Sunday, April 12

John 20:1-18

How many of us have ever identified with the disciples at what they may have been experiencing following the brutal crucifixion of Jesus? Can we even imagine the kind of psychic and spiritual darkness into which they’d been plunged? How does anyone see any light within the darkness of that kind of tomb? Our scripture lesson for today says that Mary of Magdala approached the tomb that morning in additional darkness – real darkness – because the sun hadn’t yet shown itself on the distant horizon. She doesn’t at all find what she came for. What she experiences, though, is a stunning recognition and the promise of new life – a new beginning.

Let’s be clear: Easter has nothing at all to do with cute bunnies, colored eggs, and baskets filled with candy. Oddly enough, though, here in the northern hemisphere it does have a connection with springtime: of a landscape buried for months under frost and dead leaves suddenly bursting with flowers. Now that is a miracle! What we’ve all longed for, what we’ve missed and have been begging the Creator to give back to us, has been dead for quite some time, and now is alive again.

So here in the 21st century we view the story of a “bodily resurrection” with some skepticism – it must be a metaphor of the experience of those first disciples, we say; it couldn’t be about the resuscitation of a corpse. And yet every single day babies that had no being before are born, and none of us seems to question that. It seems like it’s a far greater thing for somebody to be created who just months before was without being, than for anything that once had being to now be restored.

Maybe the deeper meaning of Easter is simply, and yet profoundly, that when things don’t hang together for us we need to learn to look at unexpected events and situations with a longer point of view – with memories of spring and summer while we’re still trapped in the deadness of winter. It could be that Easter is an invitation to us to ponder all of these things in our hearts and know that some life-giving meaning will emerge for us. And we can’t do this alone. We need the community and the opportunity to tell the story again in a context that will allow us to grow together to make the fullest redemptive sense of it all that we can – for ourselves and for all those we love.