Outside the Empty Tomb

Readings: Isaiah 42:5-9, John 20:1-18, Secrets of Heaven #842[3] (see below)
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Photo by Matti Johnson on Unsplash

This tender depiction of easter morning will always be one of my favorites from the gospels. It is a story with its heart in its throat. Who cannot relate to Mary Magdalene’s confusion and grief in this story? Perhaps we can do so especially in these days. Perhaps we feel as if we are figuratively outside that empty tomb right now, eyes blurred with tears, as we encounter an increase in injustice all around us. Perhaps we might be wondering: Where are you, my God? Where have you gone? Are you still here with us? What are we supposed to do now?

What I notice especially this year, is the joy and relief with which Mary addresses Jesus as her teacher. For this is what he had been to her: a guide, an inspiration, a loving corrective, and a compassionate companion. We need this in our own lives too.

And so, as we look to the many things in our lives that teach us, we also look to this text, the story of Easter morning. What is it that we can learn from it?

We learn that Jesus, our God in human form, endured a painful and humiliating death and rose again, alive. This is indeed an incredible occurance. But the deeper question is what does it teach us? For I don’t believe its purpose is to teach us to believe in an incredible thing that once happened. It’s purpose is to help us believe in a pattern of God’s care and intention.

A pattern that communicates the reality of suffering but also the overcoming of it. A pattern that communicates God’s ability to create newness where there appears there can be none. A pattern that communicates God’s willingness to be present with us in it all.

I don’t know about you, but I need to hear these three things right now. I need teachers of all kinds to teach me these things over and over again, for I repeatedly forget. Our fear makes us forget, our shame makes us forget, our despair and overwhelm makes us forget. 

But while the remembering can be freeing, getting there is not always pleasant. Mary was devastated outside that tomb, in those moments she was lost and floundering, everything that she was expecting had been shattered. She was in a moment that would ask her to see in a new way, but that also would ask her to let go.

As we heard in our reading earlier, there is as teaching in our tradition that clarity often first requires a time of confusion or seeming chaos. That to reach a sense of what is real and true, many of our assumptions will need to be shaken apart. That in order to know what we truly believe, we first have to question and doubt. That in order to create something good, we have to be willing to see what our true obstacles are.

This is one of those teachings that I both love and hate. I love it because I know that it is true. I have experienced the clarity that comes after the storm, as I’m sure we all have at some point. But I am also super grumpy (and honestly a bit heart-broken) about having to go through the chaos at all. Why should this have to be so? Why should chaos (which can often translate in the real world as suffering) be a pre-requisite for clarity? 

So we can choose, and in choosing, create our selfhood from within. The resurrection points to us to new life, yes, but not just for Jesus. The resurrection points us to the new life that is being re-created within us each time we brave the chaos and come out on the other side with new resolve, new clarity, and new understanding, of ourselves and who we are called to be.

And yet, the chaos is not an abstract, intellectual thing. As we note painfully today and throughout history, chaos can have real consequences. The necessary revealing of obstacles to growth, such as self-serving assumptions, dangerous prejudices, unfair expectations can wreak havoc on both our emotional lives and the world stage upon which they play.

The resurrection was never meant to erase the crucifixion. The resurrection teaches us that yes, human frailty will create suffering, human frailty will create systems that perpetuate suffering. The necessity of our basic human freedom to make choices must allow this to be so. But our human frailty is not all that can be. It does not get to have the last word. And in fact, the very chaos that human frailty causes can also serve to shake us awake, can cause us to wipe the tears from our eyes as Mary did, and see God right in front of us, a God embodying our own resurrected and transformed humanity.

Jesus kept telling his disciples that he was going to die, and in fact, needed to, for a greater purpose. Even now, I can tell you that my heart resists this teaching. I understand why the disciples said no no no, every time. No one, not even Jesus, should have to do that - there should be no such need. And yet, there was a need. In order to have the freedom to choose God, to choose goodness, to choose love, and have that choice count for something, we have to be able to choose the opposite. And we do. Often. That is the story of Good Friday, a painful dark story that is still enacted in life and in hearts and minds, even now. That is the story of Holy Saturday, a day filled with confusion, mourning, and disappointed hopes.

And yet, what do we see Mary doing on the morning of what we now call Easter but to her was just the day after the Sabbath? In the gospel of Luke we are told that she went to annoint the body of her beloved teacher, she showed up to do the next most loving thing, even in the midst of her grief.

Which brings us to another teaching: that the thing that ultimately brings order to chaos is goodness and love.(1) We are invited to focus on, and center ourselves in, the practice, the ethos, and the *strategy* of love, and the goodness that love creates for all. As chaos swirls, and we experience the suffering and the heart-break of it, we are invited to see the on-going potential for resurrection in it. To see the on-going potential for resurrection that *we* can choose to both participate in and create.

Jesus was not in the tomb, he was alive in the garden, and Mary called him Teacher, for he was teaching her still. Jesus was teaching his followers the whole time, not just in parables, not just in healings, but also in the chaos of losing him, and then seeing the life that came from that loss. And in doing so, Jesus was enacting a larger pattern of God’s care and intention. 

God has given us the freedom to create chaos and suffering if we so choose. What an enormous gift of love, to give us the fullness of that responsibility, an awful and awesome one. We will fail in it, and we have. Friends, we crucified the literal embodiment of God! And yet in response, that God took that moment of complete failure and transformed it into something that can teach us, something that can give us hope, something that tells us about how much God believes in us and loves us.

So let us rest this morning in three of the things that Easter can teach us: there is suffering and yet there is also the overcoming of it. God can and will create newness where there appears there can be none. And above all, that God’s deepest desire is to be present with us in it all. 

Amen.

1. Emmanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven #3316


Readings:

Isaiah 42:5-9

5 This is what God the LORD says— the Creator of the heavens, who stretches them out, who spreads out the earth with all that springs from it, who gives breath to its people, and life to those who walk on it: 6 “I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness; I will take hold of your hand. I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people and a light for the Gentiles, 7 to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness. 8 “I am the LORD; that is my name! I will not yield my glory to another or my praise to idols. 9 See, the former things have taken place, and new things I declare; before they spring into being I announce them to you.”

John 20:1-18

1 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. 2 So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!” 3 So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. 4 Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, 7 as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. 8 Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. 9 (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) 10 Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.

11 Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb 12 and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. 13 They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” “They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” 14 At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. 15 He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”). 17 Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ” 18 Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.

Secrets of Heaven #842[3]

Before being reduced to order, it is very common for everything to fall into confusion or seeming chaos. This allows things that cling together poorly to separate, and when they have separated, the Lord arranges them in their place.

Nature offers parallels, since in it too each and every thing first falls into some degree of disorder before being put in order. If the skies did not storm, causing unlike elements to scatter, the air would never clear; destructive forces would amass and wreak havoc.