Easter, Year B, April 8, 2012

Isaiah 25:6-9 The LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
1 Corinthians 15:1-11 By the grace of God I am what I am.
John 20:1-18 I have seen the Lord.

 O God of mystery and mischief, grant us the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.

You might know that I have been spending a considerable amount of time with Mary Magdalene lately (or Miriam from Migdal as she would be called in Hebrew). She is the namesake of the prophet Miriam, who was the sister of Moses. The prophet Miriam was a religious leader in ancient Israel, divinely commissioned to lead the Hebrew people along with Moses and Aaron during the journey in the wilderness which followed the Exodus from Egypt. The Song of Miriam in the book of Exodus is thought to be the oldest piece of scripture in the whole Bible.

There is a rabbinic legend of the Well of Miriam, which “gave forth water whenever a woman sang to it with the proper heartsong.” Water from Miriam’s well could heal the sick and restore hope to the brokenhearted. The legend goes that in the wilderness, the mystical well traveled with the people, and when they camped, it settled opposite the Tabernacle. Not only would it spring up to give refreshment and clarity for understanding Torah, it would spill over, causing lush vegetation to grow, providing delicious fruit to eat, sweet perfume to wear, and soft grasses for bedding for those who were too poor for a bed.[1] After Miriam died, some said the well disappeared, though some said that it crossed the Jordan and settled in Migdal, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Many generations later, according to the Gospels, it was there that Jesus’ life work, his ministry, began, supported by and provided for by Miriam of Migdal (Mary Magdalene), along with many other women.

All four Gospels tell different and contradictory stories of what happened after Jesus was crucified and laid in a tomb. But they all agree that he was laid in a tomb. It’s a truly remarkable part of the story – highly implausible actually – that Jesus was laid in a tomb. Victims of crucifixion were human billboards of horror not just while they were dying, but after death they were usually consumed by scavenging dogs and birds. They didn’t have people taking them down and wrapping them in burial cloths and laying their bodies gently in a walk-in tomb. That just didn’t generally happen. But all four Gospels tell that Jesus was laid in a tomb, and that when the women who loved Jesus went to the tomb the morning after the Sabbath, they found that his body was gone. All of the Gospels tell that it was the women who first experienced the resurrection – different women are named in different Gospels, but all agree that Mary Magdalene was there at the tomb, and that Jesus’ body was not.

According to the Gospel of John, Mary had gone to the tomb to weep alone. There was nothing else to be done because, according to John, Joseph of Arimathea had already anointed Jesus with a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes provided by Nicodemus in what seems like a frantically extravagant gift. Mary had gone to the tomb to weep and she found that the stone covering the entrance to the tomb had been rolled away. Mary ran to get Peter and the beloved disciple who, in turn, raced back to the tomb. The Gospel of John says a curious thing here: they believed but they did not understand – or know – or comprehend. So whatever believing is, according to John, it is distinct from understanding or knowing or comprehending. John also says that it was Peter and the beloved disciple, of all people. These two did not yet understand that Jesus must rise from the dead. So I’m here to tell any of you who do not understand Jesus being raised from the dead, Peter and the beloved disciple have provided plenty of elbow room for the rest of us. Here they are described as non-knowing or agnostic believers. And scratching their heads, they returned home.

But Mary stayed weeping outside the tomb. The 13^th century mystic, Meister Eckhardt wrote that it was “a wonder that in such sore distress she was even able to weep.” It’s clear that at first the empty tomb was nothing like good news for her. Rather, it added insult to her broken heart. She just wanted to know where Jesus’ body was when she saw others sitting in the tomb. “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him,” she said. Still weeping, she then saw the risen Lord and did not know that it was Jesus. She saw and she still did not know – she did not recognize. She persisted in asking her question. Mary is portrayed here as an agnostic seer! And I love that she is asked by two messengers (or angels) and by a man she perceives to be the gardener, why she is weeping. No one tells her not to weep – to quit her crying. No one ever tells her to stop being so sad. I love that because of my own belief in the sacrament of tears – outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. And now I imagine that those flowing tears were Miriam’s wellspring. The water from the well, in the form of tears, seems to have cleared Mary Magdalene’s vision.

What she saw was someone who looked nothing like Jesus, who called her by name in a way that made it clear that Jesus’ death was not the end at all, but “only a horizon…and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.”[2] What became clear was not just the vision of the Lord whom she mistook for a gardener, but that the very ones who had gone home to figure out how to put the pieces back together, these people were the pieces. She saw past the previous limits of her sight. Through her tears, Mary Magdalene had the clarity to see that she was called to be the Apostle to the Apostles — the first apostle – the first one sent to tell (which is what apostle means). And we know that she did go and tell, and that she became known as a visionary and spiritual teacher in the early Church, providing comfort to the bereft followers of Jesus, in spite of their sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit outrage that a woman could be entrusted with this important role. (We can imagine that in Paul’s list of resurrection appearances in First Corinthians, his omission of Mary Magdalene and the other women is not an accident.) Later (4^th century) attempts to besmirch her reputation in the Western Church are finally, incrementally, failing. Bit by bit, the Western Church is moving out of its amnesia about the authoritative witness and leadership of Mary Magdalene, who ensured that Jesus’ vision of shalom – of a feast of rich food for all peoples — did not die when he died. Ever so slowly, the Church is recovering the ancient idea that authority within the community can be based on spiritual wisdom, maturity, and prophetic inspiration and not on gender or class or race or sexual orientation or … (you know the list). For me it’s a reminder of what Martin Luther King often said, that the “arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” And by that I believe he meant, it bends toward Love (capital L). The progress is more incremental than spectacular and dramatic, and often hard to recognize (even in Jesus’ time). You know, one of the other things that all of the resurrection accounts in the Gospels tell us is that those who had known Jesus all had great difficulty recognizing him. Resurrection is more incrememental than spectacular and dramatic.

The thing about resurrection – from the word anastatis — is that at its root it is about uprising, resurgence, standing up to injustice and degradation and humility. It’s about the divine determination that violence will never have the final word. And resurrection is about this world where the earthly and the divine are simultaneous realities, which is a primary assertion of the Bible from beginning to end, through and through.[3]Easter is not about whatever you think or don’t think about life after death. It’s about figuring out how to spend your life before death, and I think that was Jesus’ primary interest as well. The Easter story is actually not a happy ending. It’s not an ending at all. It’s a new beginning in the midst of the worst possible circumstances. It is about pursuing the vision of justice and peace – of shalom for all peoples, and as poet Wendell Berry writes, about finding ways to “be joyful / though you have considered all the facts.”

Happy Easter, everyone!