Love's risen body

 Easter Day - 20 April 2025: Isaiah 65:17-end, Acts 10:34-43 and John 20:1-18

Not darkness but twilight

In which even the best

of minds must make its way

now. And slowly the questions

occur, vague but formidable

for all that…

The opening of R. S. Thomas’s poem “The Answer” draws us into where we find ourselves this morning. 

We like the first witnesses to the resurrection out caught in the half-light. Easter begins in the early morning; in the not-yet light darkness of dawn. 

Questions occur, vague but formidable. Has the stone moved, or is it a trick of the light? Are those shadows or grave clothes? Can I trust what my eyes see, the sense my mind makes? Is that the gardener?  

Easter begins  here: not darkness but twilight.

Mary Magdalene Br Robert Lentz

R. S. Thomas is unafraid to write about problems and how we answer them, kneeling, praying; waiting for the stone to roll from our minds.. He takes us to the point of dying, and to the piled graveclothes of ‘love’s risen body’. 

He invites us to trust in the midst of struggle, as the disciples did. Whether they ran or hesitated, wept or rejoiced, they had to allow their imaginations to come to terms with something new. 

As light breaks in at dawn, their minds and emotions respond to slivers of hope; of life. That looks different for each of them.

Peter hears the rumour and runs towards the tomb. He’s outran by his friend, the Beloved Disciple, the one who trusts and senses love’s risen body. 

Mary arrives first and flees - the questions are too formidable. But she returns, hearing love speak and touch her heart.

Resurrection breaks-in not in darkness but twilight; it meets them where they are as a stone rolls from their minds, questions folded to oneside; love’s risen body taking up space not in an empty tomb but in and around them. 

They all come to the tomb as they are - with all their fears and hopes, questions and emotions.  They give us permission to approach the empty tomb as we are too - whatever our experience of loss or the hope we need to face tomorrow; whatever our struggles and disappointments;  whatever baggage weighs us down or new life that sets us free.

Today we are invited to linger in the garden, alone and in the company of friends. We listen as our names are spoken in tenderness; as the seed of this story settles  in our hearts.  Here we begin to notice what love’s risen body might mean for us, in our lives. 

Mary was the first to encounter the risen Jesus - and the first to speak of that experience. She waits, kneels, weeps and questions in this sacred time at the point of death, and the possibility of life beyond it. 

She remains in twilight: feeling the fullness of her bewilderment and pain. She remains before the emptiness, giving herself over to agony of tears and heartbreak. She remains in the garden, searching for answers; bearing witness to what feels unbearable. 

Her faithful love and openness, her honesty and questioning leads her to a moment of clarity.  As the theologian David Ford puts it: "Mary had been looking for a dead ‘what’; she is questioned and surprised by a living ‘who’.”

As she hears her name, she recognises her teacher.  She reaches out to that hope and healing; but rather than holding on to him, she is promised something more. 

Her letting go also signals that Jesus, love’s risen body, can now relate to all people, places and times. Mary also receives a new purpose within a new network of friends - that of being a witness, of sharing her testimony. 

She is the first to say: “I have seen the Lord”. 

Peter and the Beloved Disciple had confronted the emptiness of the tomb, but neither of them waited.  Their responses speak to our feelings and experiences too.

Peter rushes headlong into the tomb; but he cannot stay in that empty, desolate and painful place. He runs with his mind full not only of doubts and questions, but also the weight of his own failure and denials. 

His emotional landscape has been reshaped by exhaustion, shame and fear. He cannot risk waiting. He abandons the garden for a room with locked doors. 

But it’s there that the stone rolls from his mind. It’s there, perhaps, that he heard Mary’s cry of joy; it’s there'll he hears Jesus’s words of peace. 

In his haste, his retreat and defences, the good news of resurrection finds him. He can run, but new life waits. Love’s risen body claims him as his own, forgives and restores him. 

What of the Beloved Disciple? He too runs, but he hesitates. When he enters the tomb he sees beyond the emptiness and believes. He embraces what he sees - his heart and mind remain open for faith to be renewed in him; for trust to deepen. 

Believing because of the empty tomb and folded graveclothes is for him the beginning of a new understanding. It is his imagination and experience that shapes the Gospel that bears his name, John. 

He is the one who brings Jesus’ mother Mary into his own home; he is the one who invites successive generations into the space of the story he tells; deepened by images of light and life, of truth and a new commandment of love. 

He invites us into this journey too. He gives us permission to believe and to trust - and yet to allow space for understanding to grow. He waits with us in death’s reality and its defeat. He invites us to trust that all will be made new, to persevere when justice and mercy seem fragile. 

Resurrection is as much a process as an event; it’s a  promise made at the graveside, just as twilight promises a new day.

It is the promise of what we long for: from Ukraine to Gaza, Sudan to Jerusalem, in every place where tears are shed. It is the promise of homes to inhabit and grapes to be harvested; it is the promise of life from infancy to old age, with dignity, joy and delight. It is the promise of blessing - and an end to hurt and destruction. 

It is the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, as Isaiah puts it. 

That can feel a long way off. 

In Acts we hear Peter preaching in a world not so different from ours: where the power of empires, with power and wealth, seek to possess, control and dehumanise; where culture wars value some bodies and lives less than others; where rights are reduced to a zero sum game; where scarcity and excess divide peoples and communities; where the world itself cries out for release.

Peter begins with words that speak of divine acceptance; the dying and rising of Jesus presses us further into this way of life, an ethic of love.

As Willie Jennings puts it: ‘The Jesus of history becomes the defining moment of all history. Here is the deliverance of the world and its restoration toward health and life… The unbelievable has happened: Jesus was killed and rose from the dead. Death has been overcome in and through him. Yet this was no singular miracle but rather the great announcement of the new order - Jesus is the judge of the living and the dead. He is the Lord of all.’

This cosmic hope is also personal and particular: Peter preaches the forgiveness he has known. As he speaks, the Spirit moves, inviting us to love those who are different to us. In Christ, God brings loving judgement to  us and a wayworld world - calling us to embody love where we find ourselves; to announce in the way we live  what Jennings calls ‘God's desire for joining and communion’.

Such new life cannot be stopped, though many try to place a limit on the scope of love. We will rise.  We glimpse it now through tears; through communion. We glimpse it as many  bodies - beautiful, aging, bruised and tender - made one. Every grief and every hope, every doubt and every joy is held within love’s risen body as Thomas ends his poem, “The Answer”:

There have been times

when, after long on my knees

in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled

from my mind, and I have looked

in and seen the old questions lie

folded and in a place

by themselves, like the piled

graveclothes of love’s risen body.

©️ Julie Gittoes 2025

The Gardener

 Easter Day 31st March 2024:Isaiah 25:6-9, Acts 10: 34-43 and John 20:1-18

Jesus said to her, 'Mary!'

Mary Magdalene: a woman known and called by name.

She stood at the cross, watched the burial and returned to the tomb: weeping at daybreak. 

Last night at St Paul’s, Reza, Lily, Halle-May and Omid were also called by name - in part because of what happens next. 

Like them we are called by name because Mary’s tears were not the end. We’re called because of her witness.

Sometimes Mary’s faith and faithfulness have been spun into fantasy.

Some discredit or diminish her - others find in her a reason to hope. 

Mary Magdalene and the Risen Christ

In the Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown reduces her to the matriarch carrying Jesus' secret blood-line. 

  

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ presents her as the sinful woman who repents.

In Judas, Lady Gaga narrates the story of a woman who knows love, betrayal and forgiveness.

Mary: called by name from a small village called Magdala. 

She walked from Galilee to Jerusalem because she saw in Jesus the depth of God’s love for us, allowed forgiveness and hope to fill her heart. 

That same heart breaks today in exhaustion and grief. She is utterly spent in love.

May weeps. 

The emptiness of the tomb unleashes raw emotion; the silence and cries that grief brings; the disrupted relationships and yet the desire to be with others. 

She tries to describe what she sees to Peter and John - telling them what she fears or thinks she knows. 

They run away from her and towards the tomb: caught between sight and insight, belief and bewilderment, they go home. 

Mary doesn't run. She stays.  She stands alone. Weeping.

Another voice repeats the angel's question; and she repeats her conviction. 

This is death. This is final. This is emptiness.

Supposing him to be a gardener, she meets his whys with her own ifs.

The space and the silence is shattered by one word: her name.

Here she is called. By name.

She is known. She is seen.

She addresses her Lord as Rabboni!

The unbelievable has happened in history: Jesus has been raised from death, all creation is bound to him in this living hope. The hope that love wins. Death is not the final world; forgiveness, renewal and joy echo throughout the world.

For Mary, an instinct as strong as grief compels her to reach out. 

In love she wants to hold and be held. 

Love replies, saying: Do not cling on to me.

In him, death was the beginning of life, not the ending of love. 

The lost intimacy of touch translates into the powerful embrace of story.

For us, as much as Mary Magdalene, embracing new life means letter go. She teaches us how. 

She points us to the risen Lord who loves us from loss to life, sorrow to peace.

In her grief and loss, she is called by name; she is brought home, to a place of peace;  in her letting go she is sent. 

She cannot cling on to her risen Lord; but she continues to walk in his light.

Mary walked from despair to hope. She learned to live and love more abundantly, more intensely, more lightly.  

This woman, this Mary, is the passionate, committed, intense and faithful witness to resurrection.

Her pain, tears, honesty and longing are gathered up. She shows us how to live, moment by moment. 

It's a profoundly sacramental pattern of life. We are renewed in our bodies - each Eucharist a foretaste of the heavenly banquet of well matured wine - and broken bread.  

Love shown in such signs reminds us all that we are can become a means of grace and hope and good news to others.   She goes to her brothers to face their needs and expectations with  the words 'I have seen the Lord'. 

She embodies the conviction we hear when Peter himself speaks : the love of Christ which urges us on; the death that overcomes death; risen life lived for others; the liberation of forgiveness.

We are a new creation - Peter, like Mary, recognizes that love is known in the particular: we are called by name, through a veil of tears, to be witnesses to the fact that God’s desire is for communion. 

In the power of the Spirit, may we, like Mary, witness to the love of God made manifest in Christ Jesus. Love that forgives the past; love that transforms the present; love that enlightens hearts, minds; love that brings the life that is life

Mary Magdalene and the Gardener - Jay Hulme.

At first Mary thought He was a gardener, 

this miraculous Son.

She saw the dirt under His nails

though the tears in her eyes,

and saw not the grave, but the bringer of life;

And how was she wrong, then?

This woman wrapped in grief,

who saw the dirt of a borrowed tomb,

and thought at first of things which bloom;

Which turn their heads to the sun,

and burst into joyous colour. 

© Julie Gittoes 2024

Love's risen body in a time of lockdown

Easter Day - a service of light - on Zoom: Acts 10:34-43 and John 20:1-18

Our life has been severely disrupted by disease. For some that’s meant isolation, alone; for others, an intense proximity. Essential work continues to be done from hospitals to supermarkets. The boundaries between public and private space are being renegotiated. We’re relearning a body language of love through social distancing.

Yesterday, HMQ reminded us that Easter has not been cancelled.

Yet feels so radically different.

Easter is here, but like the light of a dawn: gradually. 

Breaking in slowly; just today; but over the next 40.

There are rumours of resurrection.

Fires burn; candles are lit.

Our closed church resemble sealed tombs. 

And yet.

There are whispers of Alleluia.

Light begins to break in; but there are still so many questions.

We long to break bread; and still hear the fearful cries of our city and our world.

But there is hope. Hope of something else: a glimpse of new life; a new order.

Writing in yesterday’s Guardian, Jonathan Freedland reflected on keeping Passover in lockdown. He said, ‘while Jews tell a story of emerging from enslavement to freedom, Christians move from death to resurrection. It’s starker but it offers the same message of hope - that even after the greatest pain, there is renewal’. 

There is renewal; but it takes time. 

Death does not have the final world; but it doesn’t always feel like it.

Yet we believe it.

Perhaps this Easter, unlike any other I can recall, we are caught up in the ambiguity and hope of the gospels themselves.

Today’s reading tells us of things that are seen; and of the struggle to make sense.

Mary had waited in agony at the cross and in sorrow at the tomb.   In exhaustion and grief, she has been utterly spent in love. 

She sees that the stone has been removed: she is confused and anxious, she runs away; she has to tell someone. She shares with those she loved what she sees;  She tells those who also loved Jesus, her greatest fears and what she thinks she knows.

Her words unleash in Peter and John fear and confusion - they run. They run away from her; they run to the tomb.

The Disciples Peter and John - Eugene Burnand

They run and John gets their first; he sees the emptiness but does not enter. Peter enters and sees the cloth, the linen wrappings, the absence of a body. And John saw. And he believed.

There is insight and bewilderment;  but they did not fully understand.

They had to go back to scripture.

They left. The went home.

As they gathered behind closed doors, did the beloved disciple share the experience of sudden realisation as he saw grave clothes piled up in a tomb? Did he describe the way in which that absence awakened in him an ever present love?

Mary stays at the tomb. She stands alone. Weeping.

She’s asked why she’s weeping. Why? Perhaps the most blunt and absurd  question. Isn’t it obvious.

We can identify with Mary in a moment of heartbreak. Death wreaks havoc with our lives: the physical loss unleashes a rawness of emotion; grief silences us and yet cries out; relationships are disrupted. We cannot gather together to share stories; alone, we crave the consolation o human touch.

When questioned a second time, she repeats her conviction. This is death. This is emptiness.

Supposing her questioner to be a gardener, she meets his whys with her own ifs.

And into that space, that silence, is spoken one word:

Mary.

Named. Found. Recognised. Known.

Rabboni!

An instinct as powerful as grief overwhelms her.

In love she wants to reach out; to hold and be held.

Noli me Tangere - Graham Sutherland

It's such a human moment!

But the one she loves says: Do not cling on to me.

A stone rolled back; piled grave clothes; and now, let go.

The very person who was crucified is risen: this is  love’s risen body.

Love’s risen body draws her from loss to life, sorrow to peace.

Mary cannot cling on to her risen Lord; but she continues to walk in his light.

In her grief, she is called by name; in her letting go she is sent. 

Did Mary Magdalene take the risk of seeking them out, her heart pounding as she hammered at a locked door? As the bolt slides back, she rushes in; her breathless declaration ‘I have seen the Lord’ flowing from a faith which lets go and embraces new life.

Peter - the one who ran and saw and didn’t fully understand - he goes on to speak to hundreds and thousands of a message of life, hope and forgiveness for all. He declares that God shoes no partiality - God’s love if for all.

Peter preaches: he claims the power to tell a story which changes how the world is understood. Jesus’ life, death and resurrection becomes the defining moment of all history. The world will be restored to life and health. This is God. A love that continues to reach out to all creation. 

Our Jewish brothers and sisters are telling a story of emerging from enslavement to freedom; we are telling a story that moves from death to resurrection. As Freedland put it, it is starker but it offers the same message of hope.

Even after the greatest pain, there is renewal.  As Willie Jennings puts it we ‘now see the world as God desires Israel to see the world - as specific and particular sites of love - where the Spirit would send us to go, announcing in and through life together with people God’s desire for joining and communion’.

Yes, we are fearful and isolated; and yet we are bound together. Even in this pandemic, we are called to tell a story of life and compassion and hope. For now, sharing love and protecting others means living differently.

Yes, we long to gather and break bread; yet in fasting from this feast, may we grow in prayer and faithfulness to scripture; knowing that one day we will meet our risen Lord in bread and wine.

Easter will dawn slowly today; and over the next 40 days. May we share that the hope that is within us: that love wins.

But this love means stretching our imaginations: seeking not to return to the old normal, but a richer more equitable new normal.

May God stir up in us new gifts and callings, that we may go where we are sent with radical imagination.

© Julie Gittoes 2020