Text — John 20:1-18

Easter, the experience that Jesus was alive, is what got the Christian faith started.  Jesus was crucified.  He died.  His followers scattered, afraid and disillusioned.  Probably guilty.  But then they experienced his living presence.  We’d like to know how that happened.  We’d like to have a video tape.  But those details are beyond our reach, and the truth of Easter doesn’t depend on knowing exactly what happened then. 

The Easter faith is that Jesus Christ is alive now, for us, right here, today.  Some people experience that.  I do.  But not everyone has this experience, or sees it that way.  Not everyone is open to it.  But if we are open to it, Mary Magdalene is a model for how it happens. 

Mary Magdalene is often portrayed as a Jesus groupie, tagging along as if Jesus was a rock star with his band.  In some films and musicals, she had crush on Jesus, or she was his lover, or even his wife, but seeing her primarily in terms of her romantic attachment to Jesus trivialize her true place. 

First of all, in the Bible, the fact that any female disciple of Jesus is named is striking in itself.  Women in Jesus’ time were unimportant.  They didn’t even qualify as legal witnesses.  The official disciples were all male, for that reason.  But Mary Magdalene is mentioned by name in several places.  She had been healed by Jesus.  She may have been one of the women who funded Jesus’ ministry.  Did you ever wonder how thirteen unemployed men traveled around the countryside for several years?  There were women behind the scenes, paying the bills. 

When Jesus was arrested, the text says, “They all forsook him and fled.”  That is, the male disciples forsook him and fled.  But not Mary.  She stayed.  She saw Jesus crucified.  She took custody of his body and buried it.  And then, the next day she went back to the tomb, just to be near him.  This is like a grieving widow, holding her husband’s shirt next to her face as a way to feel close.

Mary is more than a star struck groupie.  She’s deeply devoted.  She’s courageous.  She’s committed.  She doesn’t run away.  She stays with Jesus to the end, and beyond the end.  Then the two angels ask her:  Why are you weeping?  Then Jesus himself appears, but she thinks he’s the gardener.  He asks the same question:  Why are you weeping?  The repetition of this question is a signal that there’s something hidden in the question. 

After all, on the surface it’s a silly question.  The angels and Jesus know why she is weeping, in the sense of what caused her weeping.  Jesus has died a horrible death.  Now she can’t find his body.  Losing someone you love hurts.  You can feel the pain in your own body.  Weeping is what you’d expect.

But there’s still another meaning to “Why are you weeping?  Not what caused it, but what is your weeping for?  What is its purpose?  We should ask this question about all the pain of life.  What are we being asked to learn?  Where do you want your weeping to take you?  What will you find through it?  

I’m not going to make a list of life’s woes, but there are many.  From our earliest childhood we get hurt, we get disappointed.  Not everyone likes us.  We grow up.  We make plans.  Our plans don’t work out.  We see the people we love get sick, or go through some other kind of hell.  There’s a lot of change, heartache, and danger to deal with.

Mary Magdalene is a model because she doesn’t run away from this.  She stays with it.  She lives into it.  Peter and John, the famous male disciples, go back to their homes.  If they’d had TV, they would have turned them on and looked for a game to watch, or taken a pain-killer.

Mary stays with her sorrow; she stays at the tomb.  This isn’t morbid grief.  This is a lesson for us.  Because she stays, she stays she meets the living Christ.

Part of us believes that pain is something God should take away, and will take away.  After all, the Bible does end with a vision in Revelation 21, in which God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.

But the way to that end is not easy.  We can expect some weeping along the way.  There’s something to learn along the way. 

Here we are, on Easter Sunday.  Every Easter there’s something so glorious and hopeful just in having so many of us together, singing these hymns.  Easter is about finding the living Christ in our lives. 

I wish I could tell you that find this living Christ is easy.  I wish I could tell you there’s no cost or weeping involved.  I wish I had a formula that guaranteed immediate, direct mystical access, bypassing all the ways we get hurt.  

But that’s not what the Easter faith is, and that’s not what Mary Magdalene has to teach us.  Even the mystics go through some pain on the way to their beatific vision.

Even Buddhism says this.  Buddhism doesn’t talk about the way to God because in Buddhism there is no “God”, but the way to enlightenment is to let go of suffering.  It’s the way of detachment — voluntary loss, but still loss.

For Christians, the way is to face suffering and let it take us deeper, to see our suffering and death as Jesus’ suffering and death.

In both of these religions there is a cost.  Jesus pays the cost with his life, but we participate in that cost, and on the other side of the cost is Easter joy, resurrection joy, something richer and deeper than just happiness or contentment.

When you’re in pain, that’s the time to pray, “God, why am I weeping?  What am I supposed to see in this?  Open my eyes.”

A clergy colleague of mine named Margaret and her husband lost a baby, who was born very prematurely.  They named the baby Rebecca.  This is what Margaret found and said about that experience.  She tells Mary Magdalene’s truth in a different way. 

“Rebecca was perfect in every way but she arrived three months too early.  With the help of doctors and nurses, Rebecca managed to live for almost four hours, so we had a chance to meet her, to hold her, and say goodbye before she died quietly in our arms.

Rebecca’s brief coming and going from this world was for me a moment of truth.

As we cradled her in our arms, as we studied her face and stroked her cheek, as we said hello and goodbye, time stood still, and nothing mattered but love.

All the usual ego-stuff that goes on constantly in the mind simply fell away.

I didn’t care about achieving anything.  I didn’t care about impressing anybody.  I didn’t wonder if I was good enough.  All of that vanished in this moment of pure simplicity, when nothing matter but the fact of love.

In that moment, I saw nothing but the tiny suffering body in my arms, and the face of love.

I heard nothing but the murmurs of our voices and the silence of love.  I touched nothing but my child in her blanket, and everything I touched was love.

I cannot say it was a happy moment.  It was one of the saddest moments of my life.  But it was a moment of truth.

I knew that suffering is real, and that death is real, but that love is the real-est thing of all. 

And I can tell you that, for all the grief, there is deep joy in this knowledge.

In her weeping, through her weeping, Mary Magdalene found what she was weeping for.  She told the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.”