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Sermon for Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010
“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb…” Just why she went there is not really made clear. There is no indication that she intended to anoint the body of Jesus, as she carries no spices as the women do in Mark and Luke. Perhaps, as some commentators have suggested, she came to mourn the death of her beloved Lord. That’s very likely.
Four times today John tells us that Mary is weeping, exactly what one would expect from someone in mourning, exactly the same reaction of another woman named Mary, Martha’s sister, following the death of their beloved brother Lazarus. Recall in that story, when the people gathered to comfort this sister they see her abruptly get up and leave the house. “They followed her,” John says, “because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there.”
So perhaps that’s why Mary Magdalene comes to Jesus’ tomb this morning, to weep there; perhaps that’s also why she comes at night, alone, unlike the women in the other Gospels, all of whom come at dawn together. Mary may have found solace in the darkness; it may have hidden her tears, shielded her grief, protected her from those who would follow her and attempt to bring her comfort. Sometimes the more people try and console you, the worse you feel. Perhaps in the darkness she felt closer to Jesus.
In the story of Nicodemus, who came to Jesus by night, darkness is a place where God can be found just as much as it can be a place of blindness, a place in which the truth hides; a place in which what your eyes may see is not really what’s in front of you.
Seven times today John uses words for “seeing” and the seeing always results in some kind of belief; the problem is that belief is usually wrong!
Mary sees that the stone has been removed and she believes that “they have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” She came to the burial place intending to mourn and when she does not see a body, she immediately assumes grave robbers have been there first. A logical assumption, actually; tomb raiding was prevalent in those days.
Simon Peter enters the tomb as well and sees the linen wrappings and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head rolled up in a place by itself. While no mention is made of his reaction, his silence, his lack of amazement is enough to indicate that must agree with Mary. The other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, also goes into the tomb. John says, “He saw and believed,” but his belief must have been somewhat lacking because John immediately adds, “as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”
By now, it must be getting a little lighter in the tomb, but still not light enough to see completely. The two men, following their quick glimpse into the dimness of the tomb, return to their homes. They may have been puzzled, they may have believed, but it was not enough to make them stick around. “But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb.”
Mary continues to weep and to look around. She sees two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying. They ask her why she is weeping and she repeats her earlier belief about grave robbers. These angels say nothing to her about the resurrection; their attention is focused on Mary’s grief. As yet, she does not see clearly.
Then Mary turns around and sees Jesus, “but she did not know that it was Jesus.” She believes she is looking at the gardener. She sees, but her belief is wrong. At first, Jesus says nothing to her about his resurrection; like the angels, he focuses on her grief, which must have been overwhelming. “Woman, why are you weeping?”
Interestingly, the only other instance of the word used here for “weeping” is found in Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples earlier in John: “Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain but your pain will turn into joy.”
Mary’s pain does not turn into joy until she hears Jesus call her by name.
Only then is Mary able to see and she rushes to embrace him; only then, when her grief is penetrated by the Word, does she recognize her beloved teacher; only then, when he speaks her name, touching the depths of who she is, does she not only see, she believes. It took some doing but she stayed where she was when the others ran off; it took some doing but her teacher stayed with her as well.
She clung to her expectations as long as she could, probably as long as she clung to Jesus in the tomb. She had to let both go. She held onto her expectations until the persistent patience of the Risen Lord caused her to see anew. “Do not hold on to me,” he tells her, “but go to my brothers and say to them ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Only then did she leave his side, following his direction, proclaiming his message, crying with joy, “I have seen the Lord!”
She left her expectations lying on the floor of the cave as surely as the Samaritan woman at the well left the water she thought she wanted so desperately on the dusty street after she finally saw Jesus. She expected water to drink to last her for a day; she got, instead, the water of life to last her through her life.
The woman who went to the well that day is not quite the same as the woman who ran back into the city and said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” It took a while for her to see this; she also clung to her expectations. Eventually, her seeking and his patience won out, just as they did for Mary Magdalene.
The woman who went into the tomb this morning expecting to mourn is not quite the same woman who later ran out and ran back into the city, saying to the disciples, and it’s worth repeating, “I have seen the Lord!”
It’s not just about seeing. It’s about seeing the Lord, the Risen Lord. It’s about seeing beyond our expectations; of our selves, of each other, even of God. When we see the Risen Lord, we see what could be; and when we see what could be we are well on our way to making it happen.
Too often our minds work the other way; we fall into what is called a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know what that means. Once an expectation about the future is set in our minds, we tend to act in ways that are consistent with that expectation, blinding us to anything new or different. We become trapped by circumstances; trapped by literalism.
We encounter this phenomenon throughout the Scripture: Nicodemus, hearing that he must be born again, wonders how he can climb back into the womb. Mary, certain that Lazarus is dead, angrily grieves over him. The Samaritan woman goes to the well expecting only water. Mary Magdalene, convinced her Lord’s tomb has been plundered, cannot see beyond her grief. All these people cannot see the possibilities God brings them because they cannot see beyond their expectations.
Jesus, however, saw something in each of them that no one else could. He had higher expectations of those around him; sometimes when you regard people that way, they rise to the occasion.
The origin of the idea of self-fulfilling prophecy is found in the ancient Greek story of Pygmalion, in which an artist longing for the perfect woman and finding none sculpted one himself. He promptly fell in love with his own creation and begged the goddess Venus to turn his statue into a real person. She did so and Pygmalion and his living statue lived happily ever after.
Centuries later, George Bernard Shaw took this idea and wrote the play he called “Pygmalion,” in which Professor Henry Higgins insists he can pick a Cockney flower girl from the streets at random and, with some training, pass her off as a duchess. This story, of course, was later made into the musical “My Fair Lady.”
Higgins succeeds in his experiment, but a key point in the play occurs in a comment the girl, Liza Doolittle, makes to Higgins’ friend Colonel Pickering. “You see,” she says, “really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will, but I know I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.”
How he sees her affects how she sees herself. This is a lesson teachers have long known. In a classic experiment from 1968 called “Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development,” two Harvard professors gave standardized IQ tests to every child in an elementary school. Then they randomly chose 20% of the students from each of the 18 classrooms and told the teachers these kids were “intellectual bloomers” and that they could be expected to show remarkable gains during the year. Note: these kids were picked entirely at random.
At the end of the year, not only did the experimental children show a significant gain in their IQ scores – some as much as 20 points – the teachers also found the “bloomers” to be more appealing, more affectionate and better adjusted than the other children in the classroom. The authors’ conclusion: “The change in the teachers’ expectations regarding the intellectual performance of these allegedly ‘special’ children had led to an actual change in the intellectual performance of these randomly selected children.”
What would happen if we looked at one another and instead of seeing who we expect to see, we see the face of Christ? What would happen if we looked at one another and instead of expecting perfection, we see real people, with all their flaws and all their virtues, redeemed and forgiven by Christ? What would happen if we look in the mirror and instead of seeing the same tired old visage staring back at us, we saw a beloved child of God?
Easter is about seeing the future; a future we see not forgetting our past, not leaving behind all the scars we have accumulated; even the Risen Lord still had the wounds in his hands and side.
We see our past; we see our mistakes; the darkness is part of who we are. How could it be otherwise? As a seminary professor once remarked: “Resurrection is not erasure.”
Our past has formed us. It forms us but it does not determine us; because of God’s saving work at Easter, we now can see ahead. Now, new expectations are born within us. This Easter morning, I urge you to expect joy.