Beyond Belief

Beyond Belief

John 20:1-23

This morning, I want to do something that we don’t usually do.  I want to read a collection of three texts that we might normally divide up.  I want to see the connections.  I want to feel the flow.  What I hope you’ll see are three perspectives on what it means to move beyond belief.

Our text from John begins with a strange scene.  It is Easter morning.  The first person to make it to the tomb is Mary Magdalene.  She sees the rock rolled away from the tomb, does not go in, and runs back to tell the disciples.  Peter and the other, unnamed, disciple race to the tomb.  They literally race one another, seemingly turning this moment into a macho matter of pride and prowess.  Peter comes in second.  The other disciple gets to the tomb, looks in, sees some of the linen burial cloths, but does not go in.  Peter arrives at the tomb, enters it, and examines the linen burial cloths.  As Peter is doing so, the other disciple enters.  He sees and he believes.

The question at this point is, “What do these people believe?”  The answer is, “They believe the worst!”  They are not believing that Jesus has risen.  Instead, they have been through the terrible things that preceded Jesus’ death. They watched in horror as he died.  Now, they believe that what has happened is…the next “worst” thing.  They believe that Jesus’ body has been stolen.  Mary thought it right away.  This is what she told the disciples that set the two of them running.  When the “other disciple” “believes,” he now believes what Mary told him.  Insult has been added to injury.  Not even Jesus’ body could be left in peace.

Here’s the thing:  not one of us can blame these people for reaching this conclusion.  The truth that we have all experienced as human beings is that we all go through terrible times when it just feels like one bad thing follows another.  Everything is hard.  At every turn, it feels like things just get worse.  It can seem like life is simply “piling on,” just “hitting us while we’re down.”  And when it does, our sense of the world shifts.  We get jaded.  We start to expect the next bad thing.  And when those are our expectations, the next incarnation of “awful” is generally what we find.

We all know that, sooner or later, this chain of awful things will break.  Maybe we even have our own strategies.  I remember a day that was going terribly on a canoe trip.  From the moment we woke up, the weather was wrong, the fire wouldn’t catch, one of us tripped over something and fell.  We thought, “Let’s go exploring.  Let’s walk away from this mess.”  In a few minutes, we were struggling to find the next portage and actually took a circular trail that landed us right where we started:  “Are we in the twilight zone here?” Later, the morning was capped when one of us tripped and broke the beloved fishing rod that had belonged to the other person’s father. Then, my buddy reached into a pack and buried a treble hook into his hand.  What did we do?  We went back to camp and took a nap.  You do what you need to do to break the chain.

Mary, Peter and the other disciple reach the same conclusion:  the worst has happened: Jesus’ body has been stolen.  Peter and the other disciple just head home, presumably to take a nap or to find some other knock off version of normal.  When they leave, Mary is by herself, paralyzed by grief, sobbing by outside the tomb.

When it comes to belief, it is often so much easier to believe in how awful life can be, especially if we have had it up to our eyeballs in awful already.  Besides, it kind of feels safer to expect the worst, right?  At least then, the worst will never blindside us.  (Of course, such a view puts us at terrible risk for never seeing what is amazing and beautiful and loving in life at all.)

In the second scene of our text, Mary is alone in the garden outside the tomb.  She is weeping her heart out.  We all need to recognize that this is the most faithful, honest thing one can do in the face of deep grief:  to feel what is there inside of you for all you are worth.  She doesn’t have the answers.  However, she’s doing the most authentic thing anyone has done all day.  (We know that some day it will be our turn to honestly cry for all we’re worth, too!)

I like to think that Mary’s tears might be a little like having your eyes dilated at the eye doctor, that maybe the tears are what allow her to see differently.  Through her tears, Mary takes her first look into the tomb.  What does she see?  She sees two men sitting where Jesus’ body had been, one at the foot, one at the head.  John tells us that the men are angels.  For Mary, they are clearly just two men who are in a place where they don’t belong.  The truth is that angels—God’s messengers—don’t have to be recognized as angels to be angels.  Rather, what makes them angels is that they have a message to deliver.  Interestingly, these angels don’t proclaim anything.  Instead, they are there to ask a question:  “Woman, why are you weeping?”

Ask yourself, “Why does this question matter?”  Think of it this way.  Is Mary weeping because of how awful and cruel and hateful the world can be?  I’m sure she is.  She’s been totally traumatized by the brutality of the week.  However, at its core, is her grief about the nature of the world or is it about how much she misses Jesus?  What is the heart of her grief?

This, too, is our question, sooner or later.  Are you crying because of how hard your friend or family member’s death was, how awful cancer and cancer treatment can be, how insensitive that one person was at a crucial moment?  Or, are you really grieving because it has dawned on you how terribly much you are going to miss that person?  There’s trauma and then there’s grief.  We need to make sure that we are grieving our actual, gut-wrenching loss and not simply the trauma that can be there at the end of a life.

A third person appears to Mary.  She turns around and sees this man.  John tells us that this is Jesus.  Mary can’t see it.  Instead, the man asks her, not one, but two questions:  “Woman, why are you weeping?  Whom are you looking for?”  Can you feel how Jesus drives home the point?  Who are you missing, Mary?  Laid bare in her grief, Mary gives her most honest answer.  She thinks he’s the gardener.  She thinks maybe he knows something:  “Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him and I will take him away.” Mary believes that there might be a way to right the wrong that has happened.  However, Mary does not yet believe…

Then, in one word, the whole world changes.  The risen Jesus simply speaks her name:  “Mary!” In hearing her name, spoken in that familiar voice, she recognizes who is standing before her.  She cries out in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” They are reconnected.  Their relationship is restored.  Mary doesn’t believe some abstract idea about the nature of life or what was necessary or what actually happened to Jesus.  What drives her beyond belief is this incredibly personal moment.  Emmanuel, “God with us,”Jesus, the Christ knows her and calls her by name.  That changes everything.

Why does she recognize Jesus when he calls her name?  She knows this because she had spent so much time connecting to him.  Think of the relationships that matter most to you.  How do you know one another so well?  That connection is hard won by going through life together, day in and day out.  You do things that connect you and you do them over and over again.

I believe that God knows each of us by name, too, because God has been with us, day in and day out.  The challenge is to practice our end of the connection enough so that when the storm comes, when life is piling on, when we find ourselves standing in an empty tomb wondering what the heck just happened, we, too, will recognize the voice when we hear our name called.  It’s hard to be able to do something that we never practiced.  It’s especially hard when the circumstances are terrible and overwhelming.

Interestingly, in the most common translation, Jesus says to Mary, “Do not cling to me.”  I’ve always found that breathtakingly poignant and so telling.  If you have a dream when the loved one you’ve lost appears, you will want to cling to that dream and never wake up.  If you’ve felt a moment of connection, you will want to hold onto that moment forever.  However, while we find comfort in what connects us and eases our grief, we don’t get to cling to that presence.  Rather, there is work to be done and life to be lived.  “I’m with you but there are things you need to do.”  The risen Jesus tells Mary to go to the disciples and tell them what’s going on. (Thus, she becomes an angel in her own right—a messenger of God.)

Finally, the risen Jesus makes one more very personal appearance.  The disciples are terrified of the authorities.  Therefore, they have locked themselves into a room and are cowering in fear.  Again, I think we can understand this.  We’ve all tried to break the chain by hiding.  What happens when we hide successfully is that we often find our greatest fears and brokenness are not “out there” in the world but are, in fact, deep inside of us.  This had to be the case for the disciples.  They had utterly failed Jesus.  They had done things and failed to do things.  They had such deep regrets over so many things, things that just felt unforgivable.  They can’t believe that Jesus could ever love them, not after what they’ve done.

This, of course, is the other side of things being personal.  Most of us have regrets in our times of grief:  “I wish I would have said this…I wish I would have done this and not done that.”  Things get so overwhelming and complicated and we get so exhausted that we know we failed to be the best of who we are.  Sooner or later, we can’t hide from this truth.

The disciples can’t hide either.  Jesus literally does whatever it takes to get to them.  He walks through walls and through locked doors.  There are no barriers to the risen Christ.  And when he shows up, I believe with all my heart, the disciples were terrified.  Even before that moment, when they caught a whisper that Jesus might have risen, that he might be somewhere near, I bet they were afraid.  Why?  I think they expected Jesus to be angry at them or, maybe even worse, completely disappointed.  I bet they thought they had been exposed and that Jesus was coming to “tee them up!”

Jesus, though, does something unbelievable.  He comes to find his friends—the ones who each betrayed him in their own fashion—and he leads with a message of peace.  He forgives them.  Think about it.  There is no more personal moment that we share with those we know and love than the moment in which they have failed miserably and they feel totally exposed.  We could smirk and say, “I told you so.”  We could shake our heads and say, “Shame on you!” We could seek a little personal revenge.  Or, we can choose in that moment of vulnerability. to do the next, most loving thing.

Jesus’ love and forgiveness is an amazing grace, plain and simple.  Jesus empowers the disciples with the Holy Spirit.   Then, he looks them in the eye and tells them, in essence, “Don’t ever forget how awful ‘desperate’ feels.  Don’t ever withhold the grace that I’ve given to you from anyone in need. Pass it on!”