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St Mary Magdalene Day

Malcolm Rogers on John 20:1-2, 10-18 , 25 July 2004


The Resurrection Appearance to St Mary Magdalene

John 20:1-2, 10-18 

For Orthodox Christians, the Easter service is an explosion of joy. Before midnight, a procession will walk around the church, acting out the disciples confusion as they look for the body of Jesus. And then, at midnight, the realisation strikes home: "He has risen".

In actual fact it was not like that. Mary and the women were the last at the cross on Good Friday. They were the first at the grave on Easter Sunday. No one could challenge their devotion to Jesus. But – and I have to say, I find this rather reassuring - they found it very hard to accept the resurrection. It was not a question of going to the grave, discovering that Jesus was not there, and realising that he had risen from the dead.

Look at Mary here. There is quite a lot of evidence that something pretty remarkable has happened:

And yet in spite of it all Mary is convinced that Jesus has not been raised. She is convinced that "they" (whoever "they" are) have moved the body.

Mary, it seems, is working with two assumptions, assumptions that we make every day of our life.

  1. Death is the end
  2. God has abandoned us

Mary's first assumption is that death is the end. She had seen Jesus die. She had seen the crucifixion; she had seen him die on the cross; she had seen the soldier thrust the spear into his side, and the blood and water flow out of his side; and she had seen Jesus laid in the tomb. She knew he was dead. And Mary knew – just as we all know – that death is the end.

All our hopes, dreams, loves, ambitions, achievements end in death. Even our memories – the one thing that we say that will go on for ever – die. In a village in the South of England there is a monument to some Norwegian commandos who died in the First World War. On the monument is an inscription: "What they did will never be forgotten". The person who was looking at the monument asked several older people in the village, "What did they do?" And nobody could remember.

And we know that Mary assumes that death is the end because she cannot even contemplate the idea that Jesus might have overcome death. For her, Good Friday really was the end.


And Mary's second assumption is that God has abandoned his people. I am perhaps reading more into this than might be permitted by the text. Mary is grieving for someone who she has loved: but it seems that she is grieving as "someone who has no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4.13). And Mary, and others, had pinned their hopes on Jesus. They had heard him tell them that he was the bread of life, the water of life, the doorway to God, the good shepherd, the resurrection, way and life. They had seen him turn water into wine, heal a man paralysed for 38 years, multiply loaves and fishes, make a man born blind see and raise Lazarus from the dead. And they really did believe that in Jesus they had the one who would change the order of this world, who would bring life, establish justice in the world, who defeat evil and who would conquer death. And I suspect that one of the reasons why the women hung around the cross for so long was because they really believed – the men had given up hours earlier. They were waiting for something to happen: for God to intervene, for the thousands of angels to come down, for Christ to come down off the cross. And I don't know when the realisation hit them that nothing was going to happen, but it must have been like a 10 ton truck ploughing into them. Jesus was going to die. God was not going to intervene. God had abandoned them.

Most of us take Mary's assumptions for granted.


Most people assume that death is the end. Oh, we might have some vague wish for life after death, but we actually live our lives as if this life is the only life to be lived. We do not really think that we will be held accountable for the way that we live. We do not really think that it is worth submitting to costly obedience or to sacrifice or to suffering in this world for the sake of the next. We consider that people who live like that are fanatics. Most of us here are nominal Christians but practicing agnostics.

And most people assume that when things get really really bad, God has abandoned us, or does not exist. The ancients assumed, rather sensibly, that a god was only worth following if it could do you good. The idea of a god who allows himself to be crucified was utter nonsense. That is why Paul writes that the message of the cross is "foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1.23).

And people assume that if God exists, then he will do good to those who follow him. It is the common assumption of religion. And so we will be asked, "How can you believe in God when he allows such and such to happen to me?" And many of us assume that, "Yes, things might get bad, but God will never allow the really bad things to happen to me".

And when the really bad things do happen, we think that either we have failed God in some way, or that God has given up on us, or that our faith was a delusion.

The resurrection of Jesus shatters the assumptions of Mary and it shatters our assumptions.

 

1. Death is not the end.

There is a life that is beyond this life that we currently know: a life for which it is worth submitting - here and now - to costly obedience, to perseverance, to self sacrifice and to suffering.

Jesus, throughout John's gospel, talks about another place – the place from which he has come, and to which he is going; a place which he describes as "my father's house" (John 14.2); a place which is the destination of all who receive him, of all who put their faith in him.

That is why we do not have to believe that death is the end; it is why we do not consider life a "meaningless accident - a short trip from nothingness to nothingness". It is why we do not need to grieve "without hope"

Verse 17 is significant: it points to a new future and a new intimacy with God. It is the first time that Jesus uses the word "your" to describe his Father and God. Because of the cross we can know God as 'my' God; we can know the Father as 'our' Father.

 

2. When things get very bad God has not abandoned his people

Mary and the women were not wrong to believe that in Jesus someone had come who was going to transform the whole of creation. They were not wrong to think that he had overcome death. They were not wrong to think that God was going to do something very dramatic. They were simply wrong to think that things would not get very bad.

We live today in the time of Easter Saturday. We live in a world of Iraq, and suicide bombers, of Rwanda and Burundi, of the Sudan, of inner city ghettoes and over-full prisons. We live in a world in which people suffer, and suffer dreadfully. We have a friend with motor neurons, and in the space of the last few months he has deteriorated dreadfully – he is in a wheelchair and he is unable to move his head.

It is easy to look back at Good Friday and to think that that is the final word. With Mary, we come to the tomb, "while it is still dark". With Mary, we are at times unable to see through our tears.

Philip Yancey writes (in The Jesus I Never Knew):

"It's Saturday on planet earth. Will Sunday ever come?

That dark, Golgothan Friday can only be called Good because of what happened on Easter Sunday, a day which gives a tantalizing clue to the riddle of the universe. Easter opened up a crack in a universe winding down toward entropy and decay, sealing the promise that someday God will enlarge the miracle of Easter to cosmic scale.

It is a good thing to remember that in the cosmic drama, we live out our days on Saturday, the in-between day with no name. I know a woman whose grandmother lies buried under 150 year old live oak trees in the cemetery of an Episcopal church in rural Louisiana. In accordance with the grandmother's instructions, only one word is carved on the: "Waiting."

Though Jesus cast a vision for a better kingdom now and in the future, as long as it is Saturday, the fulfilment of that vision still awaits until Sunday dawns."


And with Mary we are called, by faith, to wait for that Sunday morning.

And that means listening for his word: It was Jesus' word, "Mary" that finally shattered her assumptions and broke through her tears. And it is his word that will shatter our assumptions and break through our tears.

And it means, by faith, being obedient to the command that Jesus gave her and gives us, "Go and tell: tell a world, tell your colleagues and your friends - who have not yet seen me - that I am alive: that death is not the end and that I have not abandoned you."