Keep Looking, Keep Listening
Keep Looking, Keep Listening
John 20:1-18
Last week, I tried to offer a perspective on God as a loving parent who has never wanted anything more from us than to be loved back. Having tried to find that loving relationship with human beings in almost every way imaginable, God becomes one of us—Emmanuel—in order to show us what it means to live a life of faith. Jesus cares for the sick, feeds the hungry, forgives, humbles himself and loves the seemingly unlovable. Then, he keeps saying to the people around him, “Okay, now you try!”
The problem in Jesus’ day which still persists today is that we expect to get some kind of a payoff for doing the right thing. Jesus is asking us to do things that don’t make sense in the world’s view. “Why would I waste my time caring about the people no one cares about? Why would I love my enemy instead of attacking him? Why would I humble myself instead of using the power I have to get whatever I can get? This is a big ‘ask’ Jesus. Can I ask you, ‘What’s in it for me?’”
Some people early in Jesus’ ministry (and a whole lot of people over the centuries) have tried to say that if you’re a faithful person then the “payoff” will be an easy life. If you’re a faithful person, good things will come your way because God will want you to have everything you want. Stop, though, and think for a minute. Does anyone here believe that the mark of a loving parent is that they give their kids everything they’ve ever wanted? Of course not! Yet, that’s the vision of a loving God that sells a lot of books—the prosperity Gospel.
Of course, the problem that unfolded in Jesus’ ministry and is preserved for us in the Gospels is that things don’t get easier over time for Jesus and his disciples. Things get brutally difficult. Being loved by God doesn’t mean that someone will be loved by the powers that be in this world. In fact, it’s fair to expect the opposite. Following Jesus was going to cost people deeply. That’s why most people who heard him didn’t follow him. (So much for that, “If I’d only been there to see him for myself” theory!) That’s why those with power began plotting against him from the beginning.
So, the heart of the Gospel is the truth that the longer Jesus lives in this faithful way, the worse the world treats him. This culminates in the final week of his life when he is betrayed and abandoned and falsely accused and tortured and convicted and crucified. Not all of those things may happen to us. (Thank God!) However, I’ve never understood how a close read of Jesus’ story could lead anyone to think that faith will somehow protect us from suffering or that faith will somehow make us wildly successful. We should expect that there will be a cost to discipleship.
The Gospel is not about how to win friends and influence people. The Gospel is not about how to succeed in business without even trying. The Gospel isn’t about how to live a life of ease. No…the Gospel is about learning to live a life where the most important thing is your loving relationship with God. The question isn’t “What’s in it for me?” The question is, “Where is God in this moment?” Continually asking that question, doing our best to discern an answer, and making choices based on that discernment is what the life of faith is all about. And the reason why we do this? Well, to put it simply…because we are grateful that God loved us first and keeps loving us, no matter what.
Why did those bad things happen? Again, God is the unconditionally loving parent, not the punitive judge. Bad things happen not because the unconditionally loving parent wants to punish us. Bad things happen because the world is broken, because people who have power and money and status want to hold onto those things, because people are so short sighted that we are unwilling to make the long term sacrifices to correct past mistakes. Bad things happen because the chain reactions get going in this world of me handing my anger over what happened unfairly to me onto you for no good reason. Then that cycle is repeated over and over again. Bad things happen because we have not taken responsibility for stopping them from happening, for changing what needs to be changed. Bad things happen because people can forget to use the minds that God has given them. Bad things happen because we forget that we have to work together.
The God who is revealed in Christ is not a God who punishes us but a God who suffers with us. Again, this is the loving parent in action. We totally love our children but we can’t keep them from suffering along the way. What we will not allow them to do, though, is suffer alone. We will find love and meaning even in the hardest times. We will remind each other that sometimes the only way out is through. We will also look each other in the eye and say, “If we have to go through this, we will go through this together!”
All of this is what leads to the most crucial insight. If we do not have to be afraid of what is genuinely hard in this life, if we do not even have to be afraid of death, itself, then we have a shot at spending more time being who God intended us to be. The Easter good news is that not even death can separate us from the love of God. Suffering is real. Death is real. However, in the end, love wins.
On the Sunday after Easter, we stand in this strange interlude. We are in the space between Easter and Pentecost, with Pentecost being the Sunday when everyone looks at one another and whispers, “What’s Pentecost again?” I want to do better than that this year. For a brief period of time, people had experiences of the presence of the risen Christ. Then, things changed again. For a while, we are going to look at those experiences not as a magical, mystical tour but as essential clues for us if we want to live a life that is oriented around the loving presence of God. Then, we’ll be ready for Pentecost.
First, though, I have to remind you of one more thing. As I’ve already said, I disagree with the folks who think Jesus came to show us how to succeed. I also disagree with the folks who think that Jesus came to show us how to go to heaven, not hell. As I said last Sunday, I do believe that the God who loves us in this life, loves us well beyond this life. In the end, trusting this loving God ought to make this life matter more than ever. We don’t seek to live our faith to get what we want in this life or to get what we want in the next life. We seek to live our faith because we are grateful that we have been given the gift of life at all and that God is here and loving us every day. The question is not “What’s in it for me?” The question is, “How can I ever find a way to thank God?”
So, the clues that we are going to explore aren’t about how to get something or how to get to go somewhere. The clues are about how to recognize God’s presence in really turbulent times. What should I be watching and listening for? If the risen Christ was standing right in front of me, how would I ever know?
The Gospels tell us that in this brief time when people actually met the risen Jesus, almost no one recognized him at first. Consider our text for this morning. On Easter morning in the Gospel of John, the first person to make it to the tomb is Mary Magdalene—one of the faithful women. When she sees the stone rolled away from the mouth of the tomb, what does she do? She assumes the worst. She assumes that Jesus’ body has been stolen.
I dare you to try to do anything other than confess that you’ve been there and done that, too. If you saw a whole lot of awful things happen in a row, what did you expect that the next thing would be? You were sure it was the “next worst” thing, right. Mary is standing right on the edge of unbelievably good news but she can’t see it. Instead, she runs to tell the disciples the bad news.
What do the disciples do? They start out with good intentions—to go check out this latest wrong. However, what do they do along the way? They make it all about themselves. They start racing each other to see who can get there first. The Gospel tells us that they, too, made it to the edge of the good news but what they believed in the end was Mary’s bad news—that something terrible had taken place. Disheartened, they headed home.
Unlike the disciples, Mary stands her ground. She stands there with no answers but with an awful lot of tears. (Anyone but me had a good cry lately? I hope so. We are in a time when most of us have far more tears and questions than we have answers.) Through her tears, she looks into the tomb. Two angels are sitting there waiting for her. Now, let’s think less about these two figures and their wings and think more about their purpose. Angels in Scripture are messengers. They are there to bring the truth to life. (You may not have ever met an angel with wings but I bet you have felt like someone was put in your path to deliver the truth that you needed to hear at just the right moment.) What’s so interesting about these angels is that they don’t lecture Mary. Instead, they ask her a question: “Woman, why are you weeping?” They invite her to look inside of herself, to search her heart. Her heart is broken. She’s not ready, yet: “They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him.” The same despairing answer…
Almost as soon as she says this, though, she turns around. (How easy is it when we are stuck and sad and despairing to forget to turn in a new direction, right?) The risen Jesus is standing right in front of Mary! She does not recognize him, though. Jesus asks her the same question: “Woman, why are your weeping?” Mary thinks that the risen Jesus is the gardener. She thinks maybe he can tell her where to find Jesus’ body: “Sir, if you have carried him away…” Mary has seen a rock rolled away from a tomb. She’s seen two angels. She’s seen the risen Christ, himself. But, she’s blinded by sadness and grief and her own bitter expectations.
Then, the breakthrough happens. It happens in a single word. The risen Jesus looks Mary straight in the eye and says, “Mary!” He calls her by name in a voice that she suddenly recognizes. Her broken heart starts to warm and beat again. Somehow, the voice to whom she had tuned herself for years was powerful enough to be heard through the roar of all that was bad. Mary speaks one word back, “Rabbouni,”—teacher. The connection is restored. Having been previously blinded by grief and despair, Mary runs to tell the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!”
Let me remind you again, appearances like this to Mary only take place for a few weeks after Jesus’ death and only with a handful of people. Then, something else is going to happen. Before we get to that something else, though, we have to pick up the clues. Mary is struggling mightily. She can’t see what’s right in front of her but she keeps looking. She keeps listening. Finally, there is a breakthrough moment where she hears what’s familiar in the midst of all the mayhem. She is brave enough to feel again. The challenge is to keep looking, to keep listening. The challenge is to keep believing that God’s in here somewhere.
There’s plenty of mayhem still today, right? If you hearts not broken then you’re simply not paying attention. Are you still looking? Are you still listening? Cry the tears that need to be shed. Dare to feel. Ask your questions. Don’t forget to listen for the messengers. Will you be willing to turn around and look at things a bit differently? Most importantly, will you listen for the still-small voice that will call to you, too, even in the midst of this storm, the voice that knows you by name. That voice may come from some “gardener” standing in front of you—maybe the person working at the store, maybe the friend or family member on Zoom. Of course, the mind blowing possibility is that this voice might even rise from within you, from deep inside your tattered but still beating heart.