Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Easter Sermon by Jamie Howison on John 20:1-18

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!

We have walked this week from the glory of last Sunday’s palms to the glory of this resurrection day, and have done so by telling of the hard road of suffering and death. We all know how the story flows, right? No surprises here. As Robert Farrar Capon said to me back in 2004 in a series of conversations we shared in his home on Shelter Island,

We have done it with the sort of sequential business of Palm Sunday, three cheers, cheering, then darkening, darkening, darkening, how sad, how sad, how sad. And then Good Friday and the death – how sad, how sad, how sad. And then surprise, surprise, it’s all fine again. But that’s okay. That’s the way the movie shows it.

“That’s the way the movie shows it” he had said, because he’d been working with an image that looked at the scriptures as being a film—a long film, certainly, with all sorts of unexpected turns and detours along the way—but a film that we have to watch again and again. No fair stopping at a point in the middle, he’d told me, landing on one verse or one episode and saying, “ah, this is the key to it all.” No, we keep watching the film from beginning to end—keep telling the story week by week, month by month, year by year—and then out of nowhere something will hit us afresh.

I mean, I know the resurrection story, and I know it well. I’ve been preaching it for over thirty-five years, and I studied the gospels formally for three years of theological college before that... to say nothing of all the years of growing up in the church. But time and again when I sit down to work through what I might have to offer this year, I’ll see something I’d not noticed before. Or perhaps see something in a new way, which is just as significant.

This year we have opted to proclaim the resurrection story from the Gospel according to John, so it is just worth saying that each of the four gospel accounts has its own unique character. The figures involved can vary from gospel to gospel, and the emphasis of each can be quite unique. I’ve made this point before, but it is very much worth repeating again this evening. While modern sensibilities imagine that a historical account is meant to line up the details and facts, an ancient understanding of history is quite different. What the gospel writers sought to do is to tell us about the meaning and significance of the event, and not narrowly the nuts-and-bolts details. So in this account tonight, we have features—including the presence of the “beloved disciple,” or John himself—not included by the other three writers. And there is that fascinating set of details related to Peter and John running to the tomb—“The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.” John outran Peter, yet waited there until Peter arrived and let Peter enter first.

And what is that about? Well, in the view of Raymond Brown, the great scholar of John, it was meant to say that while John led a Christian movement that was somewhat independent of Peter and the Jerusalem-based church, and he was here saying that he was recognizing the priority of Peter and the Jerusalem church; the church which had commissioned St Paul, and so stood at the heart of the whole Christian movement.

And yet it is not as if the account is meant to only do this, for John is saying something about his own radical transformation in light of the resurrection of Jesus. Here N.T. Wright drills down on the phrase “he saw and believed”; John entered the tomb “and he saw and believed.” This is how Bishop Wright describes that moment:

Oh, he’d had faith before. He had believed that Jesus was the Messiah. He had believed that God had sent him, that he was God’s man for God’s people and God’s world. But this was different. ‘He saw and believed.’ Believed that new creation had begun. Believed that the world had turned the corner, out of its long winter into spring at last. (Wright, John for Everyone)

That is what the resurrection meant to John, and what it must mean for all who read his gospel account. New creation had begun. For all that the world still struggles, and for all that we can despair at the state of things, in that moment new creation same into our midst.

And the two of them returned to where the other disciples were in hiding, bringing with them these fragments of a bigger story, “for as yet they did not understand the scripture.” That will come in time, when together the disciples will have a more fulsome experience of the risen Christ.

Which leaves Mary Magdalene alone in the garden, weeping and lost. “As she wept,” John tells us, “She bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’” She is still reeling, in other words, but who can blame her?

And then comes that moment when she turns from the tomb, and she sees Jesus who also asks her why she is weeping, but she doesn’t recognize him. That happens in these resurrection accounts; people see, but at first they don’t recognize who it is they’re seeing. The tears are too thick, the frame of what is happening just too impossible.

“Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’” Supposing him to be the gardener, which is an extraordinarily poignant mistake to make, because she’s not entirely off target. No, he’s not literally the gardener who tends this area where the tomb is located, but at another level he is absolutely the Gardener of the new creation. He is the one who has planted something new, right in the midst of the weeds and thorns of the Empire-dominated world. He will see to the blooming of blossoms and the harvesting of grain, even in a world still held in captivity by Rome and its emperor. He will inspire people to do things beautiful and brave and lovely, even through the hardest times. Christ is indeed a gardener—the Gardner, the new Adam.

And then she recognizes him, and with eyes wide she exclaims Rabbouni! Teacher! And as John pictures things, she must have been moving to grasp on to him, because right away he says to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father,” which had often struck me as unfortunate. I mean, I wanted him to embrace her, and let her laugh and cry and rejoice, if only for a few moments. But no, it is “don’t hold on to me, go to the disciples and tell them that, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” And on this William Temple offers an important reflection. He writes that while a great embrace between Mary and Jesus might have been expected,

… in a profounder sense [this] was the inauguration of a fuller union. In the days of his earthly ministry, only those could speak to him who came where He was… But his Ascension means that He is perfectly united with God; we are with Him wherever we are present to God; and that is everywhere and always. Because He is “in Heaven,” He is everywhere on earth; because he is ascended, He is here now. (William Temple, Readings in St. John’s Gospel)

And he is. Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!