"Mary!"

“Mary!”

John 20:1-18

So, we’ve looked at Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s perspectives on Easter and the events following.  Here’s what you need to know as we begin today.  New Testament scholars refer to Matthew, Mark, and Luke as the “synoptic” Gospels.  That sounds complicated but it’s really not.  We’ve all been asked in an English class somewhere along the way to provide a “synopsis” of what we’ve read.  We provide a description of the plot.  To say that these three Gospels are “synoptic” is to say that they share a common plot.  Scholars have long believed that they even shared a common source which is called “Q”—not “Q Anon,” just “Q.”  No one has ever found “Q,” but scholars have been writing about it for a long time. 

Matthew, Mark, and Luke arrange things in a slightly different order and emphasize different things.  They each include moments that are not found in the others, too.  They each also definitely have their own writing styles and are writing to different audiences.  However, the bottom line is that when you read them, there is something familiar about what you are reading.  They all reside in roughly the same “zip code.”  

Then, there’s the Gospel of John.  Instead of a nice Christmas story, we get, “The Word becoming flesh.”  The first miracle is providing wine for a wedding where they are running short.  Jesus gives a whole lot of speeches and makes “I statements” that are not found in the other Gospels:  “I am the way, the truth and the life.” This Gospel is deeply philosophical and theological and often makes me miss the concreteness and practicality of the synoptic Gospels.  Still, this is our fourth “witness,” and the one that demands our attention this morning.

In John, on Easter morning, there is only one woman who makes her way to Jesus’ tomb:  Mary Magdalene.  Although history is reluctant to take the role of women seriously, there are strong suggestions that, in the earliest days of the church, women played powerful roles.  Mary Magdalene may have been the most powerful woman.  In fact,  Mary was so powerful that, later on, the “powers that be” would put a lot of effort into discrediting her, suggesting she was possessed by demons or had been a prostitute.  Knowing all of that, it is amazing that the lone figure at the start of Easter morning in the Gospel of John is Mary. This had to be either really controversial or simply an undeniable fact that couldn’t be burried.

In all four Gospels, the women make it to the tomb first.  In Mark, they end up terrified and running away.  In Matthew and Luke, the women run to tell the disciples.  In Luke, the disciples don’t believe them.  All of which makes this moment with Mary Magdalene very interesting.  She goes to the tomb, finds the stone rolled away, isn’t met by any strangers—dazzling or otherwise—and she runs.  She’s not running away in terror.  Instead, she’s made an assumption, namely, that Jesus body has been stolen.  (Remember, this is the rumor that the authorities were said to have started.) She runs to tell Peter and, “the other disciple whom Jesus loved,” not that Jesus has been risen but that Jesus’ body has been stolen.

Let’s stop there for a minute.  What’s up with, “the other disciple whom Jesus loved?” This is the Gospel of John’s way of speaking of…John!  Now, it may well be the case that the Gospel of John was written by a community of John’s followers. In this case, this would be a humble way of referring to the disciple whom they loved. In fact, one agenda of the Gospel of John is to claim John’s place as a special disciple.  So, when you hear, “the one whom Jesus loved,” just subsitute the word, “John.”

So, Mary tells Peter and John, at which point the two men start racing to the tomb.  In the early days of the church, the two most powerful leaders would have been Peter and Paul.  This footrace seems like another way to position John, not Paul, as Peter’s peer.  In fact, as the footrace unfolds, “the one whom Jesus loved” turns out to be even faster than Peter.  John gets there first but he doesn’t go in.  He looks, though, and sees the linen burial cloths.  Then, Peter arrives and goes into the tomb and examines the linen cloths in detail.  Only after that does John enter the tomb.  And having had a good look around, both of them believe.  They don’t believe that Jesus has been resurrected.  They believe exacgtly what Mary told them—that Jesus’ body has been stolen. 

So, pause for a moment.  The first thing that happens on Easter morning is that three central figures in early Christianity—Mary Magdalene, Peter, and John—believed that a crime, not a resurrection had taken place.  The faithful woman, Mary, was there but on her own, she believed the worst.  Peter and John were there but on their own, they too believed the worst.  

It’s worth pointing out two other things before we move on.  It’s sad to me that while the three synoptic Gospels tell the story of women who were faithful enough to get to the tomb and, with a little help, were faithful enough to be called to preach to the disciples, John tells us an altogether too familiar story in the patriarchal world of a woman who led the “good men” astray.  She comes to the wrong conclusion and convinces the disciples to come to the wrong conclusion, too.

Second, the writer of John keeps referring to Peter as “Simon Peter.”  I think this is a “dig” at Peter’s followers and at Peter himself.  Simon is who Peter was before Jesus renamed him, “Peter,” “the rock.” Calling him by his old name is a bit of a “diss.”  

So far, in John’s take, we are “0 for 3” on Easter.  No one gets it.  The boys? They just head home.  What’s happening here?

Mary stays at the empty tomb, sobbing.  She looks into the tomb and sees two angels in white sitting where Jesus’ body had been, one at the foot, one at the head.  One of the angels asks, “Woman, why are you weeping?”  Mary gives a heartbreakingly honest answer:  “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” She turns around and sees a third figure, whom we are told is the risen Jesus, but she does not recognize this. She is literally blind with grief.  She doesn’t see the angels. She doesn’t see Jesus.  She is lost in the darkness of the worst of what can happen in life.  In that blindness and darkness she makes another assumption.  She assumes that Jesus is the gardener.  She pleads with him to tell her what has happened to the body.  Instead, he speaks the one word that can call her back to life and back to the light.  He calls to her:  “Mary.”

This is the most powerful “take-away” for me in the Gospel of John.  Mary sees an empty tomb but she doesn’t understand.  She comes to the wrong conclusion.  Mary sees the angels and doesn’t understand.  Mary sees the risen Christ, himself, and thinks he looks a lot like a gardener.  The only thing that can pull her out of her false assumptions and blindness and grief is hearing her own name, spoken by the one whom she dearly loved:  “Mary.”

Again, let’s connect this to our experiences.  We may not have been to the empty tomb on Easter morning but we have all been to some dark places.  We have all been blinded by grief and lost in our worst assumptions and caught in a profound darkness.  And when it looked like all was lost, including our sense of ourselves, someone—some Christ like figure in that moment—called us by our name.  We heard our name spoken by a voice that we recognized.  We were brought back to life and light again.

And if, by chance, you have not yet been to that dark place, well…I just want to plant a “bulb,” if you will.  When the hard things just keep piling up, when the light has grown dim, make a note to yourself to keep listening carefully as you navigate that darkness because, sooner or later, that voice will call to you and call you by name and call you back to life, as well.

Mary, in an instant, recognizes Jesus.  What does she call him?  She calls him, “Rabbouni,” the Hebrew word for teacher, “Rabbi,” in English.  Despite attempts in history to imply that was “something more” to the relationship between Mary and Jesus, the most profound way for her to address him is as her teacher, the one who showed her how to really live a loving life at all.

Then, Jesus says a second, fascinating thing to her:  “Do not touch me.”  In my opinion, this is an unfortunate translation to English.  The force of what Jesus is saying, some scholars argue, is, “Do not cling to me.” Again, for any of us who have had our hearts broken by grief, there is always a tension between holding onto them for dear life and knowing that we have to let them go.  We cannot cling to them.  Wherever those we have loved and lost have gone—whatever that mystery may be—we have to do the hard work of letting them go, even when, for a moment, it feels like they are right here with us.

Finally, Jesus charges Mary to go and tell the disciples.  What she is to tell them is mysterious, “That I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” That’s a lot different than the synoptic gospel’s instructions:  “Meet me back home in Galilee.” Whenever John has the chance, he chooses the mystery.  He offers us theology.  However, what Mary offers the disciples are the most concrete words imaginable:  “I have seen the Lord.”  The thing is, I suspect they saw that truth in her eyes before she ever said a word.

When it comes to Easter, it’s hard to feel like, “Well, maybe you had to be there.”  We have to remember though that even for those who were, Easter was mostly misunderstood.  Everyone agrees that when it comes to the empty tomb, we are looking at a huge mystery.  The only people who made any sense of that mystery were the people who were invited to remember what Jesus taught or the people who met the risen Jesus themselves.  Until we have have our own experiences of that mystery ourselves, we have to work at trusting those who have gone before us.  We have to learn to live with the mystery, ourselves.