Finding Jesus at the Tomb

Sermon for Easter, April 9, 2023
John 20:1-18

In the past couple of weeks, an addition has quietly come to our columbarium.  If you go over there to light a candle, you’ll notice a small crucifix on the wall – an image of the cross with Jesus hanging on it.  A couple of parishioners had asked about adding a crucifix somewhere in the church, and that seemed like the right place. 

I’m telling you this because Easter morning is a good time to think about where we look for Jesus – on the cross, or somewhere else?  In the Episcopal Church, you don’t see a lot of crucifixes.  We typically look toward the empty cross, toward Jesus rising and reigning in glory, rather than sacrificed for us, hanging there in death.  We like to think of ourselves as Easter people, and we are – not just this morning but always.  But, as Good Friday teaches us, you can’t run to Easter morning without spending time at the cross along the way.

Even our Gospel reading this morning recognizes that both/and.  You know, we hear this story in the light of 2,000 years of Easter celebrations, but Mary Magdalene isn’t there yet.  As the story begins, in that darkest hour just before the dawn, Mary makes her way to the tomb – and in John’s Gospel, we aren’t ever told what she’s doing there.  In John’s story, after Jesus died on the cross, two of his secret followers from among the Jewish leaders prepared the body for burial – anointing it, wrapping it up with “a hundred pounds” of spices, and laying it in a fresh tomb (John 19:39).  In the account we heard today, Mary isn’t there to prepare the body for burial; that’s how it happens in the other Gospels.  Here, Mary just comes to the tomb.

And for more than half of this Easter story, darkness still reigns.  The stone that sealed the tomb has been removed, and the body’s gone.  Mary reasonably assumes their enemies have stolen the body, maybe planning to drag it through the streets to show just how dead this Jesus fellow really is. 

So, Mary runs to get Peter and John, waking them up to help look for the body before the horror show begins anew.  The three of them make their way through the darkness back to the tomb.  The guys have to see it for themselves, I guess to make sure Mary hadn’t just missed the body tossed in a corner of the cave.  Peter looks in, and John goes in, and Peter goes in after him.  They see the body’s empty wrappings, and they believe that Jesus truly is not there – but they don’t know what that means.  So then, the guys go home.  That’s always seemed strange to me, but maybe they thought for a minute about what might happen if they went out looking for the body.  Peter and John didn’t want to end up as bodies dragged through the streets themselves.

Well, here’s the remarkable thing:  Through all this, Jesus is watching.  He’s been there the whole time, standing alongside them in the dark.  But in the dark, Mary couldn’t see him standing beside her.  Even when Jesus starts speaking to Mary, her pain is too thick to let in the voice of God.  Her mind is full of awful images of truly awful people, backed by a murderous regime, desecrating the body of her Lord – which would prove that evil does get the last word after all, despite Jesus’ signs that love would win.  She even talks with Jesus there by the tomb; but in the darkness that surrounds her, she still can’t see it’s him. 

For more than half of this story of the ultimate good news, the news is not good.  But then, it turns.  The story turns from night to day when Jesus calls Mary by name.  She sees Jesus when she knows Jesus sees her.  And it’s then she knows she’s not alone – and never will be alone again.

All that sounds like the shape of life to me.  I mean, I’m in the business of proclaiming good news, but I’ll tell you – life is at least half darkness, and I think it’s our time in the darkness that forms us most.  To find the light, you’ve got to go into the darkness with your eyes wide open.  You’ve got to go to the tomb to find Jesus waiting for you.  

And there, what you’ll find is that he’s been walking right alongside you the whole way, taking the hardest steps we take.  It started with being born in poverty, his parents forced by the government to travel cross-country to be documented and then fleeing as refugees from persecution.  As an adult, he worked with his hands, scratching out a living day by day.  He watched the people he loved suffering in an imperial system set up to profit by taking their resources.  He saw his cousin, John the Baptist, begin to lead a holy movement, only to be arrested and killed in prison.  And he himself rode into the center of power, the people proclaiming him to be their king, only to watch his friends desert him and deny him and betray him, delivering him up to his own torture and death. 

Every pain of human life is a pain he knew – and a pain he defeated.  Because, alongside the persecution and deprivation and struggle, Jesus – God in the flesh – also knew every joy that’s ours and promised to bring us into that joy for all time.  All those moments when heaven and earth intersect – the joy of deep relationship, the joy of miraculous creation, the joy of changing someone’s life for the better – all those moments when heaven and earth intersect are previews of our coming attraction, life with God that never ends.  “I have overcome the world,” Jesus told his friends (John 16:33 NIV).  So “do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid” (14:27).

But, of course, we are afraid.  Because all around us, we see night creeping in.  We see loved ones die.  We see our bodies failing.  We see leaders we can’t trust pursuing the politics of endless bickering.  We see one shooting after another, and we rush to blame rather than to solve.  We see young people – young people – living in fear of the future.  Much of our life is spent at the edge of the dark night, afraid of what the next day may bring.

But also at the edge of that dark night stands the risen Christ.  And he’s calling your name.  Whatever fear you face, he’s faced it, too.  God has taken flesh and blood, and walked through the worst that humanity can dish out, and walked out of the tomb in victory, scattering the darkness with the light of life.  But here’s the holy irony that Mary Magdalene shows us:  You have to go to the tomb to find Jesus.  For it’s from the tomb’s womb that the risen Christ comes.

As you know, I’ll be going to Jesus’ tomb before long myself, God willing.  As part of the sabbatical that starts tomorrow, I’m planning to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  Now, of course, I’m watching the news, as you are, and praying that conditions on the ground will allow the trip to go forward.  But the plan is for me to tag along with another church’s group and learn how parish pilgrimages work so we can take pilgrimages from St. Andrew’s.  I’m also staying in Jerusalem a couple of days extra, once the tour is over.  It will give me the chance to go back to the Mount of Olives and take my own journey of Holy Week and Easter, my own walk from the Garden of Gethsemane, down into the Kidron Valley, and up Mount Zion into Jerusalem’s Old City, following the Via Dolorosa, the way of sorrow, to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the tomb.

Now, that doesn’t exactly sound like a fun vacation: “Hey, I know – let’s walk the path where Jesus was beaten and killed!”  That’s why it’s not a vacation but a pilgrimage, a journey not just to see a famous site but to find yourself, and God, in the holy mystery of that site.  I am trusting that there is a balm in Gilead, healing to be found along the way of sorrows.  I’m trusting in that because Jesus shows us it’s true, walking out of the tomb and calling us by name – if we come to the tomb to find him.

So, at some point, when you feel the darkness creeping up on you, I invite you to make a tiny pilgrimage of your own.  You don’t have to go to Jerusalem.  You can make a powerful journey right here.  Sometime, when you’re having trouble seeing the way forward, when the edge of the dark night is near, come by the church.  Come into this beautiful space and walk down the aisle, encircled by fellow travelers from centuries gone by.  Feel free to stop in a pew, to “enter, rest, and pray” along your way. 

But then, keep going; and make your way to the columbarium.  Maybe you have someone there whose love you want to remember.  But even if you don’t, make your way over there, and light a candle, and be present in the beautiful, holy tension of this space.  Look to the crucifix in the corner, and remember that your Lord and Savior walks with you through every hard step you have to take.  And then, look up to the angel window, and remember that the promise of life in its fullness, a life of heavenly healing, awaits you, so close you can almost touch it. 

And then, make your way out of the columbarium, out of the tomb, and climb the steps to the sanctuary – to the empty cross, to Jesus’ victory over sin and death in the here and now.  Why make that trip?  Because he’s calling you by name, asking you to come and see, and then sending you to go and live – to live the truth that you, too, have seen the Lord, even in the darkness.