While It Is Still Dark

Easter Day: John 20:1-18

It’s so good to see you all here to celebrate Easter with us this morning. After the long season of Lent, we’ve been looking forward to this day. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy seeing the vibrant colors of the flowers and pretty Easter dresses, hearing the sounds of the triumphal Easter hymns, and sharing in the tasty goodies of Easter brunch! Easter for many of us is a celebration of things that are high, bright, light and clear.

And yet, Easter doesn’t start out that way. Easter may ultimately be about things that are high, bright, light and clear, but it begins low, dim, dark and murky. That’s what we see in our Gospel lesson this morning from John. Here we are told that, for Mary Magdalen, the day that would eventually become celebrated as Easter began “while it was still dark.” I take this both in a literal and metaphorical sense. It was before the sun rose, before Christ rose, when the joy of reuniting with the resurrected Jesus had yet to appear, when the weight of Jesus’ death hung heavy on Mary. There was no victorious procession that morning, no trumpet fanfare. Indeed, right up until the very end of this story, what we find among those involved is not jump-up-and-down Easter joy, but head-scratching confusion and heart-rending sorrow.

Our story this morning takes place two days after Jesus’ death. It was early in the morning, “when it was still dark,” but there was light enough that Mary Magdalen could pick her way to the tomb. What she intended to do there is not clear. But likely she went there for the same reasons that you or I visit cemeteries—to be close to ones we love, to say we haven’t forgot them, we miss them, we wish they hadn’t gone. We most definitely do not visit a grave expecting someone to rise out of it. Dead people don’t come back to life.

Mary knew that as well as we do. So when she found the stone rolled away from the entrance and Jesus’ body missing, she assumed the same thing we would, if at the grave of a loved one, we found the head stone cracked in two and a mound of fresh dirt all around: she believed that someone had stolen Jesus’ body. What other explanation is there?

So Mary ran and brought back two of the other disciples. But once they had satisfied themselves that what she was saying was true, they left her weeping there. If they tried to lead her away, she refused them. She was like an abandoned puppy who lost her master, staying rooted to the last place he had been, without the least idea what to do next. Even when two angels show up, they can’t rouse her from her despondency. (She didn’t know they were angels, of course.) It was clear it was going to take something truly stupendous, something miraculous, supernatural to pull her out of her sadness.

Which of course is what happens. A man appears. Mary at first thinks he is a gardener. But then he calls her name—Mary—and she’s jolted out of her grief. Jesus was alive again; her teacher had returned!

Only there’s something different about him now. And it isn’t just because he went through the experience of dying and being raised from the dead, which I imagine is rather traumatic. There’s more to it than that. You see, it’s not that Jesus had just been miraculously healed, restored to the life he had. Something different had occurred. Jesus was not just resuscitated, he was resurrected.

What exactly that means, and how it happened, we don’t know, we aren’t told. The Gospels leave out those details. His resurrection happens in all four Gospels “off-camera,” so to speak.

Now, that hasn’t stopped artists over the centuries from imagining and depicting the miraculous moment. Often they show the stone not just rolled away but blown over, the soldiers guarding the tomb knocked off their feet, and Jesus emerging from his grave like a conquering king mounting the ramparts, with banner flapping in his hand. My favorite painting is one from Matthias Grunëwald, which shows Jesus flying up out of the grave like Superman, hanging there in the sky, silhouetted by a large golden orb like the sun (a halo). It’s a striking image, but nothing anywhere so epic is described by the Gospel writers.

Easter in the Gospels doesn’t so much burst onto the scene as much as it creeps onto it, emerging out of the darkness and confusion, out of death and sadness. In the Gospels, there’s no razzle-dazzle “Ta-dah!” or triumphant swell of the music score as the hero comes on stage. Rather, the Gospel writers content themselves with recounting the after-effects, what happens next, the resurrected Jesus appearing to his disciples. And they narrate these appearances in a sparse, subdued, matter-of-fact manner. It’s as if, rather than explaining the significance, the writers want to let readers slowly discover, along with the disciples, what a truly momentous, earth-shattering event this was. Jesus didn’t just cheat death, rather God conquered death. He overthrew the natural order, he thwarted the forces of decay, he defied the law of entropy!

It’s an astounding claim, hard to accept. It goes so far against what all of us know, that death is the end for all of us. And so for that reason, there have been countless attempts, going back almost to Jesus’ day, to discredit the Gospel accounts, to deny their reliability. Jesus wasn’t raised, they argue, his body was stolen. The disciples wanted to make it look like their leader was still alive, so that they could go on preaching Jesus’ message after he died. Or maybe they just imagined it, a collective delusion, a hallucination. Maybe they were on drugs. The more sophisticated skeptics among us propose that the resurrection is just an idea Jesus’ followers came up with to describe the sense they had of Jesus “living on” in his teachings, like Socrates or Confucius. Or take it as a metaphor, expressing a general belief in life after death, or of the immortality of the soul, or confirmation that love is stronger than death, or some other bland and predictable notion. The idea of someone coming back from the dead makes so little sense, challenges our most basic beliefs, they figure there just has to be some other logical explanation.

And the fact is, we Christians cannot really argue with their logic. We don’t have any evidence to substantiate our claim. The Gospels don’t tell us anything about what exactly happened. There were no security cameras outside the tomb. There were no witnesses who were there when it happened. There are no artifacts from the event—no folded sheet or report from the soldiers on guard duty. We don’t have any hard evidence we can point to to prove that Jesus rose from the dead.

No, the only “proof” we have is what came afterwards, what happened immediately following Easter—namely the explosion of Christianity throughout the known world, sparked by the witness of Jesus’ disciples. Nothing so abstract as belief in life after death or so poetic as a teacher living on through his teachings comes close to explaining what happened—how a tiny band of nobodies on the margins of the Empire, who were utterly heartbroken and in hiding after the death of their leader, became galvanized, virtually overnight, starting a movement that ultimately won over the whole of Europe and transformed it, and in the millennium since has reached into the remotest parts of the Americas, Africa and Asia.

There’s no other “proof” than that. But really I can’t think of any stronger evidence than that, than the explosive growth of Christianity. I love what Clarence Jordan said of Easter: “The crowning evidence that Jesus was alive was not a vacant grave, but a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled away stone, but a carried-away church.” That is to say, the best evidence that exists for Jesus’ resurrection is a people whose lives make no sense apart from the resurrection, whose actions and attitudes are explainable only by the fact that Jesus rose from the dead and is alive today.

You see, we may not be able to explain the resurrection. But the resurrection explains us. Because of the power of the resurrection, the first Christians did otherwise inexplicable things, things like, when plague broke out in the Empire, they stayed in the cities to tend to the sick and bury the dead; they rescued babies left out to die of exposure and adopted them as their own; they treated their bodies as sacred and each other, even slaves, as brothers and sisters. And they did it all under the threat of public shame, persecution, even death. This drove the Romans crazy. Because the Christians believed in the resurrection, they weren’t afraid of dying and so Rome, which relied on the threat of death to keep people in line, had no power over them.

None of these behaviors makes any sense apart from the resurrection. Take out Jesus being raised and the things they did are inexplicable. It’d be like removing the middle act of a play or the center movement of a symphony, and trying to understand the plot. You can’t, because you lose the logic, the meaning.

The proof of the resurrection is like what Thoreau said about finding a trout in your milk. Circumstantial evidence doesn’t prove anything, but it can be very compelling. Such as when you are trying to determine if milk has been watered down by stream water. Well, if you find a trout in your milk, that is some pretty strong circumstantial evidence! The same is true for the resurrection—the power it has had in people’s lives, the effect it has had in transforming whole societies, constitutes some pretty compelling evidence, like finding a trout in your milk.  

What this all suggests, moreover, is that Easter, the resurrection, isn’t just an event that happened some 2000 years ago; it is just the beginning, a launching pad for an even greater work of God, a work that we are involved in. The resurrection is something God does, but we are implicated in it.

There’s a curious exchange between Jesus and Mary in our Gospel lesson. Jesus tells her not to cling to him. There’s no evidence she was holding onto him in any way. But maybe she was moving to embrace him as he said it. Maybe it was what she called him—Rabbouni, teacher—which was what she used to call him from before, before Friday. Maybe he could hear it in her voice how she wanted him back the way he was so that they could go back to the way things had been, back to the old life where everything was familiar and hopeful, not frightening as it is now.

Only, it couldn’t, he couldn’t. For Jesus is not on his way back to Mary, to stay with her and the others. He is on his way to God, and he is taking the whole world with him. He’s only stopping by Mary and the others now to let them know what he was doing, where he was going…and to let them know that all is forgiven…and to tell them they’ve got work to do now too. They can’t just sit around reminiscing about their time with him, clinging to their memory of Jesus. They’re charged with going out and telling others about him. This mission begins here, with Mary Magdalene. The passage ends with Jesus commissioning Mary, delegating to her the task to “go and tell the others.” She is to tell, to relate, to announce what she has seen, what she has experienced, so that others might come to know the resurrected Jesus too.

That is the same mission we have been caught up in, drafted into—to witness to others the resurrection; to live lives that are different, that make no sense if Jesus has not been raised from the dead; and at the same time to proclaim to the world a truth that the world, held in the bindings of sin and death, cannot tell itself, the truth about what God has done in Jesus and is doing in us—raising us from death to new life.

Easter, we understand, does not come in sunshine and pastels and trumpets. Easter begins in the dark, in fear and confusion, where death reigns—in hospitals, in hospitals, in prisons, at gravesides. It is there, where the news that Jesus conquered death is most needed and least expected, where Easter comes, and not just as an event in the past, but as a promise for the future and as a present power, guiding and empowering our lives today. We then have no reason to be afraid of “the dark,” not in this life or in the life to come. Because it is in the dark that Easter happens, where God shows up to bring us into the light. And so it is that we can say with joy, today and every day, “Christ is risen. He is risen, indeed. Alleluia!”