Looking Forward to Easter Sunday: John 20:1-18

Noli me tangere: The Risen Jesus and Mary Magdalene in the garden the first Easter dawn. Fra Angelico, Florence, San Marco

EASTER GOSPEL TEXT: Easter Day (John 20:1-18)

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him." Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, 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." When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" 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." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, `I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'" Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

The Bible texts of the Gospel lessons are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Church of Christ in the USA, and used by permission.

COMMENTARY by the Rev. Raymond Webster

These comments on the Easter Gospel above are from my Easter Sermon in 2010. I want to wish you a very happy Easter.

On Easter Day we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. On a day in our history, Jesus died on the cross, in love for us. He was buried and on the third day rose. The heart of the Christian faith and hope is that when we die, when those we love die, we will be with him in the new life in heaven.

With him. I have printed above, as something of an Easter present, a photo of the fresco of the today’s Easter Gospel, painted in the 1400s by Fra Angelico, in Florence, Italy. Fra or Brother Angelico was a Dominican friar. This is one of an extraordinary series of frescoes of scenes of the story of Jesus he painted in a Dominican monastery of San Marco in Florence. The last time we were there my wife Eve told me, that the building just next to San Marco was the main building of the University of Florence when she was a student there.

Fra Angelico shows the scene where Mary Magdalene has come to the garden, and encounters the risen Jesus. It was just before dawn, and in the dark she thought he was one of the gardeners in the place, so Fra Angelico painted Jesus holding a gardener’s hoe.

Fra Angelico painted the original in the room of one of his brother friars. The original is big, my memory is life size. Fra Angelico painted a fresco in each of the monks rooms.

In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew Jesus told us that when we pray we are to go into our own room and shut the door. Paul said that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. We go into our room, we go within ourselves to the place inside where we think and feel and hope and fear and know and wonder – and there God gives us the stories of Jesus to remember and listen to and picture.

Our Easter Gospel is this story Fra Angelico has pictured.

While it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the place where they had buried Jesus. She had been there when they took him down from the cross, and the mother held him in her arms for a time, and then they brought him here to this garden and buried him.

That first Easter morning, in today’s story, when someone was there in the dark she thought it was one of the gardeners, and she spoke to him. And then she heard him speak her name, perfectly simply -- Mary.

And she recognized him. It was Jesus. And she said in recognition, “Rabbi.” “Teacher.”

Then he said to her what is often the title in Latin of paintings of this scene, Noli me tangere, don’t hold on to me, do not hold on to this risen visible presence, given for a short while so you and the others might know what has happened, that he has been raised from the dead, that God who was with you in him is with you again in him. Truly with you. Present.

Jesus would not remain visibly present. He would ascend to the Father – to the heart of God, where God is. Beyond us, other (and so the imagery of up) and also – and also, deep in the tradition of the Hebrew Bible, out of the theology of God’s presence in the Hebrew Bible – also with us. Unseen. Present.

We listen for his voice in the stories of what he said and what he did. .

We take the bread and wine as signs of God’s presence with us in him, in his love.

And he is with us, to offer forgiveness, friendship, purpose, calling, vocation – God calls each one to follow him as his disciple. His last words in Matthew, the Gospel of the Sermon on the Mount, are his Great Commission to go into all the world and make disciples of everybody. Our mission of empowering and enabling and teaching.

And at the heart of it all, he who is risen and living at the heart of God is with us to love with us with the love we see in his story, in his cross – the living love given to us and if we accept it and trust it and live in it, we forget self and love with something of his love and die to self and come into his new life.

Mary Magdalene left the garden and went and told the others she had seen the Lord – the first witness to the resurrection, the first preacher of the gospel good news of Easter.

A happy and blessed Easter in the love of Christ!

(These comments are based on a sermon preached by the Rev. Raymond Webster on Easter Day, April 4, 2010 in St. Chrysostom’s Church, Chicago.)

Looking ahead to the Fifth Sunday in Lent: John 11:1-45

Opening scene: Jesus gets word his friend is sick

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, "Lord, he whom you love is ill." But when Jesus heard it, he said, "This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it." Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

The writer gives us a picture of how much Jesus loved these three, Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha. There is an emphasis on how much he loved them. And there is also a perplexing hesitation. Jesus stays where he is two days longer.

Then after this he said to the disciples, "Let us go to Judea again." The disciples said to him, "Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?"

Bethany was (and is) just down the road from Jerusalem. If you take the road, as Jesus would on the first Palm Sunday, from Bethany, you come to the top of the Mount of Olives. Directly ahead, across a narrow valley, rises the Temple Mount, where at the time of this story the great Temple in Jerusalem stood. Jesus went down the Mount of Olives to enter the city – in the most visible way possible – on Palm Sunday.

Going to Bethany was in effect deciding to go to Jerusalem. There was a hesitation on the part of Jesus. The reaction of the disciples was to try to talk him out of going.

Jesus answered, "Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them." After saying this, he told them, "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him." The disciples said to him, "Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right." Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, "Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him."

Courageous Thomas

I remember many years ago, the Church of Scotland preacher James Stewart (1896-1990) said that Thomas should be called “Courageous Thomas” rather than “Doubting Thomas” because he was the one to speak up to urge them all to go with Jesus, whatever the risks of going near Jerusalem.

Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, "Let us also go, that we may die with him."

Jesus goes to Bethany and talks with Martha

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him." Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again."

Here is the promise of resurrection.

Martha said to him, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day."

Then Jesus says another of the seven “I am” statements:

Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

These words are quoted at the beginning of the burial office, the funeral service, in the Book of Common Prayer, and are read at the opening of every funeral in St. Chrysostom’s parish.

“Do you believe this?" She said to him, "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world."

Jesus died and was buried and on the third day rose, and our central Christian faith and hope is that when we die, or those we love die, we will be raised with him.

This is the center of what the church – of what St. Chrysostom’s, Chicago – has to say to the city and world.

When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, "The Teacher is here and is calling for you." And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep.

A deeply human moment. Even tighter in the King James Version: Jesus wept. As the Nicene Creed emphasizes, Jesus was Son of God, and also human, born of a human mother. He was born and he would die. He ate meals and loved. And faced with the death of a friend, he wept.

So the Jews said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"

Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, "Take away the stone." Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days."

An extremely earthy real human comment.

Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, "Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me." When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!"

So may we each hear Jesus one day call us, to come out of death into life with him.

This was the great sign of the resurrection which was coming soon, when Jesus would die on the cross, and be buried, and on the third day rise.

The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go."

Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.

---

The Bible text of the Gospel lesson is from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and used by permission.

Sermon preached on the Third Sunday in Lent: John 5:19-24

Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11;
John 4:5-42

There’s something suspicious about a person who’s too quick to sign on to things.  I’m not talking about people who are quick to volunteer, or try something different, or make new friends.  I’m talking about serial committers: people who seem to make big life decisions the way other people decide which socks to wear.  We’ve all had to deliberate about whether to get married, whether to join a new church, or whether to leave a job, and most of us, even if we know what we’ll ultimately do, take our time, consult with others, go through the motions, etc, etc.  So when somebody runs off to Vegas with a girl they met yesterday, or quits her job one morning and enrolls in beauty school the next, we’re shocked, we’re confused, and we’re put off by the unstudied immediacy of the whole thing. 

When a group of us got together to talk about the Samaritan woman during our first Wednesday night Lenten program at the church, her immediacy was one of the things that stood out to everybody.  It shows up in two places.  First, Jesus tells her that she should have asked him for water, because what he has to give can quench thirst forever.  Without missing a beat, she responds, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty ….”  Their conversation continues, and when Jesus tells her things about her life that he shouldn’t know, she realizes that he’s a prophet.  She starts to ask questions, thinking, “Maybe this is the prophet, the Messiah we’ve all been waiting for.”  After Jesus confirms that he’s the guy, she’s off, running to gather her village in a second bold show of immediacy. 

Now you could look at this woman’s relationship history and make some supporting conclusions about her being quick to commit to things.  Jesus reveals it all: she’s had five husbands and is living with a man to whom she’s not married.  But there are some pretty valid historical-cultural reasons why she might have found herself in this situation – and reasons that were largely out of her control, because as a woman she was not a powerful person.  She needed protection, and she needed support.  Her dependency was a given, nothing that she could hide.  And that’s why this woman and other people who are quick to sign up for things, who are quick to say, “Give me this water,” can be so disturbing to us.  They’re emblematic of a basic fact about the human condition: we need.  We are dependent.  We’re creatures who won’t survive unless we have real water, unless we have food and shelter; but more than this, we’re creatures who won’t survive unless we have love, unless we can make meaning of our lives, unless we have purpose and relationships.  The Samaritan woman isn’t particularly fickle or promiscuous; neither is she particularly spiritually open or adept … she’s just particularly transparent; she’s very obviously looking for something; she’s frank in this whole exchange: “Yes.  Please.  I need a Messiah.”   

Which is the opposite of Jesus’ most recent conversation.  You may remember from last week the story of Nicodemus, a powerful person – a judge – living in a powerful place – Jerusalem – who came to Jesus by night and exhibited a sort of caution and confusion in speaking with him that’s so endearing, because it’s how a lot of us feel a lot of the time when it comes to Jesus.  Nicodemus is a responsible person, a newspaper reader, a taxpayer, who isn’t going to join Jesus’ ragtag band of disciples without some serious probing into this whole Messiah thing.  He stands to lose a lot if his friends and neighbors see him with Jesus (which is why he comes at night) and he can’t seem to get his brain around the things that Jesus says anyway: “How can I be born again?” is his famous question.  Nicodemus jumps to the same conclusion as the Samaritan woman, taking Jesus’ words solely at face value.  But his response is totally different.  Nicodemus puts his hand to his chin and mulls over this idea of being born again, while the Samaritan woman holds out her hand, and demands, “Give me the water.”

Whether he should take it literally or not, being born again is exactly the thing that Nicodemus needs.  He needs to be raw again, to see the world with brand new eyes.  He needs to be viscerally aware of what being a creature requires, and how fundamentally dependent he really is.  Instead, Nicodemus is in the same situation most of us end up in:   he’s been able to cover up his dependency with a sense of self-sufficiency.  Because his basic needs have been met, he’s been able to cover up his basic human neediness with responsibility, with mature adulthood, with obligations and allegiances.  He’s built a respectable and comfortable life, he’s become a good person, and he’s scooted far, far back from “the edge,” that place of precariousness and marginality where people do make quick decisions about their lives, and do act with a sort of stunning immediacy and urgency, and are aware of needing help and needing comfort, and needing salvation.  It’s a place that’s really hard for us to get to when we’re safe and healthy, and when things are going well.  But it’s where we end up when things go wrong – it’s where some people spend their whole lives – and it’s this edge that is the place of prayer, where we cry out for Jesus because we sense, suddenly, that we need him.  Because we know, desperately, that we can’t make it on our own.  And because we remember, without a doubt, that we are dust. 

Jesus has been walking the edge this whole Lenten season.  When he’s alone in the desert facing temptation; when he goes, today, to the center of an unfamiliar village and shoots straight with a Samaritan woman; and in the center of power, Jerusalem, with a powerful man, Nicodemus, it’s this edge that Jesus is trying to draw out of him, to make Nicodemus feel the sharpness, the immediacy, the urgency of his human need so that he can receive the gift of grace for the real gift that it is.  So that he can find the meaning, purpose, love, and peace that we all long for in Jesus – in this water that Jesus offers, the water of rebirth, the water of new life, the wellspring that each one of us carries within him or her whose source is Christ, alive in you and in me. 

The Samaritan woman and Nicodemus reflect us back to ourselves, and Jesus has a stake in all of it: our unvarnished, creaturely selves and the polished, self-sufficient selves we sometimes become.  What he really wants, though, are our true selves - or, rather, he knows who we truly are and wants us to discover the truth about ourselves, too … for that is where he lives.  And that is where we will find him. 

Sermon preached by the Rev. Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Sunday, March 27 at 8:00 AM and 11:00 AM. 

Looking ahead to the Third Sunday in Lent: John 4:5-42

Where’s Jesus?  We can answer that in a couple of ways this week.  Where he is geographically is important, and where this week’s story about the Samaritan woman and “living water” falls is important. 

John notes that Jesus had to go through Samaria to get back north (where he lived) after being in Jerusalem (where he was celebrating the Passover).  This could be a commentary on geography: the shortest, safest route between the south and the north was through this central patch of land called Samaria.  If you look at a map of ancient Palestine, there’s no reason to avoid it.  Unless, that is, you know something about ancient Palestine.  There was some pretty profound enmity between Jewish people and Samaritan people, which most of us are familiar with from the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke.  For one thing, “southerners” (the area called Judah, where Samaria is) and “northerners” (the area called Israel, where Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth is) had not been inviting one another to parties for some time before both regions were torn apart by war and exile.  When the dust had settled from both the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions and deportations, and the new, triumphant Persian king allowed Jewish people to go back to Israel and Judea, things did not always go smoothly between them and the people who had remained in the land – which appears to have included the Samaritans.  The returnees began to rebuild the temple and reestablish Jerusalem as the center of worship, but the Samaritans weren’t interested.  They didn’t really have any breakthrough ideas about God’s presence in the world and among us that kept them from getting excited about the new temple.  Rather, they had other notions about where the appropriate center of cultic activity was, and ended up building their own temple on Mt. Gerazim, north of Jerusalem.  During a brief period of Jewish rule in-between Greek and Roman occupation of the land, the temple at Gerazim was destroyed. 

When I think about Samaritans in the Bible, I’m quick to apply the label “insiders and outsiders” and assume that because we are reading along with Jesus’ largely Jewish audience, Samaritans always teach us a lesson about his attitude toward marginalized people.  That’s not entirely wrong, since from within any one of these two groups the other group would have been considered to be irritating, unimportant, even threatening.  If you know the other side of the story, though – not just how Jesus’ contemporaries felt about Samaritans, but how suspicious of Jewish people the Samaritans were – you realize that Jesus is doing something bigger and more complicated than reaching out to a person who is unlike him.  He is diving into enemy territory, taking on centuries of discord that has recently focused itself around the very important question of how to worship the one God that both Samaritans and Jews claim to know.  Jesus is sitting beside a well that could be in the middle of the Balkans, or the Middle East, or Chiapas, holding a summit with the other side … only it’s not a head-of-state or a rabbi with whom he is speaking.  It’s a woman. 

Which evokes the second answer to the question, “Where’s Jesus?”  Think about his most recent conversation: last week Jesus spoke with Nicodemus about being born again.  Jesus was in Jerusalem, discussing serious matters with an influential leader in the Jewish Sanhedrin (like a supreme court).  From the center of power with a powerful man, Jesus arrives in a center of conflict with a legally, socially powerless person (the Samaritan woman seems to have had some power to influence or persuade once she runs to tell her neighbors about the Messiah). 

Back to John’s phrase, then, “he had to go through Samaria” (John 4:4, my emphasis).  What do you think: a matter of geographical expediency only, or a trip that tells us something about who he is and what he’s here to do?  

(Danielle Thompson)