Readings – Acts 10: 34–43; John 20: 1–18
Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him…’
What a strange encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus in this morning’s Gospel. How could Mary possibly fail to recognise Jesus? She and Jesus were, after all, close – just two days before, on that terrible Friday, she had been one of the very last of Jesus’ disciples to be present at His crucifixion, when nearly all others had fled in fear. How could she of all people mistake Jesus for the gardener?
St Mary’s, Potterne – a lovely place to celebrate my first Easter Mass. © Gerry Lynch
Then we hear another odd phrase from Jesus’ lips when she might have been expected to hug Him: “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.”
It is the first Easter morning, and Jesus is risen from the tomb! Alleluia! But something has changed. This is no mere resuscitation by a sort of divine defibrillator. Jesus is alive, speaking to Mary Magdalene, as they meet in the beauty of a garden on an early morning in the Jerusalem springtime. But she doesn’t recognise this intimate friend at first, and He asks her not to touch him. What is going on here?
Some of you may remember the Bishop of Durham back in the 1980s, David Jenkins, causing a bit of a flap by saying the Resurrection was no mere conjuring trick with bones. This was interpreted by the press to mean that the Resurrection wasn’t real. That wasn’t what Jenkins was saying at all, although I have to say as someone who used to be a bishop’s press officer that, for all his many virtues, Jenkins was his own worst enemy in dealing with the press.
Yet David Jenkins was absolutely right. The Resurrection is no “mere conjuring trick with bones”. It is something far greater than that. Heaven also isn’t simply an endless perfect day on earth, but a reality that is different, greater, than the one we experience in our physical bodies. In heaven we will be the human beings that God has created us to be, as individual and unique as all of us are, and yet also in harmony with one another, with God, and with the whole created order, in a way that simply cannot be in this world. Here death and sin have power over us; in heaven we will be liberated from them for eternity.
We can no more comprehend it than a caterpillar could understand what it means to fly through the air as a butterfly. Yet that is what caterpillars are designed to do – to be transformed into something that can move in new dimensions. So our human bodies are wonderful and glorious things, beautiful creations of God – but also only part of what we are designed to be. That will only be revealed after our mortal death, when we are raised to eternal life.
Scripture and the tradition of the Church give us only fragments of the life that is to come. If we were capable of understanding it fully, it wouldn’t be such good news. Yet we are told that it will be a Kingdom where, in the words of Peter in our reading from Acts, “God shows no partiality”; somewhere with people from “every nation”; somewhere where there will be no hunger or thirst. A place where death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.
I have found it strange that during these years of plague and death, when our churches were closed for the first time in eight centuries, that the Church has spoken little about Resurrection and eternal life. I think we’ve been stung by the claim that none of this really matters, and people want to hear solutions to the problems of the world today rather than pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die sort of stuff.
But I don’t think that Christ’s Resurrection is just about what happens after we die. If we truly believe in Jesus Christ’s Resurrection, it should change how we live our lives now. If we believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and in doing so opened the way to eternal life for us, then we should also realise how irrelevant so many of the most toxic things we spend time and emotional energy on actually are. Our need for status, and money, and our need to always be right, and our need to find somebody else or some other group of people to look down on – the Resurrection should make it clear how pointless and stupid these all are.
In fact, a lot of these bad life practices are games we get sucked into because we’re frightened that we’re not really people of much worth. Yet, in reality we’re people of such immense worth that Christ stretched out His arms on the Cross to carry us over into eternal life. That knowledge of that divine love should free us, at least a little, from those fears and doubts and inabilities to love ourselves that prevent us living our lives to the full – free to love and not to hate; free to forgive and not to bear grudges; free to trust and not to fear.
Much of our modern technological society has been created to help us try to escape the consequences of our physical bodies – most obviously death. Yet although we may have added a few decades to the time most of us can expect to spend here on Earth – something I celebrate, because human life is a beautiful thing lived out in a beautiful world – in the end, our mortal lives will all end, relatively soon in the grand scheme of things. It is when we appreciate that this wonderful but tortured world, and our lives full of mess and pain but also full of love and glory, aren’t all that is, that we are free from clinging so tightly to it; to take it for what it is, to love it for its wonder and bear patiently with its pains and the crucifixions it inevitably inflicts on us.
It should also free us from taking too seriously the conventional standards of the world, which are so often wrong-headed and hypocritical, for the good news of the Resurrection was announced first to Mary Magdalene. In the macho Jewish and Graeco-Roman cultures, consumed with various forms of respectability; God entrusts the most important news He will ever convey to a woman and more than that, one who had, of all things, been possessed by demons. We find, time and again, in Scripture that God speaks through the outsider rather than the ‘in-crowd’.
And therefore Mary represents all of humanity, not just those who consider themselves holy, when she stands by the grave and weeps. We see in Mary’s tears the part in each of us which dies when someone we love passes away. In bringing the good news of his Resurrection to Mary, Jesus Christ brought her to new life, a foreshadowing of her own Resurrection. Indeed, it turns out that Mary’s fist mistake wasn’t entirely wrong-headed, because Jesus did act as something of a gardener, making her spirit fresh and green again.
And if we open our hearts to this good news, it is not only Mary’s spirt that Jesus renews, because this first encounter on that first Easter morning prefigures what will follow to the end of time. Christ will turn all our graves into garden plots; indeed, will one day return turn the whole earth into a great garden, transforming the whole of creation into something new and wonderful.
Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
