John 20:1-18
So, for the first time in 62 years, Easter
has fallen on April Fool’s Day. For
people in my line of work, it hardly seems fair. It’s not like the Resurrection is an easy
thing for people to believe anyway; and today, in the back of our minds, we’re kind
of expecting an April Fool’s prank.
Maybe the snow’s enough.
I don’t know how our current calendar
would translate back 2,000 years, or how close to April 1 that first Easter
morning would have been. But the first
half of this resurrection story from John’s Gospel certainly leaves Mary
Magdalene feeling like a fool. She comes
to the tomb before sunrise. The story in
John’s Gospel doesn’t actually say why she’s there. Maybe she’s been up all night; maybe she’s
going to the tomb to grieve. Whatever
brings her there, what she finds is horrifying: the stone sealing the tomb has
been moved away, and the body is missing.
It’s awful enough that Jesus is dead; now someone has desecrated his
body, too.
So, she runs to get Peter and another
disciple, thought to be John. The two
guys race to the scene, and look inside, and hesitatingly go into the cave; and
they see Mary is right … which is no surprise to Mary but may have surprised
the two of them. Then, the guys
unhelpfully turn around and go back home.
And Mary’s thinking, “Wait, what?
You’re leaving me here to deal with this? Really?”
And she breaks down in frustration and grief.
Then, when she looks into the tomb, she sees two angels there; and they ask
what must have felt like a completely unhelpful question: “Why are you
weeping?” Mary shoots back, “Well, why
do you think? They’ve taken Jesus away,
and I don’t know what they’ve done with him.”
Then she turns around and sees the guy she imagines to be the caretaker,
yet one more unhelpful man asking stupid questions. “Why are you weeping,” he asks; “whom are you
looking for?” Though she’s completely
frustrated, she decides not to let
him have it, but she cuts to the chase instead: “Look, if you’ve taken Jesus
away for some reason, just tell me and I’ll go fix it.”
Now, Mary may have felt like a fool, but
it turns out the joke’s on Satan. The
one thing the power of sin and death didn’t see coming was God’s choice to enter
into death so people could live forever.
Satan didn’t understand what C.S. Lewis calls “the deep magic,” the cosmic
victory that comes when the innocent champion battles sin and death, and wins.
Of course, Mary Magdalene had heard Jesus
talking about crazy ideas like that – that he’d be arrested, and killed, and on
the third day rise again. And she’d
witnessed the last three days, as his friends rejected him, and the authorities
tried him and beat him and hung him on a cross for subverting the Empire. The rising-again part would begin to make
sense days and months and years later, the way the disconnected threads of a
story come together to weave the tapestry of a great ending. But in the moment – as she went to the tomb
that Sunday morning, and dealt with the unhelpful guys around her, and tried to
figure out how to pick up the pieces after a grave robbery – in that moment,
she must have just felt like a total fool.
After all, she had bought what Jesus was selling; she went all in, gave
her heart completely – and then watched every hope fall apart. And finally, to make it all just that much
harder, she was the one who got stuck
cleaning up the mess. Foolish, foolish –
it can just feel foolish to give your heart to hope.
Nobody wants to feel like a fool, but religion
does that to us sometimes. The Church
tells stories about virgins having babies, and blind people suddenly gaining
their sight, and five loaves of bread feeding 5,000 people, and dead men walking
out of tombs. Right. It doesn’t take much Google searching to find
experts who can explain it all away. By
the same token, it doesn’t take much searching to find religious people
explaining away those rational explanations by telling you that if you dare to think
critically and don’t swallow the
whole story hook, line, and sinker, then you’re damned to hell. It can make you feel like a fool either way, believing
it or not.
But there’s a different kind of fool – a
holy fool, an Easter fool, a fool for Christ’s sake.
That’s what Mary becomes in the rest of
the story we heard this morning. As she
stands there, sobbing, trying to get the guy she thinks is the caretaker to do
his job, Jesus does the simplest but most powerful thing. He speaks her name: “Mary!” She’d know that voice anywhere, and she turns
to see him for the first time that morning.
She hears her heart’s own song when the risen Christ calls her
name.
And she knows the fools’ errand that lies
ahead of her. Now it’s time to go find
those unhelpful guys once more but with a very different message, one they’re
not likely to buy. That conversation may
have begun with a little attitude – I think we could forgive Mary for
that. “Hey, Peter and John,” she says to
the fearful disciples. “Thanks a lot for
running home and leaving me holding the bag.
Guess what? The body’s not gone. He’s alive.
He’s risen. You can tell me I’m
crazy, but I’m here to tell you: I have
seen the Lord.”
I think religion can make us feel like
fools sometimes because religion gets tempted to confuse mystery with technicality. Humans – especially human institutions – like
to think we have things figured out. We
sleep better that way. We also sound
much smarter that way. Everyone wants to
have the answers, right?
But you know what? Think about the Church’s No. 1 answer man,
St. Paul. He was Christianity’s first
theologian, and we have all those letters in the New Testament that show just
how confident he was that his answers were right. But you know what else St. Paul was? He was Christianity’s first fool – other than
Mary Magdalene, I guess. At least he was
the first one to see himself that way and write it down. He was making the point that the “eloquent
wisdom” of worldly knowledge doesn’t hold a candle to the power of the cross
and the empty tomb. “The message of the
cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,” he said, “but to us who are
being saved, it is the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18). I may sound foolish, but “we are fools for
the sake of Christ.” (1 Cor 4:10)
It’s OK to be a fool in the world’s eyes because
the greatest truth of all time is mystery that runs counter to everything the
world knows. If that truth were really knowable
through intellect alone, then we’d be right in striving to conquer the
complications, and tame the technicalities, and find a universal theory of
everything. Maybe if we all had brains
like Stephen Hawking, that would be possible.
But you know, Stephen Hawking has now come to the end of his life, and
my hunch is that his attention has shifted now, from being wrapped up in so
much logic to being wrapped up in so much love – whether or not the math proves
it’s real.
God is deeply mysterious, but God is not
deeply complicated. Neither is
resurrection, despite all the ink that’s been spilled over the centuries trying
to prove or disprove it. The deep mystery
of life, the deep mystery of God, is this: We find new life when we choose to live in the hope that love wins,
even when the world says you’re a fool for thinking so. Now, on any given day, you may or may not
feel that love. But feeling love isn’t
the measure of following the one who brought resurrection to the world and who offers
it to you right now as the story of your life.
Feeling love is great, but it’s also fleeting. What lasts, and what grows into greater power
than you can imagine, is the hope of
love, the practice of love, the investment of yourself in the long game
of love.
You know this love. It’s the love of showing up for your kids’ never-ending
soccer games or wrestling meets or piano lessons, when there are a million
other things you need to do that day. It’s
the love of going to counseling with your spouse or partner, even though it’d
be so much simpler just to walk away. It’s
the love of a real conversation with someone who looks different from you, or
votes different from you, and taking the risk to learn his beloved story. It’s the
love of putting yourself into relationship with others to grow your faith, or serve
people around you, or work for your community’s well-being. It’s the love of high-school kids going down to
Theis Park last weekend to say out loud that they’re tired of living in the fear
of gun violence. That kind of foolish
hope that love wins becomes
resurrection, even in the here and now, when we believe in the power of love
enough to live it out. Jesus told his
followers, “Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and
thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart but believe that
what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So, I tell you,” he said, “whatever you ask
for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark
11:22-24)
Sounds pretty foolish, right? Tell that to the high-school kids in Florida who
decided it was time to start a national movement to choose a future without
school shootings. Tell that to any
couple who’s chosen to reconcile and build love back stronger than they’d ever
known it before. Tell that to any of us who’ve
prayed people we love back from terrible illness or injury. Tell that to Mary Magdalene after she saw the
risen Christ. Change happens. New life happens. Resurrection happens – if we take the foolish
risk to believe that love wins.
So, it’s April Fool’s Day. It’s the day when we’re supposed to poke around at the edges of what we know to be true and
push against the boundaries of our well-enclosed lives. Well, I want to invite you today, with Mary
Magdalene, to take the risk of being a fool for Christ’s sake. I want to invite you to take the risk of
living in hope, even though the world wants to sell you a different story. Because here’s the mystery we celebrate this
morning: Light shines through the darkness.
Death is not the end. Life is
eternal, and we’re only in chapter 1.
Hope overpowers despair. Love
wins – we just have to act that way.
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