The Best Story
Easter Sunday
The best stories are usually the old stories, aren’t they? I realize that this term “old” might be a relative one, especially in a world where tastes and trends change so rapidly. But I would guess that all of us probably have our favorites. The story that we tell on Easter is one of the oldest and one of the best that we have, mainly because of its ability to speak to us with power across a gulf of two thousand years, its ability to crash our party and shake us up and maybe, if we’re really paying attention, to teach us something new each time we hear it, especially if we look at this old story with fresh eyes.
John’s gospel invites us to look at this story through the eyes of a woman named Mary. Mary of Magdala. For the small amount that was actually written about Mary of Magdala, she has inspired more than her fair share of hypotheses. For our purposes today, we’re going to stick to the Scriptural evidence about this woman, what we do know for sure, according to the words of the gospels. She was one of several women who followed Jesus and his disciples throughout the earthly ministry of Christ, and took care of their needs. She had once been possessed by seven demons, which Jesus had driven out. She loved Jesus with a pure and devoted love, because he had changed her life. And unlike most of the male disciples, she appears at the cross during Jesus’ final hours. Not surprisingly, then, given her devotion and courage, she also appears at the empty tomb three days later, in all four gospel accounts. The resurrection story is a story about Jesus, of course. This comes first. But it is also the story of Mary of Magdala, a story which she undoubtedly told and retold throughout her remaining years. How would she have told it?
When we try to approach this story through Mary’s perspective, we realize that the Easter story is a story about expectation. What was this woman expecting when she went to the tomb on that Sunday morning after Christ died? When the rooster crowed and she stumbled out of bed to rush to the burial place of her Lord, what did she think she would find? The answer that we get from Scripture is not what we might think. She certainly didn’t expect to find an empty tomb. This is something we need to realize if this story is ever going to move us beyond familiar boredom and into the proper sense of awe-inspired worship. We’ve heard the story so many times that whenever we open our Bibles to John chapter 20, or Matthew chapter 28 or Mark 16 or Luke chapter 24, we know what we’re going to find. An empty tomb. A resurrected Lord. Just like he said. Just like we’ve been saying for two thousand years now. He is risen. He is risen indeed. But just because we know how the story ends, that doesn’t mean Mary did. Or any of Jesus’ followers, for that matter.
At the end of the previous chapter, we read that two men, Joseph and Nicodemus, prepared the body of Jesus for burial. They brought him to this cave, they poured seventy-five pounds of spices on his body, and they wrapped him tightly with strips of linen. Would they have bothered with all of this if they knew he was going to be up and walking around 48 hours later? No, they expected Jesus to stay dead. Peter and James and John and all of the other disciples, those who had listened to Jesus teach and preach for three solid years, expected Jesus to stay dead. Mary Magdalene expected Jesus to stay dead. As far as they knew, that’s what dead people do. The only exceptions in their experience had been miracles, and after seeing what they had seen on Friday, they just didn’t have it in them to hope for one of those. So Mary went to the tomb expecting to pay her respects, expecting to grieve, expecting to remember, in the midst of all her pain, that day when Jesus had healed her and made her new. What she didn’t expect to find was a missing body.
When we come to worship, whether we’re talking about Easter or any one of the other fifty-one Sunday mornings we gather each year, we might expect a lot of things. We expect to sing some songs. We expect to read Scripture and hear a sermon. We expect to greet each other, to catch up on each other’s lives, and to share in an experience of worship, fellowship, and communion with God and our brothers and sisters in the faith. What we might not expect, if we’re really honest with ourselves, is an encounter with the risen Lord of the universe, Jesus Christ. Like Mary, we might come to pay our respects to a Jesus who isn’t really among us anymore, to remember the stories we’ve heard about him, and to pray for his guidance in our lives, but on most days, I imagine we aren’t really counting on meeting him here. We say he’s present, but do we mean it? Do we really mean that this God who triumphed over death, sin, and the devil in such a powerful way is sitting among us? I believe we mean exactly that, or we don’t mean anything at all. So I need to stop coming to worship, we need to stop coming to worship, thinking we know what’s going to happen. I need to gather every Sunday, and face life on Monday through Saturday, expecting something big, something that shakes our carefully ordered, planned-out existence off the Richter scale. We don’t come here to pay respects to a dead God, but to worship a risen one.
When Mary’s expectations were shaken on that first Easter morning, when she found not a carefully sealed tomb but an empty grave, the Easter story immediately became a story about exhilaration. She might have had a lot of ideas about what had gone on that morning, but they all pushed her to the very limits of human emotion. Look at what she goes through from the moment that she realizes the tomb is empty. She’s frantic. She runs to the first place she can think of, to the place where the disciples were hiding out, and she blurts out the only explanation that she’s capable of comprehending: “They’ve taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they’ve put him!” The careful observer might slow down and ask Mary who she means by “They”, who are these mysterious people who have taken the Lord? This is the stuff of conspiracy theories and half-baked ramblings.
But this was no time for careful observation, and soon Peter and John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, are caught up in the exhilaration as well. They start sprinting back and forth from the tomb, racing each other to catch a glimpse of this bewildering, terrible, amazing thing that has happened. Everyone’s on an emotional roller coaster, from doubt and fear to hope and back again. Mary stands in the garden outside the cave, crying her eyes out, unable to make heads or tails of all that has happened, emotionally drained to the point of exhaustion. She sees the gardener, and when he asks her why she’s crying, she experiences a moment of hope, as she prays that this man might know where she can find the body of her crucified savior. Remember, she’s not even imagining, in her wildest dreams, that Jesus might be alive. She just wants to re-bury him out of respect for the dead. But when this gardener speaks her name, in the voice that had driven out her demons and comforted her in her pain, her despair, her grief, her paralyzing hysterical sadness becomes joy. The text says that she turned toward him. I can imagine her head spinning around like a top, and her eyes getting as big as plates as she faces her Rabboni, her teacher, the one who had given her life its meaning and who now, before her eyes, had given a new meaning to death as well.
I could use more of this exhilaration. I could use more sprinting and weeping and spinning and hysterical laughter in my relationship with God. I’m not talking about emotion for emotion’s sake. I’m talking about a passion for prayer, a sorrow over my sinfulness, an unbridled joy over the forgiveness that Christ offers, a sense that this roller coaster called life is only worthwhile because God’s at the switch. Too often, I settle for going through the motions instead of drinking deeply from the well of God’s love, eating gluttonously from the banquet of God’s word, gasping at the awesome might of my heavenly father and the unparalleled goodness of his son. Mary had a hard day. She went through a lot in a few short hours, every emotion we could possibly imagine, some of them unspeakably bad, and others undeniably good. At the end of her day, she was no doubt exhausted, worn out, completely spent. But I guarantee you she wouldn’t have traded her time at the empty tomb, her early morning roller coaster ride through the miracle of resurrection, for anything in the world. The resurrection story, the truth that the Savior of the world who had died on a wooden cross was now alive and well and posing as a gardener, is an exhilarating story. This is exciting stuff.
But all of this expectation, all of this exhilaration, would mean nothing if this story weren’t about something else as well. The resurrection story, for Mary Magdalene and for us, is a story about transformation. On this day, the Sunday after the Jewish Passover feast, the Sunday after the crucifixion of a prisoner named Jesus, everything was changed forever. As I said earlier, dead people stayed dead. Sure, various religions had always had theories about what happened when this life was through, but until that Sunday morning, no one had ever actually demonstrated, no one had ever stood in as a human visual aid, for what that new life might be all about. But Jesus did. Jesus died, and Jesus was resurrected. He was the same, but not the same. He was living and walking and talking, but in a different way. He was in the world, but in a different way, and he was going to the father. Not just his father. Our father too. He was going home. Not just to his home. Our home too.
Because of the resurrection of Jesus, everything changed forever. Death doesn’t have the power it used to have. Fear doesn’t have the power it used to have. The violence of a government like the Roman empire doesn’t have the power it used to have. And in the midst of all of this broken down power, among all these memories of the way the world used to operate, Jesus Christ stands glorified as the one with real power, a power that he used to tear down the strongholds of death and hell, not just for himself, but for all of those who believe. Everything is changed. Everything is transformed. But Mary isn’t forgotten. She’s not just left out in the cold, and neither are we.
Notice how this Easter event, in the process of transforming the nature of the universe, transforms Mary as well. Jesus turns to her and gives her a mission. He issues a call: Go and tell. This woman, who would have been viewed by society as someone not worth listening to, let alone trusting, who had been healed by a Galilean carpenter and said goodbye to her seven demons forever, has been transformed into a missionary, a messenger, a proclaimer of the glorious truth that he who was dead is now alive. The Lord is risen!
Maybe you think there’s no hope that someone like you could ever be used by God. That you could never minister to others or teach others the wonders of Christ’s love and the power of his forgiveness. I have to admit that before that first Easter, you might have been right. But then things changed. When that stone was rolled away, when those angels came down, when that gardener with nail marks in his hands spoke the name of Mary of Magdala, everything was transformed. I was transformed, you were transformed, the fabric of the world was transformed. It’s now a world where a formerly demon-possessed woman can encounter the risen Lord and be the first to spread the news. In a world like that, how can we not rush into the arms of the one who died for us, and rose again, and has gone to prepare a place for us, in the kingdom of his father?
