Easter Day, 4/12/2020

St. James Church, Somerville

Jesus said, ‘Mary!’  She turned and said to him, ‘Rabbuni!’ (which is Hebrew for ‘Teacher’)  John 20:16

Celebrant:           Alleluia, Christ is risen.
People:                The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

This, my sisters and brothers in Christ, is the greeting with which I had hoped to greet and be greeted by you this morning at Eucharist in our beautiful sanctuary, made even more beautiful bedecked with lilies and other signs of spring.  In addition to that affirming greeting, I had planned to join with you in the joyful, exuberate voicing of poems set to music, beautiful, moving music to celebrate the presence of the Risen Lord among us.  These were plans [that] had taken place some months ago over dinner.

On that occasion, I had invited a friend over to dinner, to a working dinner, [during] which I told him of the hymns [that] I proposed we would sing: first, “Jesus Christ is risen today,” a hymn so familiar that we needed not our Hymnal; then one unfamiliar to our congregation, “Alleluia! Hearts and voices heaven-ward raised”; next a favorite of one of our parishioners “Alleluia! The strife is o’er”; followed by “Come, ye faithful, raise the strain of triumphant gladness”; and we would depart with the hymn on our lips, declaring “He is risen, he is risen!  Tell it out with joyful voice.”  Over the course of our meal, assured that a soprano solo would prepare us with melodious Alleluias for the hearing of the gospel, he and I agonized whether [we] would have sufficient bass voices for the bass line in the offertory anthem.  But, lo!  none of that was to be.  Our plans were waylaid, literally, by something mundane, something that, although invisible, has made its presence felt among us in a most devastating manner.  Nevertheless, I insist on calling out to you, if only from the written page: “Alleluia, Christ is risen.”

Thanks to a housewarming gift from my dinner guest of two months prior, I had begun long before Holy Week and before mandated “shelter in place,” to cast a different look at Easter.  The gift was one which my guest had rightly calculated would pique my interest and show his appreciation for the Michelin Guide 4-star dinner which I had prepared with my unequaled culinary skills.  It was a small volume which bears the title “Die Mitte der Nacht ist der Anfang des Tages: Bilder und Gedanken zu den Grenzen unseres Lebens,“ written 1968 by Jörg Zink. (My translation of the title: The Middle of Night is the Beginning of Day: Images and Reflections on the Boundaries of our Lives.”)  Using the paintings and sculptural presentations found on altars in various parish churches in Germany, the author of this 112 page volume of devotions for Holy Week, asks his reader to retrace the winding route travelled by Jesus of Nazareth from his baptism, to his crucifixion, to the post-resurrection encounter on the Road to Emmaus.

Midnight (middle of the night), even in our era in which technology has allowed millions and other millions to engage in commerce and other activities, continues to mark a time of retreat, repose, and transition, in order that, in the light of day, we might reengage with the world around us.  So did the First Easter and most assuredly does Easter 2020 offer to us all the opportunity for reassessment and transition into a life different from that with which we had become accustomed.

While reading that booklet, one thought overwhelmed me: The First Easter and Easter 2020 are more alike than they are different.  Admittedly, there were then no hymns of celebration “Jesus Christ is risen today” or “Come, ye faithful, raise the strain of triumphant gladness,” or “He is risen, he is risen!  Tell it out with joyful voice.”  If biblical history be our guide, that First Easter was also not marked with Allelulias.  The First Easter was riddled through and through with fear.  Those who had followed Jesus from the beginning had sought refuge because they were afraid.  They had sequestered themselves behind locked doors, practicing social distancing out of fear for their very lives.  They found themselves most assuredly emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually drained, confounded because the world, as they had hoped it to become under their recently-proclaimed Messiah, now appeared to have eluded them, to have been turned on its head.  An already intangible aspiration had evaporated into the ether, as it were.  And even upon hearing of their resurrected leader, there was doubt among them concerning the veracity of what had been communicated to them.  Their humanity did not allow them to envisage such a possibility.

Humanity laid bare is exactly that which we see at that First Easter.  We see a bereavement that blinded the followers of the resurrected Christ from seeing the obvious.  Yes, they were bereft of their North Star.  Yet, life did not cease for those disciples.  Life did go on, as indeed life should and must.  The old gives way to the new, to the unanticipated and the unknown.  In their exposed and vulnerable humanity of the disciples of Jesus, we see our own.  Bemourn we must: when relationships break up, or a loved one passes back into eternity, or a promotion after which we had so striven is given to another, or when we move simply from one town to another.  However, that is only one of the elements that define our humanity.  Through it all: the betrayal, denial, desertion, fear for one’s safety, God’s presence and God’s design for the creation did not evaporate into the ether for them, and likewise also not for us.

At the close of Mass, the priest pronounces the traditional benediction: “The peace of God that passes all understanding…,” and it is that formulation which brings into perspective our humanity.  One must marvel at God’s ingenuity, God’s way of achieving fantastic results!  It would be theologically unsound and socially irresponsible and reprehensible, as was too often the case in bygone eras, to assert that our current plague is God’s means of attracting our attention.  It is, however, on point to remind us that God is forever and offers us, via human means, ways of overcoming adversity if we are but open to new discoveries and ways of facing what lies before us.

Biblical history is replete with incident after incident, tale after tale, in which God chooses the most unlikely, the least expected, in order to carry out the Divine Plan.  Joseph of multicolored-coat fame, the eleventh in the line of brothers, outwits his older siblings and saves the infant Hebrew nation from extinction.  Moses is a stutterer.  David, too small to wear a warrior’s armour, slays the king of the Philistines and in time becomes king of Israel.  The Virgin Mary, chosen to bear the Savior of the world, lived not among those in kingly palaces who wore the purple of royalty, but was of lowly birth.

Whereas messengers of God, called angels, heralded the birth of Jesus at the Resurrection, God, who according to the psalmist, delights “not in the strength of the horse…but in those who hope in his steadfast love…” (147:10 – 11), employs not a heavenly fanfare of angels to declare the Divine faithfulness to humankind.  At the Resurrection, God meets us where we are, in the middle of our humanity, a humanity framed by joy and grief, by clarity and doubt, by uncertainties.  God, at the First Easter and even now, uses the human element of awe and thanksgiving and positivity, as it were, in order to deliver us from our own destruction and to gladden our hearts.  And to do so, God chose the most unlikely of messengers, a woman.

Hear once again from John that Easter message of good news.  “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb.  She saw that the stone had been moved away from the entrance.” (20:1)  Emerging from the darkness of grief, Mary, rushes to inform the frightened and sequestered disciples of this marvelous development.  They, hindered by centuries of established behavior, were not able to see the obvious and accept the possibility of the dawn of a new day.  God sent them not angels from above, but a woman, an ordinary woman to alert them to something expectation-shattering.  Mary herself is bewildered still by this occurrence, but tarried behind after Peter and the other unnamed disciple had returned to their safe house.  It is then that something special, a revelation, takes place in front of her very eyes, a revelation that changed not only her own life, but the trajectory of humankind.  Jesus, whom she had thought to be the gardener, “said ‘Mary!’” (20:16.)  And her response is “’Rabbuni’ (which is Hebrew for ‘Teacher.’)”   Mary is called by name!  Mary of Magdala becomes for all time the human messenger of the Good News of the Resurrection.

Even as the psalmist assures us that God has known us as we were being formed in our mother’s womb, and even as Jesus assures us that God knows the number of hairs on our heads and that we are of greater value than the sparrow, it is nevertheless reassuring and comforting to be called by name, to be singled out.  That is the fresh message of Easter then and now.  Each of us is special to those around us, whom we love and who love us; but then even more special are we in the eyes of God.  Each of us is called, called by name.  God has not forgotten or forsaken us, for God knows us each by name, and we are moved by God’s intervention from our darkness of uncertainty to the emerging light of the day, offered possibilities of a different, more fulfilling life, spurring us on to do battle with plagues of all kinds.  Yes, an empty tomb turns the world upside down.  However, when God calls Mary or recognizes you and me by name, it not for recognition only.  We are given, individually, as was Mary, the opportunity and privilege to respond.

And finally, as John, in this biography of Jesus of Nazareth, reminded his first audience, so does he us today of another truth, something which we humans learn as small children and which is reinforced again and again and again, as we proceed through life.  We do not always have to see, to touch, to smell, in order to believe.  It is the word spoken by parents, by teacher and other care givers, and heard by the ear that brings us also to faith.  Jesus admonishes Mary not to touch him, thereby teaching her that the Word of God is enough.  So it was also with the disciples who recalled subsequently the words of Jesus, words alive in their memory that strengthen them to recommit to the commission of their teacher.  It is the Word, that singular recognition by name by the God of unbounded grace that makes Easter come alive again and again in our lives, and not only on one day, but wherever and under whatever circumstance that we find ourselves.

My brothers and sister in Christ, today and in the days ahead, seek for yourselves a silent place in your heart and so shall you hear for yourselves the message of Easter, a messages just as valid now as then.  And that message is a simple, yet comforting, one: God has not abandoned the Divine Plan set since creation for humankind.  It is then that we move from midnight to day.  It is then that we, as people of faith, can proclaim boldly:

Alleluia the Lord is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed.  Alleluia!

AMEN

The Reverend Clarence E. Butler, Ph.D.
Priest-in-Residence

Image of Christ the Gardener:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_20:14#/media/File:Rembrandt_van_Rijn_-_Christ_and_St_Mary_Magdalen_at_the_Tomb_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg