Small Easter
John 20:1-18
Emmanuel Baptist Church
April 12, 2020; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the Easter service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_DxdqGMWxI
I hope you can see the ever-flowing stream of justice behind me. You remember it from the sanctuary, right? On the first two Sundays in Lent, we started adding to it. If we had kept on, it would have been so full, it would have cascaded down the wall. It would have flowed out beyond where the lectern usually stands. We were just getting started when we had to stop, because of disease, because of death and the fear of death.
Disease, death and the fear of death is occupying a lot of energy these days. There are no sports, no arts and entertainment, no in-person events of any kind to be covered by journalists, and so every day we get reports on what work death has done over-night. What are the latest safety recommendations? Who has been newly diagnosed with covid-19? Who has died? How many have died?
In one of those reports a week ago, I learned that three medical residents in New York City have died. Most of you know that our daughter is a medical resident. You might think this news makes me more concerned for her. It doesn’t actually make me more fearful. But it brings the grief very close. I can easily imagine young people, bright, compassionate, committed young adults who have worked hard and delayed gratification to get through college and then med school. Their families have supported them and missed them on holidays when they had to work or study. They reached the milestone of graduation a year or two ago. And what celebrations they had. Now as residents, they were finally getting to do what they’d been trained for, what they had wanted to do for so long. They were just getting started . . . and now their lives are over. Their families lives are shattered. The grief -- I imagine it sharp and cutting like a knife. And simultaneously heavy and dull and suffocating. Their parents must be inconsolable.
That sharp pain, that suffocating weight of sorrow, that inconsolability -- all that could also describe Mary Magdalene as she arrives at the tomb. Mary is in the cemetery to be as close as possible to the now lifeless body of Jesus. She is there to see if her memories of him are more vivid there. She is there to weep and curse and be angry. She is there to grieve.
Only she can’t really do that, because the grave has been desecrated. They have taken Jesus’ body and she doesn’t know where. Two angels speak to her. It doesn’t seem to register that they are angels. And then gardener asks who she is looking for. She repeats the story that she has been telling everyone—why isn’t anyone getting it? –If he knows where Jesus is, would he please, please just tell her.
Then the gardener says her name “Mary”. That’s all it takes. We remember what Jesus said before: “[The shepherd] calls his own sheep by name … they know his voice.” It is not the gardener. It is Jesus. Mary turns and says “Rabbouni” which means teacher.
Mr. Wiechern was my high school physics teacher. He took us out into the long hallways to play with Slinkys while he explained how light was like a wave. He got up on his hands and knees on a lab table to knock over a bottle with his nose. Then he asked for volunteers to try. The boys had a much harder time than the girls, which provided the perfect opportunity to explain the concept of center of gravity. Mr. Wiechern is one of a handful of teachers to whom I wrote a note of appreciation years after I left high school.
There’s a scene near the end of the movie Dead Poet’s Society where devoted students stand on their desks in protest of the firing of their beloved teacher played by Robin Williams. I am fortunate that I can name several teachers for whom I would stand on my desk. I hope that you have a list like that too. At its best, the relationship between teacher and student is one of discovery and trust and even intimacy. There’s a viral photo of a teacher who heard that a student was getting very frustrated trying to learn math at home. So he took a big white board and stood outside her house and worked the problems with her. Last week, one of my friends posted a picture of his 8-year-old daughter. She’s wearing headphones and connected to a her teacher via Zoom. She has the biggest smile on her face. Her father said it was the happiest he had seen her in days.
When Mary recognizes Jesus, she says Rabbouni. It is a an emphatic form of rabbi, which also means teacher. Rabbouni means “my teacher” or “master teacher” or “beloved teacher”. It conveys great respect and deep affection.
“Rabbouni,” she breathes, with so much caught up in that one word. Jesus is her beloved teacher, the one who taught her so much, the one who changed her life.
She doesn’t even entertain the notion that resurrection is a possibility until he calls her name. It only becomes real when it is close and personal. And then, she goes to hug him – wouldn’t you? Aren’t there people you haven’t been able to see in weeks now? People you want to hug for a good long time whenever you finally get to? The grief is gone and Mary is ecstatic, but within moments she is told she has to let him go.
“Do not cling to me,” Jesus says. How much would that hurt? There’s a clip going around of a doctor dressed in surgical scrubs. His young son is running towards him and the man hollers for him to stop, as the man himself is backing away. It seems that the father is keeping his son at a safe distance. But you can see the confusion and hurt on the son’s face and then on the father’s face too. I bet Mary looked like that. I wonder if Jesus did too.
“Do not cling to me,” Jesus says. Mary can touch him. They don’t have to be physically isolated, but she can’t hold on. She can’t try to contain or confine or control Jesus.[1]
Jesus has something yet left to teach her – which is that things are not the same. There were probably some things she was in the middle of, something like our ever-flowing stream, that got set aside, put on hold when Jesus died, but now Jesus is alive and she wants to pick up where they left off. Except they can’t. Resurrection has changed everything. Life will not go on as it was before.
The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor says that Jesus “was not on his way back to her and the others. He was on his way to God , and he was taking the whole world with him. . . The thing we cannot do,” she says, “is to hold onto him. Instead, we must let him take us where he is going . . . into the white hot presence of God, who is not behind us but ahead of us, every step of the way.”[2]
That sounds really big. It sounds like the kind of thing a preacher might say on a big Easter Sunday, but Easter feels kind of small this year. None of us gathered for Easter sunrise in Capital Park. No one got up super early to put the coffee on and cook for the Easter breakfast. We’re not in the sanctuary, which would be beautiful with white banners and Easter lilies. There’s no glorious live music to compensate for weaknesses in the preaching.
It feels like a small Easter, but here’s the thing: the first Easter wasn’t big either. Maybe it was for Jesus. Maybe for Mary. But for most people. It wasn’t headline news. It was a small story that trickled out gradually.
Two people encounter each other. They exchange two words—“Mary” and “Rabbouni”. It’s a small, short story. But it packs a wallop.
It is a story about desolation and ecstasy wrapped up immeasurably close to one another. It is learning from the best Teacher that resurrection is not about things being the way we want them to be. It’s not about getting back to normal. That would make for a very small Easter indeed.[3] It is about the deep truth that what looks like the worst thing doesn’t have the last word. Death and the fear of death cannot . . . do not . . . will not have the last word.
If Easter feels small to you this year, you are not alone. But take courage, the first Easter was even smaller, and it was enough to change the world. Enough to change the world, for Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed.
[1] Gail O’Day in Frances Taylor Gench, Encounters with Jesus: Studies in the Gospel of John (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2007) p.132
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Unnatural Truth” in Home By Another Way (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1997) p.111
[3] I’m grateful to Joanna Harader and her musings about a Small Easter which coincided with mine this week – only hers began in 2012. https://spaciousfaith.com/2016/03/21/small-easter/