From the Pulpit:

 
 Behold I am doing a new thing!
 

On Thursday I went to Marble Falls. I have to admit that in the panic attack that Holy Week can turn into for me, rather than the serene and meditative time it ought to be, it was peaceful to drive through the Hill Country on this unexpected day trip. Janet Knapik’s son, Mark, had died, and I went to the visitation to pay my respects. I don’t think I had ever met Mark, but I went out of love for Janet and to honor her love of her son. And to honor her grief, which is the dark side of love. We only grieve for what we have loved that has been taken from us.

And so, in this morning’s reading from John’s gospel, the air is as thick with grief as it is dark with the last moments of night, as Mary of Magdela picks her way carefully so as not to stumble along the rocky path to the garden tomb. I’m certain her mind was full of images, that she could see as clear as day – her Lord on the day he healed her of her demons, I’m sure that she could feel his hand resting warm on her head, and that she could see his face, swollen and tear stained as he was led up the hill yesterday, the crossbar of his execution strapped to his back, and that she could look into his eyes as they met hers in the agony of his dying, that she could see the lifeless body as it was lowered into the arms of two men who were nearly strangers but who had arranged for burial, and that she could see in her mind’s eye what she anticipated seeing that morning, a tomb in a garden where she would sit for she didn’t know how long to pay respects to him, to honor the grief that had taken the place of her love for him. So many pictures filled her mind that she didn’t mind the darkness, but she welcomed the pale light that greeted her,
the light that showed her that the stone had been moved.

Some Easters I focus on the faith of Peter and the beloved disciples who run hither and yon, full of competitive shenanigans even as they are the crime scene investigators of the day. Faithful, yes, but not the best, because it is Mary who stays behind because she came to pay her respects not check out an impossible claim, and she doesn’t know what else to do. It is Mary to whom the angels appear just as a single angel had appeared some thirty-odd years before to another young Mary who may very well have been in another garden. If an angel comes to you, nothing will ever be the same.

The angels simply ask her why she is weeping. She answers and turns away from them only to see the man she presumes to be the gardener. John’s irony is sweet. Of course he is the gardener. Think back to that garden of perfection, the health and wholeness of all creation that is now restored in the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus and the miracle of his resurrection.

Mary is not thinking clearly. People do not think clearly when they are consumed with grief. What does she think she is going to do with a corpse? Even if she could get the gardener to lift it for her. What? Take it in town to show Peter and the rest of them? Hide it from the Romans? Place it back in the same tomb and guard it? It doesn’t matter because Jesus speaks her name. She hears her name in his loving voice and it all comes back to her. The love she held him in floods every cell in her consciousness and of course her first reaction is to want to reach for him in embrace, to hold onto him and never to let him go. That’s what I’d want to do. Wouldn’t you?

I remember a day some years ago when a lovely young woman came to my office after dropping her toddlers off at preschool. She’d come back to church after that typical period of college and first career and early marriage when young adults find better things than to go to church, because she wanted her children to go to Sunday school. She’d been active in youth group and diocesan activities but just sort of drifted away. She was glad to be back, but she was troubled. I got out the Kleenex, and we sat in the cozy chairs.

“I’ve lost my faith,” she said. “I’m here and I’m going to be here, but I don’t feel anything. My faith used to be so strong, and now I can’t find it.” I asked her to tell me about the faith she had lost, and she told me about campfire songs and tears, of arms wrapped around her friends as they worshiped Jesus in a big circle. She told me of lock-ins and group prayers and friendships that seemed so holy. She didn’t seem to be able to get that back. It had felt so good, so right, so close, but when she came back to church, it just wasn’t there. She felt like a failure because she couldn’t recreate it. She was truly surprised when I told her that she wasn’t supposed to recreate it. That it was a lovely adolescent faith, that awakening of your very own relationship  with God and Jesus and your fellow Christians, but that she was now called to a mature faith, a faith that is more like a long and seasoned marriage than the lusty passion of first love. That what God had in store for her was not a recreation of what she had had at fifteen, but something new, something beyond her capacity to imagine it, but that she would recognize because it would speak her name and she would recognize its voice.

I imagine Mary’s arms ached with emptiness even as her beloved lord stood before her. I imagine most of us have holy moments in our past that we long to return to, to recreate somehow, but that we find we cannot. We can’t blame Mary for wanting to put things back together, to get the whole crowd around the same table, to undo the atrocities that had been done, to cling to the person she had known as her beloved friend and teacher. But Jesus loves her too much to allow for that.

There are hundreds of reasons why people go to church, but probably more reasons than usual on Christmas and Easter, because I’ll bet money that there are some here – and you don’t have to admit it to anybody but yourself –  who wouldn’t be here except that somebody else talked you into coming. I’ve been that person, and I don’t mean the one who talked you into it. I had to rediscover as an adult what my faith was, what church had to offer, and why I should make the effort to join a church family. It was nothing like the Sunday school days of my childhood or the giddy faith of my youth group. I had to let go of something I had loved to make room for something better and richer.

Mary went to the tomb to pay her respects, to honor the love that had died with Jesus on the cross and that had been locked in a cave behind a rock. But that love was not dead. It would never look like the love she had known when he healed her or shared a meal with her or prayed with their inner circle of friends. Way back in the days of the prophet Isaiah God said in no uncertain terms, Behold I am doing a new thing. That is the promise of the resurrection.

God is always one step ahead of us. God is always doing a new thing. Much as we’d like to hold onto the old Jesus we knew, the comfy and even predictable Jesus, that is not the Jesus who defied death for our sakes. He came back not to stay with us but to take us with him into new life, into new ways of being family, into new ways of loving each other, and new ways of being one with the infinite love that is the creator of all that has ever been, is now, and will ever be.

Amen.