April 4, 2010

John 20:1-18; Isaiah 65:17-25

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

Happy Easter to everyone!

As Christians, we celebrate Easter each Sunday the day of Easter is our time to really celebrate the triumph of good over evil, of love over hate, and of life over death.

Whenever, we proclaim “Jesus is risen” we re-affirm that God is the power of life in the midst of much brokenness and sorrow.

However, let’s be honest this morning. It is easy to believe in the resurrection on Easter Sunday – when the music is joyful and the scent of lilies is in the air.

And yet, in the midst of our broken world and the stuff of our very messy, everyday lives – the resurrection story can seem like a dream.

This is why I especially like John’s telling of the resurrection account. John’s description of Jesus’ appearance on that first Easter morning is very simple.

No thunder claps. No lightening flashes. No blaring trumpets. No beating drums. No mass choir singing the Hallelujah chorus. No white robed Jesus being magically elevated from the tomb.

In John’s Gospel the resurrected Jesus always appears quietly and gently to his disciples. And the joy of Easter does not blot out the marks of Jesus’ journey to the cross.

So, this morning I want us to notice a few things in John’s telling of the resurrection story that don’t appear in the other gospels.

These things aren’t all that big a deal, but I think John wants us to notice them.

The first thing I notice is that John has Mary Magdalene come to the tomb while it is still dark. The other Gospels all say that the women came to the tomb as the sun was coming up.

As you might know, the Gospel of John is big into contrasts – good and evil, life and death, freedom and bondage, and light and darkness.

For John, “darkness” describes a world alienated from the presence of God. Darkness is mere human existence, but without God. Darkness is the condition of the broken places in our world and in our lives.

At the Last Supper, when Judas leaves the table to betray Jesus, John adds this footnote in 13:30 – “It was night”. And then Good Friday, when Jesus was crucified, was seen as the darkest night of all. It was the day when darkness overcame the light.

And it was still dark, John says in verse one, when Mary Magdalene, headed off to the tomb on Easter morning.

All of our alleluias on Easter morning cannot drown out the fact that the world still has too much darkness in it.

The brokenness of our world is still very evident in all the violence, poverty, hatred, war, disease, and death we see all around us.

Mary had experienced so much darkness in her own life. She had struggled with demons for many years until she met Jesus.

Jesus set her free and offered her unconditional love.

For the first time in her life she experienced wholeness.

Mary Magdalene, along with many other women, then traveled with Jesus’ entourage. Luke tells us that these women financially supported Jesus during his ministry.

In a world in which women were considered property and had no legal rights – the way Jesus treated women was truly freeing and Mary felt loved by Jesus.

When all the male disciples left Jesus as he suffered on the cross – the women stayed with him. Mary Magdalene was by Jesus’ side for those agonizing six hours that Jesus hung on the cross.

My hunch is that not only could Mary not sleep that night but she wanted to be close to the One she loved – so she goes to the tomb while it is still dark. She couldn’t wait any longer. She wanted to be near him.

And while she is there – all she can do is weep. Not only is she grieving his death but now she also is grieving his missing body. She discovers that the tomb is empty.

All that remains in the empty tomb are some linen cloths. Jesus is gone. Mary thinks someone has stolen his body and so all she can do is weep.

Sometimes – weeping is the only appropriate response to the darkness and brokenness in our world. Sometimes the pain is so great that no words can describe what we feel.

Many of you have experienced moments like Mary.

• Some of you have gone through a divorce and the tears just wouldn’t stop flowing. You felt like your life was falling apart and you had no hope for the future.
• Some of you have experienced the death of a close family member. The loss of friendship and companionship can be overwhelming. One can feel so alone.
• For some folks, the loss of a job can be very painful and disconcerting.
• For some of you, the economic downturn has meant the loss of your retirement savings and you don’t know if you have enough to retire on.
• And for some of us – we live with an illness or a disease that leaves us with some significant losses of what we can do with our lives.

The pain and suffering and heartache in our lives is part of the human condition and sometimes the only appropriate thing to do is weep like Mary did.

And the truth is – Easter does not change our circumstances. Easter does not mean we will never suffer or go through hard times. Jesus suffered greatly and many of his disciples died for their faith.

So, Easter does not change our circumstances, but it does change our perspective on suffering and death. Easter changes how we view life.

Easter gives us hope that the worst things are no the last things. And that death is not the end – there is life after death.

Mary Magdalene, after her encounter with the risen Christ, would never live the same way again. The disciples, when they fully understood the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection, were able to face incredible hardships and suffering.

One of the amazing things for me about the risen Jesus is that God did not erase his scars suffered on the cross.

The power of God that raised Jesus from the dead did not blot out the marks of Jesus’ journey to the cross. Jesus’ wounds were healed, but the scars remained.

I think so often we want a scar-less Jesus. We want a Jesus who is above human suffering and pain – because we want to escape pain too.

In the early church there were some Gnostics who believed Jesus was divine, but not human. They couldn’t handle a nail scarred Christ. They thought Jesus was only pretending to be human.

The early church declared Gnosticism a heresy – not because of what it affirmed about Jesus’ divinity, but because it denied Jesus’ humanity – it denied a Jesus with scars.

The risen Christ with scars is important to us and offers us hope because it helps us see that we too can be made strong at the broken places of our lives.

At the places we are most broken – we often discover the most profound experiences of God’s grace. It is only as we enter the darkness that we discover the light.

Like Mary and the disciples, because of Easter and because the risen Jesus has scars –

• We too can enter the darkness and not be afraid.
• We too can know that death is not the end.

• We too can know that evil will never have the final word.
• We too can know that the worst thing is not the last thing.
• We too can have our sorrow turned to joy.

Mary Magdalene entered the darkness on Easter morning and had her sorrow turned to joy. The message of Easter for us and every generation is – that there is always hope.

Now, the other thing I notice in John’s Gospel that is not in the other ones is that Jesus was crucified, buried, and raised in a garden.

In chapter 19:41 it says – “Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid.”

For some reason – John thought it was important to let us know that this whole event happened in a garden.

One of the unique features of John’s Gospel is that it sounds a lot like Genesis.

John begins his Gospel with – “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Genesis also starts with “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth.”

And Genesis also has a garden – the Garden of Eden.

The Garden of Eden is paradise. It is the story of how human beings were meant to live. It is the ideal. It is what we are to strive for.

In the Garden of Eden there was no war, no poverty, no bigotry, no racism, no shame, no hurting each other, and no pain.

But then Adam and Eve sin and go their own way. The story of their sin – is also the story of our lives. Each one of us hears the serpent whisper in our ear that it is okay to eat the one fruit that we are forbidden to eat.

The “fall” is the story of the human race. This is why there is so much war, poverty and brokenness in our world – we continue to sin.

We have moved far from the Garden of Eden. We are no longer living in paradise. We fall short of what God intended for our lives.

John, by placing the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus in the garden, wants to show us that Jesus came to heal what went wrong in the Garden of Eden.

God’s desire, from the beginning of time, is to repair the brokenness of our world.

The cross helps us see how far we have moved from paradise and God’s original intention for humankind.

So, in the garden, Jesus suffers for our infidelity to God. Jesus takes the sin of the world upon himself. His sacrificial love on the cross is the only way to heal the brokenness of our world.

And his resurrection is God’s way of saying – I have overcome evil and I am beginning to restore the garden to its original design.

Now, I find it really interesting that when Mary meets the risen Jesus for the first time – she doesn’t recognize him.

He wasn’t wearing a flowing white robe. He didn’t have a crown on his head. He wasn’t riding a stallion.

When Mary Magdalene first sees Jesus she thinks he is the Gardner. The risen Jesus looks like a Gardner. I don’t know where he got his clothes, but the risen Jesus comes with coveralls and work gloves and dirt under his fingernails.

The imagery of the Gardner is that – it is time to get to work in the garden.

Mary wants to hold on to the familiar Rabbi she always knew but Jesus tells her – “not to cling to him” or hold on to this sacred time because there is more work to do.

The risen Jesus will not remain physically with the disciples but will now be present with them through the Spirit.

When Jesus meets with the disciples for the first time after his resurrection – John says Jesus said to them – “As the Father has sent me so I send you”.

Jesus sends the disciples out to continue the work of restoring the garden to God’s original intention.

Our life purpose as Christians is to work with God to restore the world – to do justice, to love kindness, to share mercy, to love our enemies, to forgive those who have hurt us, and to walk humbly with our God.

We are to work so that the world may look like the Kingdom of God. Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer – we are praying that God’s kingdom would come on earth as it is in heaven.

I said earlier that the Gnostics didn’t believe Jesus was human – only divine. They only believed the spiritual world was real and that the physical world was inferior.

Because they saw the physical world as inferior – it didn’t matter to them if the earth got trashed because God would destroy it in the end anyway.

It didn’t matter to them if you overate or overworked because only your souls would ascend to God anyway.

It didn’t matter to them if you had sex with prostitutes or had an incestuous relationship or committed sexual sins because your body was inferior anyway.

But the early church repeatedly rejected this dualistic Gnostic teaching that the physical world is inferior by proclaiming that God bodily raised Jesus from the dead.

In the resurrection of Jesus from the dead – the early church re-affirmed the goodness of our bodies and the goodness of creation.

Salvation is much more than getting a ticket to heaven – it impacts how we live our lives and how we care for creation.

In Isaiah 65, the Prophet Isaiah has this vision of a new heaven and a new earth. In this vision, there is good health care for the young and the old. All people have adequate housing and there are jobs for everyone.

And then Isaiah says – God’s people are to work for the shalom of the city. The church in the city is to seek the reconciliation and shalom of all its diverse people.

So good health care, adequate housing, fulfilling jobs, and reconciled relationships are all a part of what it means to live in God’s restored garden.

God never scraps the physical world for the better deal called heaven. Salvation includes all of God’s beautiful creation. There is life now and there will be life forever with God.

And this is what the risen Jesus was telling Mary Magdalene when he said – “don’t hold on to me”. I have more work to do and I want you to be part of it.

Jesus says to her – go and tell the other disciples that I am alive and I will give the Holy Spirit to you to do the work of restoring the garden.

The very good news this morning is that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is available to each one of us in our day-to-day living.

God has not left us helpless in our life work of restoring the garden to God’s original intention. We are not left on our own to grind it out.

Through the Holy Spirit we can be connected to the power of the resurrection and we can partner with God in caring for and healing our world.

Because of the resurrection – we know that all of our efforts to bring justice, to protect the earth, and to foster reconciliation between people groups will not some day just be thrown on the garbage dump by God.

Our work matters and God will redeem it.

Sisters and brothers, the good news this morning is

• God is still at work bringing good out of evil.
• Healing the brokenhearted.
• Overcoming hatred with love.
• Bringing life out of death.
• And turning our sorrows into joy.

Mary, after she encountered the risen Jesus was never the same again.

The question for each one of us today is – have you encountered the Gardner – the risen Jesus? Have you heard him call you by name?

This morning the risen Jesus knows each one of us by name and invites us to partner with God in restoring the garden to God’s original intention.

May you this morning know the risen Jesus!

And may the power of the risen Jesus strengthen you and give you hope.

Alleluia – Christ is Risen!!