Sermon 23 April wk34: Who is it you're looking for?...WMRBW

We continued on an Easter theme, as we explored John's account of that first
Easter morning.  We began with Mary Magdalene meeting a gardener turned Messiah,
and moved across to an upper room, with Thomas and the other friends of Jesus...

READINGS/ Psalm 133;  John 20:1-31

REFLECTION 1/ Mary Magdalene
I thought that was it –
they’d taken him,
accused him,
tried him,
...crucified him.
I’d heard that last awful cry,
heard that last breath
and then his utter stillness.

I thought that was it –
seen him die
watched as his body
was taken from that cross;
saw him placed inside the tomb
and heard the roll of stone
in groove
and the subtle snick
as stone came to rest
and sealed him in.

I thought that was it –
his light put out,
my heart torn
like the curtain in the temple.
A part of me, also broken,
dead inside,
all hollowed out
and empty.
Who had I been following
all this time?
What was it I’d been looking for?
I’d dared to dream
but under death’s weight,
the dream was crushed.

I thought that was it –
and yet, I wandered
to the garden,
to the grave,
not quite ready
to let it all go.
Perhaps wanting answers,
to make some sense of things.
And there, confronted a scene
that made no sense at all:
a stone rolled away,
a tomb exposed and empty,
angelic messengers,
and a gardener suddenly turned Rabbi.

I thought that was it –
hope shut off,
the journey ended.
A time for weeping.
And then,
a voice,
familiar,
unexpected,
warm and kindly.
I thought that was it –
but somehow it’s not,
for I
have seen the Lord.

REFLECTION 2/ Thomas
Did he condemn me for doubting?
Not a bit of it –
he understood and answered.
Perhaps I should have believed earlier –
but had any of my friends been me,
I suspect they’d have done the same,
been sceptical,
doubted.
Let’s be blunt:
no-one just comes back from death
and wanders into locked rooms
and starts up a conversation.
Was it the grief that was talking, I’d wondered.
Mary’s news of a garden sighting
had put the wind up us.
What could it mean?
Had she gone mad with the sadness of it all?
When Peter and John
had gone and come back
and reported an empty grave
and folded grave clothes,
some of us wondered if the authorities
had ordered it –
best take the body away
and not leave a place that could be
turned into a shrine.
That was certainly more plausible
than the dead rising.
Wasn’t it?
Stuck in that upper room,
with nothing to do but feel fear
and talk of wishful thinking,
I’d gone out.
Needed air,
just as much as we needed food.
And, perhaps, it was also useful to see
how safe it was to take our leave of the City.
Pragmatism and practicality –
that’s why I wasn’t there.
When I came back,
they were jabbering away excitedly,
claimed that they’d all seen him.
Had Mary’s madness spread?
Was there something in the water?
How could I believe what they were saying;
it made no sense.
It hurt too much to even consider the possibility,
and to raise hopes, so recently dashed,
back up again.
So I dug my heels in:
thought that one of us at least
should stop from falling over the edge
into the world of odd speculation
and hallucination.
I couldn’t face waking back up
into disappointment
and closed my mind
against all this talk of resurrection.
And so a week passed.
We were still stuck:
sat in that upper room
with no idea what to do,
or where to go.
It had been hard –
the only one of the group
not to buy into the constant wondering
of whether he’d appear again,
with my constant shake of head
my refusal to play their game,
saying only that ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’
And then
him.
In the room,
a room now peace-filled.
The rabbi, calling my name,
stretching out his hands:
‘Thomas...
touch and see,
believe,
it’s me.’
And I did see –
even more to the heart of him
than the others, perhaps:
understood
that he was not just a man,
but so much more:
‘My Lord, and my God.’

SERMON: 'Who is it you're looking for?
Let’s pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations
of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Back in the day, there used to be a laundrette in Edinburgh called
‘The Lost Sock Café’ –
the name was pure genius and used to make me grin every time I passed by it...
I don’t know about you, but so many times when I do a load of washing,
I spend a lot of time looking for missing socks.
Mind you, these days, I also often find myself looking for a whole assortment
of items that I’ve put somewhere in the manse and then forgotten where they are!
I suspect I’m not alone in this.

Our gospel reading this morning is about looking
for that which seems to have been misplaced...
and about finding, but not initially realising, that what you’ve found is
what – or who – you’ve been looking for.
The first section of our gospel reading concerns Mary Magdalene.
There are so many Marys in the Bible, that’s it’s a job working out which one’s which at times...
However, we initially come across this particular Mary in Luke, chapter 8,
she’s a woman from the area around Galilee, a woman probably from the village of Magdala.
Jesus has been touring the area, teaching and healing –
and, we find, that Mary is one of those healed.
She, along with several other women, defy convention, and become followers of Jesus.
Mary, we discover from this first encounter in Luke, appears to be a woman of means:
we’re told that she uses her wealth to help support the other followers.
Now, over the centuries, a story has built up around Mary that she was a prostitute –
perhaps because she’s also been associated with another story
about the woman who came and washed Jesus’ feet with her tears of repentance.
But, actually, scripture doesn’t make a value judgement on this Mary one way or the other –
there’s no case from scripture to make concerning her past life, or her virtue.
Anyway, over a period of time, Mary, like others, has followed the rabbi called Jesus,
eventually arriving at the city of Jerusalem,
where things all seem to go so horribly wrong.

As with the other friends of Jesus, she’s been through a pretty traumatic time;
her whole world has been turned upside down in the course of a week.
The rabbi that she’s followed –
who’s healed her,
who’s caught her imagination...
who’s taught her,
who’s shared conversation,
and food with her...
the rabbi that she has followed,
who she’s committed to,
and, whose followers she’s financially supported,
...is dead.
And she was there:
from acclamation on the Sunday,
to accusation, to crucifixion, and death, on the Friday

Mary Magdalene has seen it all, and watched Jesus, the beloved Teacher,
placed in a stone-sealed tomb with a sense of awful finality.
The dream has ended –
having descended into the stuff of which nightmares are made.
This is not how it should be:
after all, shouldn’t stories have happier endings than this?
Especially when it had all begun with such promise,
surrounded by what seemed to be a fulfilment of the words of the prophets of old?
But, the rabbi Jesus...is dead.
And along with those other friends of Jesus, there, in Jerusalem, she grieves.

Perhaps, in her grieving, as can happen, questions arise:
had putting her faith in Jesus all been for nothing?
What was it that she’d been looking for?
Who was it that she’d been looking for, and seemed to find in Jesus?
What were her hopes, her expectations, of this travelling rabbi?
Whatever they were, they’d quite literally come to an abrupt dead end.

A couple of days after his death, she finds herself
going to the garden in the early morning.
The account we heard from Luke last week,
mentions other women also going there with her,
and with spices to finish tending to Jesus’ body.
Here, in John’s gospel, however, we see only Mary.
Whether drawn there out of tender practicality to minister to his body,
or, drawn there to find some comfort in being near him even though he’s no longer alive,
there she arrives at the garden.

We know the story:
of the stone, somehow rolled away and the tomb, exposed and empty.
In the midst of her grief, and confusion, her primary concern is voiced:
‘where have they taken the body’ –
‘they’ presumably meaning the authorities.
What new cruelty is this?
Haven’t ‘they’ already done enough?
We also know that in John’s story of that first Easter morning, there’s a lot of running:
Mary races off and meets Peter and John.
Peter and John then race off to see the tomb.
They presumably race off to tell the others
Thereafter, Mary is back in the garden...
looking for Jesus,
wondering what’s happened,
weeping:
even the comfort of being near where he’s buried has been taken away.
And then, a strange conversation with angels, who ask her why she’s weeping.
Having answered the angels, another conversation with the gardener,
who also asks that same question:
‘why are you weeping?’
But then, follows it up with another:
‘Who is it you’re looking for?’

As with many of the resurrection appearances, there’s a strange lack of recognition by Mary:
often those who see the risen Lord, don’t immediately seem to understand that
they’re facing Jesus, until Jesus, in some way or another, reveals who he is by word or action.
It’s one of those puzzling things:
why don’t they realise it’s Jesus?
I wonder:
if you’re not looking for something, or someone,
might that actually play some part in not seeing it when it’s right there in front of you?
Also, Mary Magdalene, and the other friends of Jesus, had seen him die:
and nobody comes back from the dead –
unless you’re Lazarus and Jesus has done the raising.
Their grief, and the whole way in which they saw the world,
had put up some quite understandable barriers to seeing Jesus for who he really was:
for resurrection is not an everyday event...
it’s way beyond the ordinary.

But, back to the garden.
Jesus says to Mary:
‘Who is it you are looking for?’
Mary had been looking for a body,
not a living, breathing Jesus.
Mary had, in Jesus’ lifetime,
been looking for so many things in Jesus:
all her expectations about
what the Messiah would be like,
what the Messiah would do.
A good deal of that may very well have been tied in with cultural expectations.
It’s hard not to want a warrior Messiah to rescue you when you’re living under
an occupying power that has no real understanding
of your culture,
or your God.
Mary, having her hopes of Jesus as Messiah crushed by his death,
is there in the garden, and, momentarily,
she doesn’t see the Messiah,
she sees the gardener
through tear-filled eyes.
Only when he calls her name does she find just who she’s looking for,
and is amazed.

But wait.
Hadn’t he talked about overcoming death?
The conversations begin to come back.
Hope dawns with the beginnings of understanding.
And now, not needing to cling on to her own expectations,
now liberated to see a different way
of looking at things...
of looking at Jesus,
she moves from the tomb
she moves from death
into an understanding of new life, new possibilities.
She heads off to share her story with Jesus’ other friends...
who can’t quite believe her –
for, when we move to the second half of this chapter in John,
there they are, in the evening,
stuck in the upper room,
with doors locked in fear.

Effectively, they’ve ‘done a Thomas’ to Mary: they seemingly refuse to see –
given that they stay put.
Who is it that they’re looking for?
Well, they’re not even looking at this point; they’ve closed themselves off,
closed their minds to the possibility, dismissed it as nonsense.
Only when Jesus appears, and bids them be at peace, do they begin to see:
that which was lost has now been found –
Jesus has risen.
The resurrection penny begins to drop:
what’s deemed nonsense in human terms makes perfect sense to the One
for whom nothing is impossible...

Thomas, as we know, isn’t there...
And, given the earlier reaction – of lack of – to Mary’s news by the others,
it’s quite hard lines on poor Thomas,
that, when Jesus appears to the disciples,
Thomas is the one who gets stuck
with the label of ‘doubter’.
He returns to a changed atmosphere:
something’s happened while he’s been away.
The others claim to have seen the Lord.
Impossible.
Nonsense.
...No matter what Thomas had been looking for in Jesus,
what he may not have been expecting was a risen Messiah.
‘Unless I see him, and touch the wounds, I won’t believe,’ says Thomas.

A week later, still in that upper room,
but this time with Thomas present,
Jesus appears once more,
greets them with words of peace,
and has a conversation with Thomas.
Seeing is believing –
but what is it that Thomas sees?
The others have all seen Jesus,
but it’s only Thomas who goes that step further:
now he knows who he’s looking for –
this is not just Jesus, the man –
there’s something more at work here.
It’s Thomas who gets this, and who responds in words of worship:
‘My Lord, ...    and my God!’

And, bit by bit, as peace fills their hearts,
as the news spreads of resurrection,
the friends of Jesus even manage to leave the upper room that they’d locked themselves in.
They find their faith,
find their voice,
and find themselves rising up together to share the story of the One
who rose from death...

Nearly 2 000 years on, how do we see Jesus, in the light of the Easter accounts?
Who is it that we are looking for?
Writer and Christian activist, Jim Wallis notes that:
'With the Easter eyes of resurrection faith, 
we can see the door through which we too can walk, through which we are invited, 
where we also will be given the news of the resurrection.
And with this hope, sisters and brothers, 
we can know our sins forgiven, 
and our lives made whole. 
We can look into the faces of our children and believe there is a future for them.
With this hope we can look into the eyes of the poor, the suffering, and the dispossessed 
and believe that God is able to establish justice for all. 
With this hope we can together build new communities of faith that will 
someday overcome the barriers of race and class and gender. 
And with this hope we can even look forward to a day when our nation 
no longer measures its security by its weapons, and its status by its wealth.'

As those first friends of Jesus began to look at Jesus through resurrection eyes;
as Mary was moved to run from the garden and tell the news
of new life,
of hope,
and of things thought impossible made possible by God...
as the others eventually moved out from
the upper room and began to share the good news of Jesus with others,
and to spread the message of God’s love in word and action,
so I encourage all of you:
to remember the story,
but don’t just remember it,
allow God’s Spirit to move you -
out of this building and into the world,
to share the message of life and of God’s love:
to be people of the resurrection,
and, in so doing, to transform the world.  Amen.