No Holding On 4-9-23
No Holding On
Jer 31:1-6; John 20:1-18
Jer 31:1-6
At that time, says the Lord, I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be my people. Thus says the Lord: The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest, the Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O virgin Israel! Again you shall take your tambourines, and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers. Again you shall plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria; the planters shall plant, and shall enjoy the fruit. For there shall be a day when sentinels will call in the hill country of Ephraim: “Come, let us go up to Zion, to the Lord our God.”
John 20:1-18
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes. But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
Prayer – Risen Lord, remind us this day that we are indeed a resurrection people – that we don’t need to hold on to death since we have new life. Send us out into the world, to live faithfully, to share the good news that the tomb can’t hold you in, and that because death doesn’t have the last word, that we too can be agents of new life and transformation – amen.
Christmas has a large and colorful cast of characters including not only the three principals themselves, but the angel Gabriel, the innkeeper, the shepherds, the heavenly host, the three Wise Men, Herod, the star of Bethlehem, and even the animals kneeling in the straw. In one form or another we have seen them represented so often that we would recognize them anywhere. We know about the birth in all its detail as well as we know about the births of ourselves or our children, maybe more so. The manger is as familiar as home. We have made a major production of it, and as minor attractions we have added the carols, the tree, the presents, the cards. Santa Claus, Ebenezer Scrooge, and so on. With Easter it is entirely different.
The Gospels are far from clear as to just what happened. It began in the dark. The stone had been rolled aside. Matthew alone speaks of an earthquake. In the tomb there were two white-clad figures or possibly just one. Mary Magdalen seems to have gotten there before anybody else. There was a man she thought at first was the gardener. Perhaps Mary the mother of James was with her and another woman named Joanna. One account says Peter came too with one of the other disciples. Elsewhere the suggestion is that there were only the women and that the disciples, who were somewhere else, didn't believe the women's story when they heard it. There was the sound of people running, of voices. Matthew speaks of "fear and great joy." Confusion was everywhere. There is no agreement even as to the role of Jesus himself. Did he appear at the tomb or only later? Where? To whom did he appear? What did he say? What did he do?
It is not a major production at all, and the minor attractions we have created around it — the bunnies and baskets and bonnets, the dyed eggs — have so little to do with what it's all about that they neither add much nor subtract much. It's not really even much of a story when you come right down to it, and that is of course the power of it. It doesn't have the ring of great drama. It has the ring of truth. If the Gospel writers had wanted to tell it in a way to convince the world that Jesus indeed rose from the dead, they would presumably have done it with all the skill and fanfare they could muster. Here there is no skill, no fanfare. They seem to be telling it simply the way it was. The narrative is as fragmented, shadowy, incomplete as life itself. When it comes to just what happened, there can be no certainty. That something unimaginable happened, there can be no doubt.
The symbol of Easter is the empty tomb. You can't depict or domesticate emptiness. You can't make it into pageants and string it with lights. It doesn't move people to give presents to each other or sing old songs. It ebbs and flows all around us, the Eastertide. Even the great choruses of Handel's Messiah sound a little like a handful of crickets chirping under the moon.
It is the first day of the week, the beginning of something new, perhaps a new tradition, perhaps a new life, and Mary is the key figure in this. She is the first person there even as it is still dark. She is not some anonymous person. She is named clearly and I can imagine specifically. It is Mary who finds the tomb empty, with Jesus gone from where he had been laid.
She goes back to where the disciples were staying, or maybe even hiding and tells Peter and the others that the tomb is empty. Peter and the other disciple, who we presume is John, arrive and find that Mary wasn’t telling a story – the tomb is indeed empty. Our gospel writer suggests that ‘the other disciple’ understood while Peter simply returned from where he came. There is no attempt to explore the mechanics of what happened to Jesus. All we see is that he is gone, and that he is not bound as Lazarus was earlier in John’s gospel. Something different has happened. But there are no shouts of joy, no celebration. The emptiness of the tomb does not yet seem to have made a difference.
Mary doesn’t know what has happened. The empty tomb does not mean resurrection, only that someone has taken his broken, dead body and laid it somewhere else. This is the way the world works. We die and we are gone. Only a corpse remains, and for Mary, the disciples, in their loss, even that has been taken away as well.
Yet, on the first day of the week, the day of a new beginning, Mary encounters a stranger, a person she believes to be a gardener and Jesus asks Mary the same question he had previously asked John the Baptist and his disciples, ‘Whom are you looking for?’ What are we looking for as we peer into the empty tomb? A body? Life unconstrained by time? If we seek the wrong thing, we may not see what, or who, is true.
Mary’s misperception of Jesus as the gardener allows John to perhaps dig a little deeper significance of his text, and in this case the resurrection. The Hebrew word for garden is paradise, and Jesus had previously told her that God is the gardener. In this new beginning, unbeknownst to her, Mary has caught a glimpse of the ultimate paradise, of creation as it was meant to be, a moment in the presence, again, of the Holy Son of God.
Jesus called her by name and she immediately recognized him. He then commanded her not to hold on to him – warning her and us that life cannot go on as before. Jesus being raised from the dead doesn’t mean that he will be the same as he was before. He tells her to let his friends know that he is alive, but changed, and that there is no holding on to the past, that something new has happened, that resurrection means nothing will go back to the way it was before – new life is here and now – there is no holding on.
The already empty tomb, the stone rolled back and bandages empty, and especially Mary’s experience, point us toward an understanding that this ‘beyond death’ is not some gross resurrection. There is something other than what happened to stinking Lazarus happening here. We cannot hold onto gross one dimensional views of reality if we wish to understand or experience something new.
I find that every time I try to hold on to life, I lose it. There is a constant giving up of what I have, even of what I treasure, if life is to remain vital. As soon as I try to hold on to an experience, or an understanding, or a security, life loses its spark. When I try to hold on I lose the depth dimension of my life, it becomes flat. It I do not keep following the insights and questions the Christian life places in front of me, then I’m left weeping like Mary. There is no holding on to the old if the new wants a chance to take root.
It is hard for us as human beings to not hold on to the past. Frequently we long for the golden days which are just a memory in our minds. We wish that today could be yesterday all over again. But if that is our wish then we are unable to grasp the present or the future if we hold on too tightly to the past. There is great grief in letting go of what we have known, what we have loved, what has nurtured and nourished us in the past, and yet new life cannot happen if we don’t.
It was only in letting go of Jesus that Mary can really see him and what he is now about. Going to the Father reminds us that Jesus of Nazareth was himself the embodiment of God. There is more to the mystery we call God than the physical Jesus. Jesus once again says don’t hold on to me, look to the one who sent me.
No holding on means that there has to be active giving before we are ready for the new. It is giving up things that have made a difference in the past in order to grasp things that will make a difference in the future. The tomb is empty and Jesus has not only risen but also will ascend to the Father. There is nothing to hold on to. When we stop holding on, when we ‘let go’, we are then, and only then able to hold on to something new, something that will make a future difference.
He rose. A few saw him briefly and talked to him. If it is true, there is nothing left to say. If it is not true, there is nothing left to say. For believers and unbelievers both, life has never been the same again. There is no holding on to the past, not if we hope to grasp the future. Jesus has asked us to not hold on, because he knows that all in all we would rather keep him with us where we are than let him take us to where he is going. Better yet, we should let him hold on to us. Perhaps, even better yet, we should let him take us into the white hot presence of God, who is not behind us, but ahead of us, every step of the way – thanks be to God – amen.