John 20:1-18

Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!

Amen. 

Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb in the early morning – the other gospels speak of other women coming with her, and of them carrying supplies for Jewish death rituals. She goes to the tomb with expectations based on her experiences in life, formed by her religious beliefs, and rooted in her sense of reality.

She expects to find a cave with a dead body in it, the only earthly remains of her beloved teacher, and I imagine, as millions of women have done for thousands of years, she expected, after an awful weekend, a few quiet moments with her grief. 

That is not what she finds. I wonder if this has happened to you. If your expectations – how ever hopeless they might be – have been upset and disappointed. If you have faced a diagnosis, or gone into a job or even just gotten out of bed in the morning, and the reality that you walked into was nothing at all the way you expected it would be. 

Sometimes our expectations are surpassed – the weather is better than we could have hoped for, and the timings for the party work out like they’re a well-oiled machine. Sometimes our expectations aren’t met, the timings fall short and the presentation drones on, the work is so much harder and less fulfilling than we could have imagined, the house structure has so many more problems and so much more damage than we first estimated. 

And sometimes, our expectations aren’t too small, or too large, but they turn into something that’s not about Goldilocks at all. Our expectations are just on a completely different plane. I believe that’s what’s happened to Mary Magdalene this morning, and I wonder when it might be applicable to us, too. 

Mary Magdalene’s perspective wasn’t just adjusted this first Easter morning, her reality was obliterated and rebuilt. I wonder whether we’re open to having our expectations, our perspective, our very reality, obliterated and rebuilt, too. 

Here in the Gospel of John, we’ve read of the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Back in John 11, Lazarus falls ill, and Jesus hears of it – he’s one of Jesus’ best friends, the Gospel says – and rather than going to him right away, Jesus waits a few days. Then, as y’all know, when Jesus arrives at Bethany, Lazarus has been dead 4 days, which, in Judea as in Houston, is a long and hot time for a dead body to be lying around. Jesus raises Lazarus. Though Lazarus then dies again later, we imagine, of old age, there’s a hint, a sort of expectation introduced, that resurrection is something in the realm of God in Jesus’s reality. 

And yet when Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb this Easter morning, and when she finds the tomb empty, it doesn’t say that she wonders if Jesus has raised himself from the dead, like he did with Lazarus. Even though we see from Lazarus that resurrection is the sort of thing that God would do, her mind goes to grave robbers – which seems sort of strange to me, since Jesus was a poor and his followers weren’t wealthy either – there wasn’t any ransom or money to be gained from robbers taking his body. Surely, though, many more grave robbers were walking around in first century Judea than resurrected bodies, so we can imagine how Mary Magdalene would assume this to be the more likely culprit. 

I wonder how we, like Mary Magdalene, get caught up in the assumptions and expectations from our experiences, our beliefs, the roots of our realities. I wonder what things we allow to form our expectations, to dictate our perspectives. Jesus did this resurrection thing once to his friend Lazarus, but there are hundreds of grave robbers. That makes a lot more sense. 

What beliefs do we carry around? What expectations do we have that blind us to God the Gardener standing in front of us? What perspectives are we so married to that God may need to strike us blind in the midday on a road to Damascus? 

How might we miss the resurrection of the Son of God while we are determined to find a rotting corpse to wrap and sprinkle with spices? 

We find throughout Scripture that as God does the sort of thing that God would do – showing up on a mountain and purifying with water and energizing through fire – humans continue to do the sort of thing that humans do. And I must tell you, brothers and sisters, that what we do is get stuck. We are incredibly gifted at forgetting the miracles and ways of God in Jesus, we are unbelievably talented at misunderstanding and taking offense, we are so adept at considering ourselves the wise ones while everyone else must be adrift. These are the stories of Scripture – of God’s unfailing love in the face of our unfailing stumbling. And I don’t think we’ve improved much in the ensuing 2,000 years, whatever the Enlightenment says.

So when Jesus does appear and Mary doesn’t recognize him, she’s acting no different than any of us might. Hanging on to our assumptions, our expectations, that this strange man who has shown up at dawn at her teacher’s tomb has surely taken away the beloved body, the only earthly remains of this leader and friend, and she begs him to give back the broken bits of her beloved that she could cling to them for just a moment longer. That for one more hour, it could be some kind of familiar normal again, despite the death, despite the dark, despite the danger.

And what does Jesus say to her? He calls her by name. He brings to fruition the prophecy he gave of himself earlier in John when he said, “The sheep hear his voice and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out… I am the Good Shepherd.” Jesus calls her name and she immediately recognizes him. Finally, she can have the moment she has been expecting since she awoke in the dark this morning. She can cling to his body, still bruised, but no longer dead. 

Maybe her expectations were a little off, but we’re back on track now. It can be as if the last days were just a bad dream. Maybe we can even get back to the traveling and the preaching and the healing ministries, and just follow our Lord, the Rabbouni, like we did before. It is a wonderful Easter morning, indeed. 

But what does Jesus say to her now? “Do not hold on to me, Mary.” This is not like Lazarus’s resurrection when he is restored to you and life goes back to normal. This resurrection is the central event of all time, this event which you are the first to see and touch is the fulcrum of reality. This morning, Mary, is the embodiment of the truth of the universe. 

We cannot cling to the bruised bits of the past, or the crumbling structures that have come before. We cannot continue in the path of normalcy or expectations or assumptions that have led us to this point. Everything has changed because this God made known in Jesus Christ has by his resurrection to eternal life restored the path of the universe and the course of history and the direction of all creation. 

We come to church each Sunday as a little Easter, because we are people who get so stuck in our expectations and are so formed by the experiences around us and so bogged down by the assumptions that pummel us day in and day out. We need to be reminded this day and every day, and not just Sundays, that God in Jesus through his resurrection obliterated our expectations of what broken relationships mean and how addiction clings and who controls our future and in what we may trust. 

What freedom might you practice if God could really heal your wounds and your relationships? What might you say, and what might you keep quiet about, if God in Jesus breathed life into dead bones? How might you spend your time if God really holds power over death? What if sin were really defeated? 

Here’s the Good News, Brothers and Sisters. It is. Christ is risen. Amen.