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"He Is Risen"
Easter Sunday April 12, 2009 John 20: 1-18 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! HE IS RISEN! We’ve got everything in these 18 verses from the Gospel of John! We’ve got human action, human emotion, human error. And each one of us can relate to each of these aspects of our common humanity. Jesus’ body has been moved! Mary is upset and goes to find John and Peter. John and Peter race. John wins. Peter enters the tomb first! But John is quicker to believe! To believe what, though? They go home. Mary stays. Wow! This could be a TV mini-series. But who would watch it when they could live it? Early in the morning, it’s still dark, and the darkness of the hour is a counterpoint to the darkness that still shrouds Mary’s understanding. She finds Jesus’ body gone – has it been moved? Where is it? Who took it? She jumps to an erroneous conclusion and goes to find Peter and John. Don’t we often jump to conclusions, which often prove to be erroneous, sometimes seems to be part of lot in life. Too bad we don’t get any exercise from our jumping. Peter and John hear Mary’s news and race to the tomb – oh they aren’t racing each other, it’s not a contest, but they are running as fast as they can because this is disturbing news. John being the younger and more fleet of foot gets there first, peers in and sees the linen wrappings. Peter gets there and immediately, impulsively enters the tomb, only to find the wrappings laying there, the cloth that had covered Jesus head rolled up as if it will never be needed again. John enters the tomb then, he sees, he believes. It’s all about faith, he believes even though he doesn’t know why, he believes even though he has no real idea as to what it is he believes. At this point in time, he believes that Jesus has risen from the dead, and that’s enough for him. Peter, impulsive Peter, occasionally given insights by the Father: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” but more often putting his own agenda, his own understanding of things, first, may or may not believe at this point that Jesus is risen. Peter who denied Jesus just a few days before, is probably alternating between remorse and grief, hope and a desire to believe, but still fearful, goes home. And so does John. Isn’t that the way of things? We need to act, we need to believe. It’s all up to us. There! Mission accomplished, I’m going home. And Mary, tagging along behind Peter and John, stays at the tomb, weeping. She looks in and sees two angels in white, who ask her: “Woman, why are you weeping?” They’ve taken him away, I don’t know where he is, she replies, persisting in her error. Just like us. Once we reached a conclusion, it can be so hard, so incredibly difficult to abandon it, to challenge it, to change it. We often put Jesus in a box of our own making, constraining him, his love and actions for which we are his agents in this time and in this place. And Jesus is there behind her, she turns and doesn’t know who he is, she doesn’t recognize him, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus she engages in a conversation with the Christ. And don’t we often do the same? We don’t recognize Jesus when we see him, maybe it’s because he outside of our box. Mary supposes Jesus to be someone else and that’s exactly how we are, we see him and suppose him to be someone else. “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” In Isaiah the prophet writes: “I have called you by name, you are mine,” or in a literal translation of the Hebrew: “I summoned by name of you, to me, you.” And the Good Shepherd, the Shepherd who knows his sheep and calls them by name, says: “Mary.” And he tells us “and the sheep know his voice.” All Mary can say is: “Rabbouni!” and she longs to embrace him, but Jesus tells her “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” And Mary, doing now what all should do, what we are commanded to do, doesn’t hold on to Jesus, she doesn’t keep the Good News to herself, she goes and tells the disciples: “I have seen the Lord!” And we can do the same, we can tell, share, proclaim the Good News that we have seen the Lord in a sister or a brother, in the face of a little one or one who is in need. We have seen the Lord, we have seen him because he is risen! Christ has risen and we believe, we believe in the resurrection and we believe that because of his death, because of his resurrection, all for us, we have been given faith by grace and we will be with him in paradise. He is risen! AMEN. Rev. Bruce Hannem, Associate Pastor Lutheran Church of the Cross, Nisswa, Minnesota |
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