the darkness of the night and with the darkness in her soul, and encountering hope again has a message for us as we do a lockdown Easter...
Mary arrives to find the stone rolled away from the tomb. Pretend you don’t know the end of the story for a while. Imagine getting to the tomb and finding it empty. You have forgotten all Jesus said about him rising. Surely someone has moved his body. You can’t even pay your respects.
We are hearing sad stories of funerals taking place where only a handful of mourners have been allowed to be present. There was a man in Northern Ireland whose wife of over 50 years died from the virus. He couldn’t be at the graveside for her burial because he was self isolating. I know of one crematorium that has now closed and I know that a lot of cemeteries have had their gates locked to stop people going to them. Paying your respects is getting nigh on impossible.
Mary stands at the tomb weeping. She stands with all those across the world who are weeping at the moment having lost a loved one so suddenly. She looks into the tomb and sees two angels standing in it. They ask her why she is weeping. How fab is it that at the most desolate of places, God sends angels to give pastoral care! Who are the angels for you in this difficult time? Who is there to listen to you cry? “They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they have laid him.” It’s so important at this time we are not able to be with people we have ways that we can be cared for. Mary is in a living hell.
But it is there where Easter starts to happen. I’m finding it hard being in a holiday let for months with my study and most of my books elsewhere. Lis has brought a pile of books here and I’ve just dipped into a Taize book of hers called “Seeds of Trust.” The commentary on John 20: 1 - 18 in the book points out something I have not really noticed before. Twice Mary turns round. She turns round and sees Jesus standing there and thinks he is the gardener and later after Jesus calls her name, she turns towards him in unbelievable joy. The verb turning round in Hebrew is all about a conversion of heart. She came in the dark full of death, she could not be fully present to the reality surrounding her, she did not recognise the men in white in the tomb as angels, there to herald a new day, and she did not recognise Jesus. Why would she? Death had had the last word.
How does the risen Jesus announce resurrection? By one word: “Mary”...
To be called by our name means someone knows who we are. I remember being a visiting preacher a couple of years ago helping out a Circuit which neighboured mine when a minister was off sick. I was in the vestry with the steward for the prayer. She started fine until she wanted to pray for me. Her prayer went “we pray for, o sorry, I don’t know who you are!”
I remember dear Frank Pearce, my steward in the church I was lay worker in and his amazing vestry prayer one January: “we thank you, Lord, for this new year of 1973 and that Brian may have the wisdom of Solomon.” It was 1993 and my name wasn’t Brian! Mind you, because I wasn’t a proper minister and too young, he never called me by my name. I was “that boy” then “the boy” when things got a bit better! To not be called by name and be derided hurts, and when we label people rather than getting to know them, we treat them as less than human. We listen to a death toll, we see images of mass graves, all are people with a name...
Easter begins with the divine calling our name. The relationship we thought death had destroyed is restored. Easter is a gift to us in our despair. When we think all is lost, Jesus comes...
There is another bit to Easter though and this encounter with Mary in the garden makes it clear. Jesus says to her as she moves towards him for an embrace, “do not cling to me.” Was Mary told to be two metres away? I appreciate the poetry of Brian Bilston, he’s a genius. He’s just written a poem about social distancing and I include it here:
But this “do not cling” bit is really about Mary being told not to be possessive and to think Jesus was only risen for her. She is given a task to go and tell, beginning with the men who have run ahead of her, seen the empty tomb and scarpered. She is called to be a witness. “I have seen the Lord” she told them. Whether they believed her is another matter! I like what Lis’s Taize book has to say:
“A relationship with the risen Lord turns disciples into living words who call others, in the name of God, to give up all forms of arrogance or despair, in order to become part of a universal communion. To whom can I go to communicate an unexpected joy?”
To answer my own question: is it that death has the final word this Easter? My answer to myself and to those who are reading this is a definite “no” - when all feels dark and full of death and those things we were clinging onto to have been taken away and our eyes are so full of tears we are blind to angels and to the Jesus who stands among us, Jesus comes and calls our name.
This Easter is like no other we have experienced. But even in a time of great uncertainty and understandable fear we are called to turn round...
The risen Jesus comes when...
An exhausted nurse still gives her everything to care for the frightened patients on her ward.
A take away gives out free food parcels for the most needy in its town.
A friend rings up someone who is feeling really lonely just to see how they are.
A church provides ways for every member to still feel a part of a community.
A neighbour gladly does shopping or fetches medicine for someone shielding who cannot leave the house.
We feel no one cares about us and we need our name called.
Someone said to me a long time ago that over and over again God makes a way out of no way. He has called us by name, we are his. Easter comes to us in our tear filled garden when we think all is dead.
I do not know when this time of crisis will be over. But I do know there can be Easter joy in it. I think this year we need to look for the small signs that are there to remind us this virus and news of death and despair will not be how things will always be. If you are struggling look out of your window. We are allowed in our gardens and new life and colour are bursting out!
I think I will end with two quotes. Perhaps they might help. The first is from the Bishop of Leeds, Nick Baines from an Easter sermon a few years ago:
“Maybe - for some of you - today might be an Easter Day on which your own transformation might begin. Surely, this is good news. Surely, this can draw from us a Hallelujah of relief and praise - one that means that from this day forward we know ourselves to be a people no longer driven in a threatening and uncertain world by anxiety and fear, but drawn by hope in the God of resurrection who comes to us, where we are, speaks our name, and sends us from the place of death to live life.”
Then I love this quote: “God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of our humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.” – Nadia Bolz Weber
Resurrection is not just something that happened to Jesus one Sunday two thousand years ago. It’s not just a hope we have for some day in the future when we might live again after our deaths. It’s also something that is happening in us every single day of our lives when we hear our names called and turn and recognise the risen Jesus. And after that, we go and tell — one day outside, for now how we live. This time needs us to live Easter for others and others to live it for us. Even in ways that enable us to all get through the next few months...
Easter comes. We arrive in the dark. We have nothing to say. We turn round. We are called by name. We are called to be Easter people. We remember that nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Not even coronavirus.
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