Easter Day 2023: Acts 10:34-43 and John 20:1-18
It was dark.
Exhausted. Unable to sleep.
Mary came to the tomb, alone.
With oil? Or just to be there? At the grave.
Close to love’s bruised, buried body.
But something was disturbed and disturbing.
The stone had been removed.
It was no place to be alone. At twilight.
She ran. Ran to beloved friends.
Questions troubled from her lips.
Listening. And then.
Peter and the other disciple ran.
One would outrun the other - first in this race.
He looked. Saw. Paused.
At the threshold of what had been entombed.
Peter went in and saw.
The other would follow him, see and believe.
But they went away, returned home.
And she? She stood weeping. Outside.
She had to bend, twist her body, to look in.
To gaze from twilight into darkness.
Emptiness announced an absence.
Just as tears make eyelids swell, announcing grief.
Grief in a world made strange.
Mind racing. Thinking the worst.
It was dawn.
Have we not felt it?
The grief and insomnia; the questions and tears.
Wanting to hold on. Waiting at grave sides.
Waiting in silence. Wanting answers.
The need to run to friends; the times we’ve walked alone.
The burning eyes; and racing mind. Until twilight turns to dawn.
For Mary, recognition dawns as dawn breaks.
She senses a real presence.
Her question repeats itself, dissolves in the air, resolves itself in her body language.
Love rises, breathes, speaks.
Her name. Her Teacher.
Her heart swells, beating a little faster.
It’s not that it’s over; that it’s solved; that it’s unproblematic, uncomplicated, undone.
The pain, confusion, death and grief were real: but maybe, just maybe, their vice-like grip has softened.
Replaced by life.
Now the green-blade riseth, from the buried grain.
Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
Love lives.
Not only as the sleeping, quickening grain, but as the gardener.
The one whose hands are soiled with the earthiness of our hearts.
Even when they are wintry, grieving or in pain.
The one who brings us life when we can’t see it; who loves when we can’t accept it.
Or when there’s a risk to be taken, a change to be made.
The one who is with us when there are more questions than answers.
There when we rise, stumble or fall; when we stand alone, or together.
The one who feeds us with bread which earth has given and human hands have made.
Becoming for us the bread of life.
Mary could not hold on to her Teacher, Lord and Friend.
Letting go allows her to tell her story of his story of good news.
A story that tells us that God in Christ does not leave us.
But rather lets go in order to relate to all peoples across time and space.
Letting go leads her deeper into a new community.
One that is truth seeking, sense making, peace building, bread breaking.
One that shares God’s desire for joining, forgiving, blessing.
In that way, Mary, along with Peter and the Beloved Disciple, love expands until it reaches beyond our human limits.
Until it echoes the pulse of God’s own life.
Each one of them spoke of this hope.
Hope that sees the world as God does: with no partiality but with judgement and mercy.
Seeing God’s light and life reflected in a band of colour: violets and oranges, blues and reds.
Those particular sites of love.
Hope that reaches goes beyond the grave.
We claim that promise in the face of tears and questions.
Love is come again.
Not as a one-off miracle.
But as the beginning of a new order.
Death has been overcome; therefore all things are being made new.
This is the Spirit’s work. We share in it.
We persist and protest; dream and disrupt; nurse and nurture; create and care.
And sometimes we stand at the tomb ourselves.
And maybe find our questions, tears, losses and hurts folded with the clothes left behind by love’s risen body.
And then, maybe, rather than run, we stay; let go and live.
Live so that love can rise in us - and show that God’s loving mercy is for others too.
