Who Are You Looking For?
Seeking: Honest Questions for Deeper Faith • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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We don’t go looking for the living among the dead. Cemeteries aren’t spaces of resurrection. I remember taking ghost tours in Savannah and Charleston. People would talk about how many bodies were buried there. They would tell stories of seeing ghosts. But they never told stories of the dead coming back to life. Because we don’t go looking for the living among the dead.
In John’s gospel, Mary goes to Jesus’ tomb early in the morning while it is still dark. Mary is alone and headed to the grave. She is deep in grief. Perhaps many of you who have lost loved ones can relate. One you love has died and you just want to visit their grave. I knew a man once who visited his wife’s grave every day for over a year. Mary is in 3 day old grief. Raw grief. She has witnessed the brutal murder of her beloved teacher. She has witnessed the worst of humanity. This is the kind of agony that knots your stomach, that wakes you in the middle of the night and brings you to the tomb. Mary just wanted to be near the body of Jesus.
And so she goes to the tomb and is surprised that the stone, this massive heavy boulder, has been rolled away. She can’t bring herself to look inside but instantly fears the worst. Grave robbery. She runs back and tells Simon Peter and the other disciple. They have to see this for themselves so they run off towards the tomb. The other disciple gets there first. He bends down and looks in and sees the linen wrappings. Peter is on his heels and goes inside. He sees the linen wrappings and then the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head rolled up and set aside neatly by itself. Why is it rolled neatly aside? Was Jesus just tidying up the tomb? The other disciple, having looked inside, now believes. We don’t know exactly what. Both of these disciples, having seen the empty tomb, return home. End of story.
But not for Mary. Her Lord has been crucified and now his body has been stolen. It’s all too much. She is sobbing in grief outside of the empty tomb, her body curdled up against the stone. Blinking back tears, she musters up enough strength to finally face what she can’t bear to see.
But it isn’t empty. Two angels are there dressed in white, though perhaps Mary doesn’t recognize them as such. One is at the head and the other seated at the foot of where Jesus’ body had been. They look at her and ask “why are you weeping?” One of the most beautiful questions in all of the gospels is “why are you weeping?” But Mary is so full of sorrow and she says “ they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
She turns around and sees a man standing before her. She assumes he must be the gardener. A gardener, in the middle of a graveyard? He asks “woman, why are you weeping?” Who are you looking for?”
Who are you looking for? Mary just wants to know where Jesus is. She is desperate. Maybe this man has some answers. Mary pleads with him, “sir, if you have carried him away, tell me and I will take him.” Please. Please tell me. Tell me where he is.
But then she hears her name. “Mary.” She hears that voice. And she knows. Jesus speaks Mary’s name from the other side of the grave. Mary knew his voice. The sheep recognized the shepherd. She turned and said “Teacher.”
Mary couldn’t believe her eyes. She tried to grab onto Jesus, to see if it was real. She couldn’t quite grasp it, but resurrection doesn’t sit still. It is busy making things new. As Barbara Brown Taylor says, “don’t get so focused on the tomb that you forget to talk to the gardener.” Mary couldn’t see past the tomb, until she was face-to-face with the gardener.
Jesus tells her to go and tell. And so Mary ran, and all she could manage to say was “I have seen the Lord.” And it was more than enough.
The news of Easter doesn’t happen in front of hundreds of people. Jesus doesn’t waltz into the temple and say Ta Da! It happens early in the morning , while it is still dark. It happens in a graveyard, in the darkness of grief.
I’m sure many of you have joined in Easter egg hunts as of late or will have one this afternoon. Maybe you grew up hunting eggs yourself and have fond memories of delight in searching for those brightly dyed eggs. I grew up dying real eggs which was fun until you found one or two the next year and it was a totally different sort of surprise egg.
We were hunting on the church lawn recently with the kids. The kids had descended like a swarm on the hundreds of eggs. They would come up to me in excitement, opening their eggs and hoping for a prize. But a few of them opened the eggs and it was full of mud and dirt and old candy. Gross. It was rotten.
Mary was looking for death, and found life instead. The beauty of Easter is that no matter how many times we come back to this story, the tomb is still empty, and Jesus is still risen. We find the graveclothes have been set aside. All the stuff that we carry and hold and are bound by: Jesus has taken it and rolled it up and left it in the tomb. Maybe we need to stop trying to pick up what Jesus has already laid down.
When my sister was getting married, she was preparing to take her bridal portraits in Memphis. When the day came, mom and I drove over to help. We were all excited but when we pulled up to the location we were both sure we had the wrong address. It was a cemetery. I looked at mom and said “surely this isn’t it. Surely she isn’t having her bridal portraits taken in the middle of the cemetery.” But sure enough, she was. We helped my sister get her dress and and loaded her into the back of the SUV around the cemetery to meet the photographer. And as we did, I looked around and noticed other photo shoots happening. There were other brides. Family photos. Babies. This cemetery, as it turns out, was full of life. Almost like the graves held a garden.
Fred Craddock told the story of a woman who survived the Holocaust. When she was interviewed about her experience in the concentration camp where most of those around her died, she was asked how she survived. Every day she marched to work in a field with cardboard shoes and would hope for a bowl of soup at the end of the day. As she walked to the field where they worked, there was a little house along the road with a flower box in the window. There was a flower growing there. Seeing the flower kept her going. The interviewer said “you mean to tell me that a flower in a window box got you through?” “That was it,” she said. A flower in a window. A garden in the graveside of her life.
Easter happens in cemeteries of our lives, reminding us that we have a God who knows how to turn graves into gardens. Easter faces the ugliness of sin and death and shouts a word of resurrection so that we can stand and say “dying, Christ destroyed our death so that rising, Christ restored our life.” Sometimes you go to a funeral and it is so full of life that it feels more like an Easter service. You think you show up to hear that someone has died only to find out that they live. One man shared how when he served a church everyone was going around sharing why they had joined. Lots of stories of long-time traditions, classes, and worship. But one woman told the story of a funeral. She said “ I joined the church because of the look I saw on Ms. Mary’s face when she followed her husband’s casket out of the sanctuary. Her face was radiant. She had such a quiet confidence that I had to stick around to see how one could walk so resolutely in the face of death.”
A smile in the face of death. A garden in our graveyard. Resurrection hope let loose within our souls. The soil of sin and death turned over by the light of the world.The setting aside of all the grave clothes. The gardener calling us by name. Our feet running to say “I have seen the Lord.” That’s what I’m looking for.