Sermon for Sunday, March 31, 2024 || Easter Day B || John 20:1-18
Good morning and welcome to St. Mark’s Church for this special Feast of the Resurrection. Every Sunday is a feast of the Resurrection, but this one happens to fall on the Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. (That’s how you figure out when Easter is, by the way.) Yep, we date Easter by the movement of the celestial bodies that shine energy upon this planet and create the Earth’s heartbeat in the motion of the tides. I’ve always thought that was pretty cool, but it’s not what I want to talk about this morning. Rather, I’d like to zoom in on a single line of dialogue that Jesus speaks to Mary Magdalene in this morning’s beautiful reading from the Gospel according to John. “Do not hold on to me,” Jesus says. That’s the line we’re going to unpack on this special Feast of the Resurrection.
After Peter and the other disciple leave her, Mary Magdalene stands weeping outside the empty tomb. The body of Jesus is gone, and that last little bit of sanity she’s been holding onto so she could serve Jesus by dressing his dead body – that last little bit of sanity is gone too. She breaks down crying, and even a vision of two angels can’t stem the flow of her tears. She turns around and sees the gardener. He’s intruding on this private moment of grief, but maybe…just maybe…
He asks why she’s crying. Is she looking for someone? No, not someone. Not anymore. She’s looking for a body, something she can anoint for burial. A last act of love and devotion. But she can’t think of him like that – not as a lifeless body – because he was so full of LIFE all the time. And he brought everyone around him fully alive too. So she doesn’t ask where his body is. She asks where he is. Well, she doesn’t ask really. She accuses the gardener of moving him. “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
During this accusation, she must have turned away again to start looking through the shrubs and flowers because now she hears a single word, spoken by a voice she recognizes. The word is her name. “Mary.” She turns again. She sees Jesus standing in front of her, blazing with even more LIFE than he had before. And she leaps into his arms.
I’ve always imagined them spinning around in a tight embrace, their tears watering the garden and their laughter startling the songbirds. The spinning slows – even saviors of the world get dizzy eventually. The spinning stops, but the embrace continues. Mary is clinging hard to Jesus, each hand grabbing a fistful of fabric on the back of his robe. Jesus chuckles again, and his words are soft, tender. “Don’t hold on to me,” he whispers, as he gently takes her arms and slides her off, so now they’re holding hands, both of hers in both of his.
But Mary wants nothing more than to hold on to him. She lost him once. She watched him draw his last tortured breath. She watched his body sag on the cross. She watched Joseph and Nicodemus take him down, struggling against his literally dead weight. And now, here he is – still alive…no, not still alive…alive again…or alive in a new way! His body, wounds and all, is real. His laugh is his laugh. His eyes shine with compassion and curiosity, just like they always have. She presses in, hugs him tight. She lost him once, but never again.
“Don’t hold on to me,” he says a second time. “For I haven’t yet gone up to my Father.” And then Jesus gives Mary a mission: “Go to my brothers and sisters and tell them, ‘I’m going up to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
At length, Mary lets go, for something in Jesus’ words tells her that he is still holding on to her, even when she lets go of him. My Father and your Father, my God and your God. With these words, Jesus brings Mary – and us – deeper into the loving reality of God’s family. The promise of the resurrection is the promise of eternal relationship with our eternally loving God. Mary doesn’t need to hold on to the physical presence of Jesus because his spiritual presence is with her into eternity. As St. Paul says, nothing in all creation, not even death, “Will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
Mary lets go because Jesus promises to be with her always. And she lets go in order to fulfill the mission he has set for her. She becomes the first evangelist, the apostle to the apostles, when she proclaims to them, “I have seen the Lord.”
As we celebrate this Easter morning, imagine your way back into the garden where Jesus’ tomb lies. Jesus calls your name. You recognize him. You want to leap into his arms, but you realize your own arms are full – full of all sorts of stuff that prevents you from embracing Jesus: shame and fear and negative self-worth and every idol we cling to even though their promises are always false. None of this stuff is life-giving. But there Jesus is, shining with LIFE – joyful, abundant, transformative LIFE – and all that stuff in your arms is sucking your life away.
Jesus says your name again, and your tears, like Mary’s, begin to flow. The stuff in your arms gets heavier and heavier as the tears fall upon it. The stuff is literally dead weight. It begins falling, a piece at a time, from your grasp. Each piece hits the soft soil of the garden. The weight grows lighter and lighter. More pieces fall until you’re holding just one thing in your hands, grip so intense your knuckles are turning white.
Jesus says your name a third time. Your hands tremble and begin to release their clutch. That last death-dealing thing that you never thought you could live without drops from your hands. You leap into his arms. Together, you spin around in a tight embrace, laughing and crying in equal measure.
And then Jesus says the same thing to you that he said to Mary: “Don’t hold on to me.” A pained look crosses your face, but then you realize his words weren’t a rejection. They were the beginning of your mission to go and proclaim the promise of the resurrection to all you meet. You let go. You turn. And you see all that old stuff littering the garden. But you don’t pick it up again because, even though you’re no longer hugging Jesus, you still feel his presence embracing you.
*The title of this sermon, “Noli Me Tangere,” is Latin and means, “Do not touch (or hold on to) me.” Innumerable paintings of Mary Magdalene and Jesus in the garden from throughout Christian history bear this title.
Photo by visualsofdana on Unsplash.
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