Scripture: John 20:1-18
“Whom are you looking for?” That’s the question of the day. Why are you here? Why did you come to this place this morning? Or how about, what did you come here expecting find? If you came in the hopes that all your questions would get answered—your scientific questions about resurrection, your historical questions about political intrigue and body-snatching, your spiritual questions about life after death—then you’re out of luck. While you may be looking for the preacher to prove something to you, to lay out the verifiable facts, the truth of the matter is that today we are invited to explore something more real, more important, than what we have been trained to think of as the facts. And that’s not a cop-out. There are simply no human categories or words or theories or methods to prove what we celebrate today. There’s no answer key to break the code of words and symbols and memories and visions that we proclaim today. In fact what we’re all about today is so beyond our puny capacities for comprehension that we only glimpse what it might really be about in glimmers and moments of light and vision altogether too fleeting and few. The rest of the time we hang onto what we can hang onto.
“Whom are you looking for?” The question floats into our broken hearts and spirits—our ever searching hearts and spirits, ever seeking something, someone, someplace, some understanding, some meaning, that will mend what is torn, complete what is chipped and missing pieces, that will fill the empty room within our own souls. “While it was still dark,” the scriptures say, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb, the place of death; the tomb was carefully, completely, and forever sealed. Mary was grieving, having lost the one person who, according to tradition, had given her life back to her in more ways than one. This man who Mary came to mourn loved her in a way that was really, concretely, life-giving. But he was dead. So while it was still dark, she came to the tomb, hollow inside, the way you are when someone you love has died, aware of the pieces of your life that have been torn out of your heart at the person’s death.
She came there expecting to find that tomb firmly sealed, as it had been when she’d last been at the scene. But instead as she made her way in the dark, she looked and saw the seal was broken—the stone had been removed. And immediately Mary came up with the only logical solution, based on human experience: someone has stolen the Lord. Even after some of the other disciples have been there, Mary’s confusion and grief remain in full force. Just imagine how you might feel if you showed up at the cemetery and the grave of the person you loved most in the world was opened and the body gone. That’s not something you get over easily. An empty tomb means human interference, human high-jinx of the worst kind. What else could it mean? An empty tomb that’s not supposed to be empty is not only a place for death, but a place where not even death is regarded with respect.
And then a voice speaks: “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Jesus is there. And Mary can’t see him. What a testimony to the very human fact that when we’re looking for death, we miss life. Mary came expecting what was humanly explainable, that sealed-up tomb, a dead body neatly wrapped and contained the way human beings do that sort of thing. She came looking for a full tomb—a full tomb to accompany her empty soul. She came knowing full-well that meaning had died on that cross. That love had died on that cross. That hope had been sealed in that full tomb, lost—forever out of her reach.
And the voice speaks: “Why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” And because she came expecting death, the Life of the world was standing right in front of her and she didn’t recognize him…. She didn’t recognize him until he spoke her name.
Jesus Christ spoke her name and everything changed. To be called by name when you least expect it is always somewhat of a surprise. It is always an affirmation of our very being and our worth. And for Mary Magdalene on that morning, light began to break through the darkness of the dawn, and she heard the Lord speak her name and she knew, in that moment of intimacy with her Lord, that because of the emptiness of the tomb, all the humanly-perceived empty places are no longer empty. Because of the emptiness of the tomb, meaning and love live in a new way, a way that is free of fear of death, free of obsession with endings. The fateful, tragic, humanly sinful way of understanding life as a series of empty, meaningless moments is destroyed forever and replaced with a resurrection of meaning and hope so beautiful and powerful in its freedom that every single second of life bursts with newness and possibility. For life freed from the fear of death is new life indeed.
Mary came expecting a full tomb. And in a sense that’s what she found…because emptiness, real emptiness, implies a void of meaning, an absence of hope. And far from meaningless or hopeless, that empty tomb was so full that its riches continue to overflow across the centuries even unto this time and into this place. Every human emptiness, every human encounter with death—in all its forms—human confusion, sadness, anger, fear, anxiety—is filled with the Life that welled up within that tomb to the point of bursting forth. The tomb of death could not contain the fullness of the overwhelming power of God’s love and life.
These last weeks, we have been meditating on stories of human encounters with Jesus. Through the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus, we learned that the answer to our questions about true and eternal life are to be found through relationship with the beloved Son of God who came into the world, not to condemn but to save. Through the encounter between Jesus and the man born blind, we learned that the Christ gives us new eyes to see beyond our fears and prejudices and pre-conceived notions. Through the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, we learned that Christ meets us right where we are and loves us in spite of everything we have done. Through the encounter between Jesus and Lazarus, dead and buried for four days, we learn that we need not fear death because God’s love is fiercer than the grave. And today we learn, through the encounter between Jesus and Mary that Jesus descended to the very depths of emptiness and despair and death and ascended in victory, having filled the void of hopelessness with a love and possibility and joy that is simply beyond us. But that love and possibility and joy is also, quite simply, FOR us. This astonishing proclamation—Jesus Christ, who once was slain, lives!—means that we can trust all that he said and did. That what Nicodemus and the man born blind and the Samaritan woman and Lazarus, Mary, and Martha experienced was not just a figment of their imagination or a fluke or wishful thinking. Because God’s love in Jesus is alive and will never die, we can expect to experience true life through relationship with a living Christ; we can expect to be healed of our every blindness; we can expect to be loved beyond our wildest dreams; we can expect resurrection—in this life and in the life to come.
And yet, even after all this, we still often wander into the garden expecting death. All we can see is that it’s dark. All we can focus on is what doesn’t make sense. All we feel is our own pain about our lives or about the brokenness of others and of the world. And we seal ourselves up so tightly in our human-life-learned defense posture that we can end up becoming walking tombs ourselves. In our defensiveness or laziness or cynicism, the seal around the door into our hearts and souls becomes rigid and rusty, sealing us off not only from what might be painful, but also from what might be joyful. “Whom are you looking for?” “What are you expecting to find?” If you are looking for death, expecting the worst, you very well may miss Life standing right in front of your face.
But here we are…all looking for something, for someone. Even if we only come into the church one day out of the entire year, maybe it is to testify to the fact that our hearts aren’t completely sealed off—maybe it’s to testify to that small part of us that clings to a hope that is beyond scientific proof. “Whom are you looking for?”
If Jesus were asked that question, I will boldly proclaim on this bright Easter morning, his answer would be YOU. I am looking for YOU. Hear Jesus speaking your name on this day, hear the words of love for you, feel the healing power of Christ’s presence for you, receive the amazing freedom from fear and death that is offered, open your hearts and minds and allow the Life of the world to fill every empty place within your soul with light and hope. Jesus is alive and calling your name. Open your eyes and see. Jesus is here, taking your hand and creating your new life even while it is still dark, loving you into hope, surprising you to joy, resurrecting your faith. Poet George Herbert wrote the words that the choir will sing, words that are the heart of our hope and Easter proclamation: “Rise, heart, thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise without delays, who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise with him may’st rise.”
Thanks be to God. Alleluia! Amen.
