Where Resurrection Becomes Real

John 20:1-18

Why are you weeping?

You, yes, you, right here.
Why are you weeping?  What’s the hole in your heart?

Oh, I know you’re not weeping right now. Most of us, if not all of us, are here in simple celebration, ready for the joy that returns with Alleluias and bright music and blooming lilies (and plastic eggs and chocolate bunnies) today.

I’m here for the same reasons. I love Easter; I love joy. I am ready to celebrate.

And it’s always a little ironic that the story at the center of our celebration, the story of our joy, is a story that’s rooted in grief and loss and fear.

We come this morning in bright daylight, knowing we will celebrate. Mary comes to the tomb in the dark, wrapped in loneliness, knowing the depth of her grief. And there she discovers new loss, anxious fear. The grave is open. They’ve taken the Lord and we don’t know where they put him.

She alerts the other disciples; they come and go, encounter wonder and confusion, and then it’s just Mary, again, alone with her grief and anxiety, loss and worry. Mary being asked, repeatedly, why are you weeping?

Oh, come on, angels. Seriously, Jesus?

Messengers of God and actual God, of course you know why Mary’s weeping. She keeps saying it: They’ve taken him away, and I don’t know where he’s gone.

She’s understandably upset. You would be, too, if the body of your dearest friend was stolen from the grave. I mean, I cry over a misplaced novel or unpaired socks when I’m grieving the death of someone I love. You know why she’s crying. We all know.

But there’s undoubtedly a reason that people in this story – no, that God in this story keeps asking Mary why she’s weeping; who she’s looking for.

God knows what we’re looking for. But sometimes we don’t.

And until we know what we are most truly looking for, we aren’t able to recognize it, to receive it, when we find it.

Mary cries over her double loss, about how the body of Jesus, the focus of her grief, has been taken away from her after his life has been taken.

But she’s not just looking for a body. She longs more deeply for Jesus himself, weeps for all the ways he brought her closer to God, filled her with love and expectation. She wants his promises to be real.

And finally Jesus breaks it open for her. Mary, he says, calling her by name, knowing her, and at last she knows what, who, she’s really looking for - “My Teacher!” she says – and she recognizes resurrection; recognizes God, come to meet her, to be what and who she has been longing for all along.

Last year I spent a week in Israel. As we set out, the leader asked our group what we wanted to get out of the trip, what we were looking for. And I didn’t know.

So I told myself and the group that I was starting out with an open mind, not looking for anything in particular, ready to be surprised.

And that worked pretty well until the last day. A day when the cascading effects of a six-hour flight delay out of Newark meant that we were going to drop one of the final sites on our itinerary, and I…well, actually, I started to cry.

I felt like something precious had been taken from me; that I’d lost my chance at… something.
Entirely to my surprise, I was suddenly anxious, oddly grieving, and uncertain what it all meant. Our Israeli tour guide spotted my quiet distress, it turned out, and so, early the next morning, on our way out of Jerusalem, we stopped at the Garden Tomb.

Now, there are at least three sites in Jerusalem, maybe more, that have claims to be the burial place of Jesus. We’d already been to one, but the Church of the Holy Sepulcher - holy, beautiful, crowded – didn’t feel like a tomb to me.

Gradually, I was coming to realize that what I was looking for – in Israel, and in my life – was the rawness of the place, the experience, where resurrection becomes real.  

Now, I did not see the risen Jesus when we finally went to the Garden Tomb. I did weep, just a little bit. Nobody divinely called my name, no angels appeared.

But we celebrated communion there – our mixed group of every kind of Christian, several Muslims, Jews, and Hindus – and God was vibrantly present.

I stood in front of the tomb as tourists and pilgrims went in and out, and felt the wonder I imagine the disciples felt at the absence of the body of Jesus.

I felt the sense of awe that Mary must have felt when she reached out her hand to the risen Lord in sudden recognition. It felt raw and real on my skin and in my heart, and I had found, after all, what I had been weeping for.

In the slow dawning of my recognition that I was really, deeply, looking for resurrection to be real, it began to be, for me.

I don’t know – none of us do – exactly how the disciples felt that first Easter morning, or what Mary actually did when she met Jesus at the tomb. But I read the story today, and I know that John wants me to learn that when we encounter resurrection, doubt gives way to wonder. When we encounter resurrection, that resistant realism many of us are blessed with gives way to delight in the unknown and unknowable.

I believe John wants us, with Mary, to feel awe replace our anxiety, whatever our own anxieties may be. To lose our life-draining fears and worries, great and small, in that indescribable sense of God’s powerful presence. To know that we want resurrection to be real for us, and to feel it fresh and raw on our skin and in our hearts.

I believe that Jesus wants us to know why we are weeping – not because God doesn’t already know the exact extent of the griefs and worries, hopes and dreams that make us vulnerable – but so that we can hear in our own hearts the deep, often buried, desire for God to be real. For resurrection to matter in a very ordinary and practical world. For love to be stronger than death. 

We don’t always know we want that.

Most of the time, I’m a lot more aware of my anxiety about the health of a friend, my hopes for the life of this congregation, or a longing for a perfectly cooked hamburger and crispy fries than I am of my deepest yearning for the raw experience of God.
You might be anxious about your work or your own health, caught up in your hopes for a family member, in your longing for a cure for cancer, or an hour of peace and quiet, and not used to hearing your own deep desire for the reality of resurrection and the living proof of God.

But I believe that Jesus wants us – in the midst of the joy and celebration today, and in the deep and lonely grief of our losses when they come – to open up the deepest longings of our hearts so that God can fulfill them. Wants us to know what we weep for so that we can experience for ourselves how very real resurrection is.
And I believe that we pull out all the stops of celebration today – shout our Alleluias, drench the church in lilies and light, share feasts today with friends and family – to remind ourselves that our deepest, heart-breaking longings are above all else, the door to holy joy.

Alleluia!