John
20:1-18
Last Saturday I was sitting down to
my Cheerios and I opened my newsfeed and read, “Jewish Graves Vandalized at
Delco Cemetery”. The article began,
“The vandalism was
discovered Friday by a woman visiting Mt. Sharon Cemetery on Springfield Road
to pay respects at her father’s grave.”
My
stomach flipped.
When
I was in high school, there was a bunch of us who sort of traveled everywhere
as a pack, and one of the guys in the group had a mother who was a real
character. She had a habit of checking
on him all the time, and it was a standing joke that whenever we were at
somebody else’s house and the phone rang we would all say, “Eric! It’s your mother!” About 75% of the time we were right. She was a trip. She eased up in some ways after we all graduated,
but she never pulled her punches. I
remember when Eric’s younger sister became engaged to – hold on, here! – a Methodist. She called me up unexpectedly and said, “Hello. It’s your Jewish mother. Heidi is engaged and I need you to talk to
her because he’s one of yours, and Sidney is not happy.” Sidney was her husband, a wonderful man who
loved to show people around his lab at Penn.
Of course, the way he would get there every day was to drive down
Chestnut St. in a huge boat of a car, driving just at the thirty miles per hour
that kept him from slowing down, since the traffic lights were timed. Potholes and food trucks and bicyclists and
any car smaller than his were no obstacles.
My
friend’s mother chain-smoked, so you know she died of cancer and was buried at
Mt. Sharon. A few years later, after a
brief retirement to Florida, her husband’s body was brought back to be buried
there, too. My friend Eric now lives in
Massachusetts, and last month when there was vandalism at a Jewish cemetery in
Philadelphia I promised that if there was ever a problem at Mt. Sharon, I would
go right there and check on his parents’ graves for him. I texted him right away, and he replied with
a list of other relatives’ last names that would be on stones near theirs, and
I headed out the door. A few minutes
later, at a red light, I read another message: “I don’t think you will get into
Mt. Sharon today. Closed for Sabbath.”
(Good
news followed later that day, which was that the damage was determined to have
come from normal shifts in the ground due to all the rain that we have
had. The police declared there was no
vandalism involved. Furthermore, the
stones were all in a different section.) Sadly, though, it has been going on, and even a false alarm has meant that I come to this first sentence of John’s account of Easter morning with a small awareness of the sick feeling that Mary Magdalene, who had had to wait
out the Sabbath before going to Jesus’ tomb to complete his burial, must have
had when she saw the stone moved away. Who would desecrate a grave, and why?
“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.” [John 20:1]
But while I wonder, “What kind of slimeball would do such a thing?” she
didn’t need to wonder. She must have
known, right away, who could have done it.
Most likely, it was the people who
had had him killed. If so, there would
not likely be much left, if anything, for her to take care of. His body would not have been the last to have
been considered hazardous. When the
English captured Joan of Arc during the Hundred Years’ War, they put her on
trial for witchcraft and for wearing men’s clothing, although the real reason
was military and political. She was
found guilty and burned at the stake, and then her ashes were tossed into a
river so that not the least relic of her would be left. You don’t have to go that far back,
though. When Navy Seals killed Osama bin
Ladin, his body was flown to an aircraft carrier and buried at sea, so that
there would be no grave where his followers could gather. Extinguishing the memory is easier when there
is no memorial.
While it was still dark, for Mary it
grew darker. The people who could violate
the Sabbath to open a tomb, then probably desecrate Jesus’ dead body – what might
they do to one of his female followers if they caught her? It doesn’t take much imagination.
Innocence offers no protection in
this world. That is a hard truth to
accept because we think that it should, and cannot let go of that thought. Babies and children, completely unaware of
anyone beyond their families, are caught in the crossfire of a war. Someone’s grandmother is ripped off by a
scammer claiming to be from the IRS.
Somehow, the crime is greater because the victim is so vulnerable.
But
what if there is no human perpetrator?
Whom do you blame for tuberculosis?
Whose fault is it when a shark takes out a swimmer? A parent watches a child burning up with a
fever and thinks, “My child does not deserve this.”
You know what? That parent is right, and that hurts. We want a reason, a specific reason that this
happened to that person, at this time, and in that way. Otherwise we are left to try to make sense of
the senseless. It is one of the most
difficult things to say that some people are just born with heart defects and
sometimes the brakes fail as a car goes around a curve. It seems brutal to say, but true to experience,
that there will be earthquakes and tornadoes, and someone will die, and it has
nothing at all to do with whether or not they deserve it. It just happens. That is part of the darkness that we live
with.
It’s also why what happened to Mary
next is of such importance. It’s why we’re
here today and every Sunday, the day that Jesus rose from death. Jesus’ rising is more than just a person
being brought back to life, like when a patient dies on the operating table,
but then is revived. It’s more than one
more miracle. Mary, who followed Jesus,
surely knew about some of those: how Jesus had raised the son of a widow when
they ran into his funeral procession outside the town of Nain [Luke 7:11-17],
how he had taken the hand of a little girl whose parents were mourning, and
with the words,
“Little
girl, get up!” [Mark 5:41]
gave
her back to them. She may even have been
in the crowd a few days earlier when Jesus had cried for his own dead friend,
Lazarus, and then with the words,
“Lazarus! Come out!” [John 11:43]
called
him out of the tomb where he had been sealed for four days. No, people, had been reanimated before and,
as scary as the thought is, there was precedent.
This was different, though.
Probably
for safety, Mary didn’t go into the tomb, but ran for backup and returned with
Peter and John. They looked around and
saw that the tomb was empty, and went home.
Again, you have to feel for her because of the way she stayed there,
crying, with nobody to comfort her. The
sun may have been up at this point, but there was still a deep darkness upon
her heart, a grief and a fear and the deepest disappointment. Not even when she looked in and saw two
angels did she take a hint that maybe it wasn’t so dark as she thought,
although maybe she clung to some small hope that this was not an act of
vandalism or horrible barbarity when she heard a human voice asking what the problem
was and,
“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.’” [John
20:15]
This
was different, because there was a third possibility that had not occurred to
her, and that possibility spoke her name.
Through the tears, then, she knew him.
She knew that no one had moved him or disposed of him in any way. She knew that, without any kind of human intervention,
even prayer, Jesus had been raised up.
It was God’s doing, pure and simple.
There is no protection in this life,
as there had been none even for Jesus. But
he was alive – is alive – because the final say is God’s. That, and that alone, is enough to give
substance to our wildest hopes. All the
questions and all the verifiable injustices and all the senseless tragedies
that darken this world may continue to puzzle us, make us angry, or flood us
with sadness. When they do that, though,
there is the awareness that beyond our comprehension or control, God is setting
things right in his own time and his own way, starting with Jesus, but not
ending with him.
That was the faith that Mary showed
when she ran back again to the other disciples and told them,
“I
have seen the Lord!”
[John 20:18]
That’s
the faith that they came to share and to pass along, a faith that keeps going
in the darkness because it knows, it just knows, that God will send the dawn. Faith is the assurance that even in the
valley of the shadow of death, God is with us.
Faith tells us that beyond that valley, there is a time and place where
God will prepare a feast for us, even in the face of the world’s ugliness and
villainy, and our cups will be filled to overflowing. Faith rooted in the resurrection of Jesus says
to us, deep in our hearts, that the world’s evils may be stalking us out there
in the darkness for now, but goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of
our lives and – even more – we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Because, while it was still dark,
when Mary got to the tomb, it was empty.
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