“Who Will Roll Away the Stone" Easter Sunday 2019 John 20:1-18, Mark 16:1-8 Trillium United Church, Mono Mills

MARY COMES TO THE TOMB

The wet earth clings to my feet on this early morning errand that weighs me down with death.

I have not slept; my food is tasteless;  my heart aches, aches.

How can it be in this fractured world that morning still comes?

I wince as sparrows gather at my window, singing,

and I wish my own mind were so small that,

like these birds, it could not grasp

the barrenness of this bleakest dawn.

I am finished with love, dead as the tomb that is my hopeless destination.

That place is sealed, shut tight as my soul,  yet I am drawn there.

For it is where I left my love behind.

I need to return, alone in my misery, perhaps to find a shred of him

to carry in my fisted heart.

But someone else has already come.

Who is this that stands in the way of my mourning?

A few years ago a friend of mine lost her husband to cancer. As we talked this week, some of what she said has echoed in my mind. She had never felt this kind of pain before in her life, she said, and didn’t know where to go with it. Because they knew it was coming, he and she together had been able to plan, and had time to say goodbye. But, she said, in the bereavement group she has met people who lost their loved ones suddenly and tragically, and didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye.

Whether or not there was a chance to say goodbye, nothing will ever be the same again. It’s right about now, right at Easter, when my friend was asking deep in her very deepest soul, if resurrection is real - and if it is, what does it mean? How do we know? Can we know?

Well, to preach resurrection is also to preach about Good Friday, and a whole sequence of events. Those events are what the stories in the Gospels are there for – to help us see human nature, and what happens when someone threatens someone else’s power – and reinforce that however evil humans are to each other, love overcomes.  A well-known church leader who was popular about twenty-five years ago once tried to suggest that we should preach only the good news of Easter, and leave Good Friday out of it. I am not of that persuasion.

Easter means nothing unless we go through the events of the previous days, however painful they are. Easter is, in a sense, a kind of “bipolar” celebration. We are in the process of grief because the one we love is gone, and yet we are ecstatic because we know that the one we love still lives on. We have to go through the Passover evening – friends sharing a celebratory meal together in their remembrance of the Exodus;  then the crucifixion of Friday, waiting through the Sabbath, and waking to an empty spot in a graveyard on Sunday morning.

And even on that Sunday morning, as we carry spices and oils and cloths to the tomb, we are still asking “Who will roll the stone away?”

So we recap the story a little. Jesus had been brought to court and sentenced to death. His death was by crucifixion, the Roman occupation’s means of execution for political dissidents – the most degrading possible. The crucifixion happened on a Friday, the Sabbath Eve which began at sunset, and that fact complicated the burial. Normally, there would be a time of preparing the body properly, with care. But since no one is allowed to work on the Sabbath, there was only enough time to find a tomb and put Jesus’ body there. No time to take the herbs and spices and wrap the body properly. And like all graves, a stone was rolled across the entryway, to prevent wild animals getting in. 

I think the word “stone” isn’t quite right…even if it’s a good translation. We are talking about something four to six feet across, one foot thick and weighing one to two tons. Two strong men could roll this monolith into place, but removing it is much more difficult. For the women, and likely even for the disciples, it would have been almost impossible. So knowing this, why would the women even go?

Two gospels are given for texts this week - and I decided to play with them a little because they are so very different. In the Gospel of John, Mary first goes to the tomb alone, with no plan in mind. She just needs to be where Jesus was laid - to grieve and to think. When she finds the tomb empty she runs to Peter, who then runs to see, and leaves again. Mary, wailing in grief, sees who she thinks is the gardener , and asks where the body has been taken – she is desperate, needing to say goodbye at least. Yet when Jesus speaks, she knows it is him.

In Mark, Mary sets out on the first morning of the new week with two others, taking along the spices and herbs to dress the body. When she arrives, the tomb is open, the body is gone, and a young man in white tells her Jesus is no longer there, he is risen - but to go and tell the others. Mark’s Gospel ends there - they leave but don’t speak about it to anyone. They are afraid. They do not tell anyone.

Now, both experiences were real to those people. In John’s Gospel Mary relays that she saw and spoke to Jesus - and indeed, even in the text outside the Bible, what we call the ‘extra-canonical’ texts - the Gospel of Mary - she talks about her experience and things Jesus said to her. She has had answers to her questions – the stones have been rolled away and she has gained insight.

However, in Mark – which is the oldest of the four Gospels, none of this is included. Mark has three women going to the tomb to complete a ritual which should have been done prior to the burial. Jesus is gone, the three women are witnesses to that. They aren’t sure what has happened, but they surely don’t believe he is resurrected. They believe the body has been stolen.

What was Mary thinking about? Seeing the stone moved, had she thought, "O look, someone took care of removing the stone for me!"? No - instead, she was frightened when she realised the stone wasn't where it was supposed to be. Without even looking in the tomb, she became concerned that she couldn't do what she came to do! I believe she was feeling that pain greater than any she had felt before, and she didn’t know where to go with it - so she went to the place where she believed he still was - to be as close to him as she possibly could. But she was frustrated in not being able to anoint the body - it would have been her goodbye, and even that chance was taken away from her. She couldn’t process it all, and she and the others ran away frightened.

In John’s Gospel, Mary’s cry “They have taken him and I do not know where they have laid him” is the cry of a woman in pain and confusion, not able to see how she is going to go on, going through motions of keeping busy, trying to do the things which would be normal because she can’t think of what else to do - and everything feels dead and empty. It’s the cry of all of us as we deal with death – we hold services, we bury the beloved, and we still can’t get past the stone in front of the grave.

Now the problem wasn't the empty tomb. Nor was the stone which had been removed. Both Peter and Mary came to the tomb expecting to find a body. When it wasn't there, they were confused. John, when he arrived, saw the gravecloths, and walked away almost believing – but not quite. All of them were asking one question - is it real? How was the stone removed, where is the body, who would do this?  The early Jews believed in resurrection at the “last day”, when the trumpet sounded and the dead would be raised. Yet even after their experience with Lazarus, the followers still didn’t believe.  

Did Jesus really somehow miraculously get up and walk out of the tomb? No, I don’t believe that.  He was human – as human as we are, and he died! I believe that is part of why Mary didn’t recognise the person she thought was a gardener. He died! His physical body died, but the person who was Jesus went on.

Is it real that our loved ones, who are gone from this world, live on in another way? It isn’t a reality we can grasp, because it is different from this one, but just because we cannot see it or feel it or even touch it, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. And is the point that somehow the essence lives? Or is the point the stones people put in the way of recognising that something new and different had happened, was happening – and in doing so, do we keep Jesus in the tomb? Do we lock ourselves into a tomb?

In his first letter to the church at Corinth, Paul spoke about resurrection. He wrote “But some ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?" How foolish! What you plant does not come to life unless it first dies. When you plant a crop, you do not plant the body that will be, but a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. God gives it a body; to each kind of seed its own body. All flesh is not the same: people have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds and fish another. There are also heavenly and earthly bodies; the splendour of the heavenly bodies is one kind, the splendour of the earthly bodies is another. The sun has one kind of splendour, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendour.

So it is with resurrection. The body that is sown is perishable, but is raised imperishable; .......it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” Amazingly, Paul got it – one who had no direct experience at all with Jesus when he was alive.

The pain of parting, the pain of living after a loved one has died, does not go away. But resurrection is part of our faith. These early witnesses - the disciple, Peter, and Mary Magdalene - remind us that coming to faith and understanding is not an assembly line product but a dynamic process; faith comes through a complex of interactions between our personalities, contexts and histories. Whether through an immediate decision to encounter resurrection, or through a long and circuitous route, we find our way to that mystery.

Good News for Easter, good news for all those Easters in our lives...that was the message of the first morning, and the message this morning as we go about life again. Hallelujah!

Sources:
1. Poem by Rev. Timothy Haut, Deep River, Connecticut
2. Material from the sermons “Looking for the Wrong Thing in the Wrong Place” by Rev. Randy Quinn; “Why are You Weeping?” by Rev. Thomas Hall.
3. Gospel of Mary: Papyrus Berolensis 8052, Papyrus Oxyrhyncus. Contained in the Nag Hammadi Library.