Who are you looking for?
By Rev. Cole Powers - We, too, have come here early in the morning on the first day of the week. And who is it that we are looking for? To experience again that reality, that being — existence, we could say — doesn’t end in the Cross, doesn’t end in death and that there is an ultimately positive meaning to everything.
Or maybe we’ve come here because this is one of those high holy days of our faith. The meaning of this day may be a little obscure to us, even if we understand the outlines of the story as many people do. Jesus is betrayed on Thursday, dies on Friday and rises sometime in the wee hours of Sunday morning. And today, he is alive. So naturally, we desire to celebrate in Church.
But why did Mary get up from her bed while it was still dark—and I doubt that she managed to get any sleep at all—and go immediately to His tomb? What was she looking for? She had seen Jesus die on the Cross. She had helped prepare his body. She knew that he was gone. What prompted her to get up and go there in haste?
My friends, if we can’t understand this, we will miss something crucial to our lives as Christians. When Mary woke up that morning, the one thing she couldn’t erase from her memory, from her whole consciousness of herself, was the impact of the presence of that Man. They could have told her whatever they wanted: not to bother, not to trouble herself. After all, it was a fool’s errand: the body was lifeless and cold in its tomb. There was a huge stone blocking the tomb’s entrance. What could she possibly hope to do?
And yet she went. Because the way that Jesus looked at her when he met her marked her for life. The way that he spoke to her, healing her of the deep wound of her sin, she could never erase from her thoughts. She could ’t go even one moment without doing everything in her power to see him again, even to see his body, to see his lifeless body, to see the body of that man who had so profoundly changed her.
What comes even before theological speculations about the meaning of the resurrection for human history and life, even before our tradition, before any obligation we might have to be here — what comes before all of that — what comes first — is that desire — the desire to see Christ, our desire to see Him again.
And what an impression must have radiated through her whole being, what an impression it must have had on her to hear her name spoken by that man: “Mary.” All of Jesus Christ's affection for her, all of the Creator’s tenderness for his lowly creature, and for this insignificant woman, all of it came out suddenly, and as it was, it was transfixed Mary in the garden.
Have you ever heard the Lord say your name in this way? Have you ever heard him speak in your heart with such tenderness and love that you had to put down whatever it was you were doing, and turn to him, and say “Rabbouni,” “Lord,” “Jesus”? This is the essence of conversion. As the Gospel records, Mary “turned” upon hearing her name, translating the Greek word often used in the Gospels to indicate a more fundamental “turning,” a turning towards God, towards the Lord and away from ourselves.
What freedom there is in this. That our lives from that moment forward are no longer measured according to abstract principles or ideas that we can’t measure up to, that we consistently fall short of, but are measured now by our turning towards that man, towards that voice that calls out our names with such tenderness and love. From the moment of the resurrection onwards, being Christians is a matter of heeding that voice, turning towards it, and turning away from ourselves.
But this can only happen if we have been the objects of tremendous grace first. The Lord’s gracious election of us has called us here this morning. We were dead in our sins, utterly forsaken, just like Mary Magdalene. There was no path from where we stood to God. There was a destination but no way to get there.
Seeing the pitiable condition of his poor creature, the Lord, in mercy, stooped down to us. Even to the point of taking our meagre flesh. Even to the point of bringing that flesh to the Cross to be killed. Even to the point of seeking out his faithful ones who, from the creation of the world, had awaited his coming into the depths of Hell.
Life itself, lived without this constant companionship of God in Jesus Christ, is a kind of hell. It’s a life lived in the ever-present shadow of the grave, a life that cannot but end in death and oblivion: a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth says.
But the Mystery of God took us, plucked us from that death and gave us life — and not any life, but his own life — we were raised not like Lazarus only to die again, but like Christ, to live forever. And every morning from that moment forward, we can’t get up without feeling that desire to see him again. We can’t get out of bed without feeling like Mary Magdalene, without feeling every bone in our bodies crying out for his Presence, crying out that we might hear him speak our names again.
And if the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead has any meaning for us here today, so long after the fact, it is that God did ’t want to allow that cry of man’s heart to go unanswered. The Resurrection is God’s unbreakable promise that the search for the one “whom our heart loves,” as the Song of Songs puts it, wouldn’t be a fruitless search. Every day, there might be a chance to hear that voice say our names again, to see that face again and to turn towards it anew.
The Resurrection is a fact, not just of history, but of our experience, a fact that is present in our lives, a fact that helps us face the day, a fact that helps us to change, day by day, to be converted, a fact that has transformed the meaning of our lives. And what has it transformed them into? Into a search, not for some abstract and uncertain meaning which may or may not be waiting for us. But into a search for that man’s face, a search for that man’s voice. In the end, for us, it’s a good thing to get up in the morning, it’s a good thing to be alive and awake. It’s a good thing to open our eyes anew each day. Each time we do and draw breath, we have another chance to see and hear Our Lord Jesus, who on this day conquered sin and death forever.
Rev. Cole Powers
