In our reading today, the disciples—and I include Mary Magdalene as a disciple—the disciples are looking for Christ in all the wrong places. This is understandable. It’s logical. His body was laid in a tomb, so one would expect to find it still there in the tomb. Bodies don’t usually get up and leave. And in the previous chapter, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus have wrapped the body in linens and about 100 pounds of myrrh and aloes, which was apparently the custom.
Mary Magdalene comes looking for Jesus early on the day after the sabbath. Let’s think about what she expects to find: a large stone rolled against the entrance to the tomb—to protect from predators and keep the smell from spreading. And inside, Mary Magdalene expects to see Jesus’ body laid out on the bench, wrapped in linens and spices. There would be a smell, but the spices would help to mask it. She could sit with the body, weep, mourn, talk to it—whatever she needed to do to grieve that his life, his ministry, his healing, his teaching was all over—all now in the past. That’s what she was expecting.
What she finds instead is the stone rolled away and an empty tomb. Does she think, “Oh, he’s been resurrected!”? No. She thinks someone has stolen Jesus’ body. His enemies have, after all, just crucified him, and stealing his body would be a final act of humiliation and oppression. She runs back to Simon Peter and John in town and says, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him” (John 20:2).
Peter and John have this foot race out to the tomb and arrive panting. They both go in, look around, see the linens, presumably still smelling of all the burial spices. They shrug their shoulders and go back home, not knowing what to make of this surprising turn of events.
But Mary is still there at the tomb. She’s still looking for Jesus. And when she bends down to look in the tomb, she sees two angels. In other gospels, the angel or angels give the women directions about meeting up with Jesus back north in Galilee. In this gospel, they just ask, “Woman, why are you weeping?” Very tender. They don’t try to explain or convey anything.
She turns around and sees a person she thinks is the gardener. She doesn’t recognize Jesus.
Let’s pause there. She’s face to face with Jesus—her teacher and healer and dearest friend all this time—and she doesn’t recognize him. I have always wondered why. Is it just because we don’t expect to see someone we just buried up and walking around? Is he disguised? I’m imagining sunglasses, if only such things existed then, and a stylish hat that conceals his face. Has he been so transformed that he doesn’t look like his human self? This is one of those instances where you want to shake the text and see if the answer will fall out onto the table. But no, we have to live with the mystery. For whatever reason, this person whom she knows so well is unrecognizable to her.
Notice that Mary is fearless. Whoever this man is, she wants to enlist him in helping her find Jesus’ body, and she will take it away—she, one woman alone, will carry this body out of the garden and put it . . . where? Doesn’t matter. She is determined that Jesus’ enemies will not have his body. They will not have the last word. This is a woman who will not be stopped. Peter and John scratched their heads, shrugged their shoulders, and left. Not Mary. She is on a mission. She just doesn’t recognize that she has already found the object of her search. She’s talking to him.
Peter, John, and Mary have been looking for Jesus in the wrong place. They seek him among the dead, as if his story is over and his ministry is all in the past. But he’s not there. Only when Jesus calls Mary by name does she realize who he is. I imagine what the text here left out was her pause and then a huge gasp as she wraps her head around this new reality. [Gasp] “Rabbouni!” In that one word, her whole world shifts.
Many Christians today wrestle with this text. Did Jesus’ body actually disappear the way it happened in this reading? Was he resuscitated? No, because then he would have to die all over again. What is this whole resurrection thing? We’ve studied science. We like Facts with a capital F. This story seems like hocus-pocus. So if we are asking “Did this story happen exactly this way?” we are getting stuck on a question that, 2,000 years later, we have no way of answering. It’s the wrong question; we’re looking for Jesus in the wrong place. The people who wrote the gospels did not have our modern concept of biography, where you have to write about real things that the real person really did. The gospel writers wrote about a real man who had such an outsized impact on his community and beyond that they had to try and convey the magnitude of Jesus’ impact on their lives in mythic terms. They weren’t concerned with science. They were concerned with matters of the spirit: with love, justice, liberation, healing, spreading the Good News of God’s incarnate love among us. So if you’re looking for Christ through facts, you will be left eternally wondering, and you will be stuck trying to answer questions that don’t actually help you in your faith journey to find him.
If we’re looking for Christ only within the pages of the Bible, we will find him as people experienced him 2,000 years ago and half a world away. But if we want to find the resurrected Christ, we need to be looking elsewhere as well.
Mary recognized him when he called her by name. While she was looking for him in the places he wasn’t—in the past, among the dead—he found her in her present.
So we don’t look for the risen Christ among the dead. We don’t look back in history. We look right now, today, for the risen Christ in our midst, calling us by name. Maybe he’s someone we mistake for the gardener, restoring us to the Garden of Eden. Maybe she—Christ could be a she—is sitting next to us in the pew today. Maybe the Christ is among the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned, the undocumented, the LGBTQ, the disenfranchised, the people experiencing racism.
At Christmas we talk about how God sent Jesus to be the Divine Incarnate, Emmanuel, God-with-us, to be there with us in all the human suffering and joy, in community, in relationship, speaking truth to power, liberating the oppressed, lifting up matters of justice and compassion, naming systems of oppression and finding creative ways to not cooperate with those systems of oppression, no matter the cost.
This is why we need that resurrected Christ more than ever today. The religious leaders who turned Jesus over to Pilate and asked Pilate to kill him didn’t come into Pilate’s house because that would have made them unclean for the Passover celebration. (John 18:28.) So apparently having someone crucified on trumped-up charges doesn’t make you unclean, but stepping into a Gentile’s house does. Can you say “hypocrisy”? Can you say someone in power has lost their way in their faith journey?
And the hypocrisy continues today.
We have lost track of where Christ is. So much evil has been done in the name of Christianity, especially in recent decades, that it is no wonder people are leaving the Church in droves. They can’t stand the hypocrisy and the evil being done in Christ’s name. People are ashamed to admit that they are Christians lest they be associated with what some Christians in power are doing. Last year, 53 UCC congregations across the country closed their doors—roughly one a week. That’s a lot. That’s more a Maundy Thursday existential “are we dying” space than an Easter Sunday resurrection space.
We cannot hang onto the Church of the past. If we are to live into the resurrection, if we are to follow Christ through persecution and crucifixion and come out on the other side, we have to center our faith journey in God’s love for all of creation, no exceptions. We have to follow Jesus in speaking truth to power, even when that involves risk. We have to include everyone, especially those pushed to the margins or outcast. We have to wage peace through abundant love, not through fear or hate or oppression. We have to remind ourselves that our own liberation is tied up in the liberation of everyone else.
We celebrate Emmanuel, God with us, at Christmas. Friends, God is still with us. That Risen Christ is there at the rallies and marches, in the hospital rooms, in the prisons, at the food banks and the free lunches, at the Twelve-Step meetings, at the Pride parades, along the border. Like Mary Magdalene, we may not recognize him—or her—right away, until something deep within us feels called by name, accepted, forgiven, and profoundly loved. Look for Christ in here, in the depths of your soul, calling you to be your best self, calling you to speak truth to power, to care for the needy, to wage peace. Look for Christ out there, in all the people you meet. Practice seeking Christ with the determination of Mary Magdalene, knowing that the story is not over. And then be open to finding Christ where you least expect to. Christ is risen. He, she, they are risen indeed! Hallelujah! Amen.