Beyond Barriers: Death/Life

John 20:1-18

Rev. Monte Marshall

So here we are on Easter Sunday!  It’s been a long and challenging journey through Lent.  For those of us who may not know, our congregation has just spent the last 46 days confronting barriers that hinder us from following Jesus.  Along the way, we’ve caught glimpses of life beyond the barriers and the transformative possibilities present in Christ that move us forward into the fullness of God’s reign in the world.  Now I don’t know how everyone else feels, but I’m ready for an Easter celebration!  How about you?

Unfortunately, John’s Easter story won’t let us move quite so quickly:  “Early in the morning on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb.” 

John’s Easter story begins with the lingering reality of Good Friday.  Jesus has been brutally executed so the darkness of John’s early morning scene seems appropriate.  Death consumes Mary’s attention.  She’s going to the graveyard.  She’s making her way to the tomb of Jesus.  When she finds the stone rolled away from the entrance, she’s dismayed that his corpse might have been stolen.  She reports this to Peter and the beloved disciple and they run to investigate.   

John’s Easter story reminds us that we live in a Good Friday-kind-of-world.  But how could we forget?  Pastor James Harnish writes:  “Pick up the paper, watch the evening news, listen to the pain and torment of lives around you—be honest about sin, the fear, the anxiety in your own soul, and any of us can come to that conclusion.  It’s easy to believe that this is a world where powerless love is always the victim to loveless power; where only the strong survive, and it’s every man or woman for him- or her-self; where compassion, justice, and peace must be protected by force and destruction; and where joy and laughter are buried in dark tombs of depression, sorrow, or fear.”[1]  It’s as a Good Friday sort-of-world.

But my brothers and sisters, that’s not the end of the matter.  There’s good news to share this morning!  In the midst of this Good Friday-kind-of-world, John’s Easter story shatters the barrier between death and life.  John proclaims that God has raised Jesus Christ from the dead!  Biblical scholar Marcus Borg calls this “the foundational affirmation of the New Testament.”[2]

John’s narrative conveys layer upon layer of meaning.  Consider the empty tomb.  John’s story makes clear that in and of itself, the empty tomb means nothing.  John implies that anyone could have rolled away the stone and taken the body.  Mary seems fixated by this possibility even saying to the one she presumes to be the gardener:  “’Please, if you’re the one who carried him away, tell me where you’ve laid him and I will take him away.’”

  The empty tomb and the added details of the grave clothes fail to clarify for Mary or Peter or the beloved disciple the significance of what has happened.  John does say that the beloved disciple “saw and believed” but John then adds this note:  “As yet, they didn’t understand the scripture that Jesus was to rise from the dead.” 

But by the end of John’s Easter story, the empty tomb has taken on a profound and powerful metaphorical meaning:  Jesus is no longer constrained by death and the tomb because God has acted.  The presence of the two angels in the empty tomb is John’s way of underscoring the point. 

God has acted to bring life out of death, so Jesus is set loose in the world as the risen Christ, to continue God’s mission and ministry of unconditional love and justice.  The system of domination that sought to end his influence and silence his message by killing him and sealing up his dead body in a borrowed tomb, has failed because God has acted to vindicate Jesus and his way in the world by raising him from the dead.  But this is but one layer of meaning in John’s Easter story!

Consider the meaning of Mary’s encounter with the risen Christ in John’s narrative.  Mary’s part in the story affirms that Jesus lives!  Barbara Brown Taylor notes that for us, Easter begins the moment the gardener says, ‘Mary!’ and she knows who he is.[3]  Mary’s story affirms that the risen Christ is, to use Marcus Borg’s phrase, “an experiential reality.”  Borg writes:  “Christians throughout the centuries have continued to experience Jesus as a living spiritual reality, a figure of the present, not simply a memory from the past.” [4]

So Jesus lives, but not as before.  Mary will have to let go of her old ways of relating to him.  John’s story makes this point.  The risen Christ says to Mary:  “’Don’t hold on to me.’”

Craig Barnes finds an even deeper meaning to this aspect of Mary’s story.  He writes:  “What we long for, what we miss and beg God to give back, is dead.  Easter doesn’t change that.  So we cannot cling to the hope that Jesus will take us back to the way it was.  The way out of the darkness is only by moving ahead.  And the only person who can lead the way is the Savior.  But not the old Rabboni we once knew, which is only one more thing that has to be left behind.  Until we discover a new vision of the Savior, a savior who has risen out of our disappointments, we’ll never understand Easter.”[5]          

So, my brothers and sisters, in the midst of this Good Friday-kind-of world, John’s Easter story proclaims the good news:  Jesus lives!  And his story points the way beyond the barriers that keep us dead and entombed, and toward a transforming experience of life through the risen Christ!

Does all of this seem impossible?  Well, it’s not impossible!  Take a look around.  Signs of the living Christ are visible among us, right here at Travis Park United Methodist Church.  And I invite your attention to this story told by Thomas Long.  He writes:  “A friend of mine, Heidi Neumark, served for several years as the pastor of a Lutheran church in the South Bronx, in perhaps the poorest of all poor neighborhoods in America.  Her first Sunday as pastor, Heidi understood what kind of church she was serving when she found under the altar a box of rat poison next to the communion wafers.  The leaders and officers of her congregation include former addicts and undocumented aliens, the unemployed and the recently homeless.

“During Holy Week several years ago, this congregation decided to reenact in a passion play the whole sweep of Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter.  They began by dramatizing Jesus’ entry into the city, borrowing a live donkey and, led by an actor playing the part of Jesus, parading in a long procession around the block of shabby storefronts and run-down apartments shouting, ‘Hosanna!’  When they got around the block and back to the door of the church, the Palm Sunday procession ran into a street demonstration protesting police brutality.  It was fitting, really, as Jesus and the protesters, the congregation and the street crowds, the cries of ‘Hosanna!’ and the cries of social outrage mingled together in a swirl of movement and noise….Somehow the processional managed to make it inside the church, where, as the play unfolded, Jesus was tried, condemned, and executed.  But then [Mary] returned early in the morning of the first day of the week with the amazing word of an empty tomb and the astounding news, [‘I have seen the Teacher!’].”

The script then “called for three members of the congregation to stand up and give testimony, to bear witness in court as it were, to the truth of the resurrection.  ‘I know that he is alive,’ each one was to begin.  The first was Angie.  ‘I know that he is alive,’ she said, ‘because he is alive in me.’  She then told how she was abused by her father, how she fell into despair and alcoholism, became HIV-positive.  But then she responded to the welcome of the church, then she started attending worship, then a Bible study, and bit by bit she rose from the grave of her life.  Now she is a seminary student, studying to be a pastor.  ‘I am now alive because Jesus Christ lives in me and through me,’ Angie said, her face aglow.  ‘I am a temple of the Holy Spirit.’

“The two other witnesses stood in turn, each reciting the assigned part of the script:  ‘I know that he is alive.’  Then that portion of the play was done, and it was time to move on.  But the testimony would not stop.  Others in the sanctuary began to rise spontaneously.  ‘I know he is alive,’ they would say, ‘because he is alive in me.’  Homeless people, addicts now clean, the least and the lost, stood one by one.  Nothing could stop them.  ‘I know that he is alive,’ they shouted, all giving corroborating testimony to the witness of Jesus, adding their own word to the great witness of Easter, telling the truth about what they had seen and heard.”[6]

So my brothers and sisters, I ask you:  Isn’t it time to respond to the good news of Easter by moving beyond the barriers that keep us dead and entombed, and toward a transforming experience of life through the risen Christ?  May God’s will be done!  Christ is risen!  Christ is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!