Easter Sunday
John 20:1-18
“Shall be
the morn of song”
Last September, newspapers around the
country carried a story from
In a noisy, cramped shelter for Hurricane Katrina evacuees known as
Building 1536, a bride named Katrina said: "I do."
"I now pronounce you husband and wife," Chaplain Richard Smith
of the
Then, one by one over the next 45 minutes, Smith married three other
couples who had lost everything but each other in the hurricane that swamped
And the shelter was transformed by a sense of renewal amid loss, of
community among people who'd come here because the city they once shared was
gone.
All of the men and women who were married that Thursday morning at
KellyUSA, a San Antonio shelter for hurricane evacuees, had put off their
weddings until the time was right and they could afford it.
But the events of the past two weeks had made them see that, given the
mercurial nature of fate, there's no time like now. And all they needed to take
the plunge was the example of strangers doing the same.
Marsh got the idea of being wed there as she and Thornton talked
Wednesday with a couple of volunteers at the shelter.
From there, arrangements
snowballed. Donations enabled the
purchase of weddings bands, a dress for the bride and a suit for the
groom. A salon did the bride’s hair and
makeup. The reception featured two
chocolate wedding cakes, champagne and table decorations.
The matrimonial chain reaction, baptized by the tears of strangers, was
enlivened by an impromptu and off-key quartet the chaplain pulled arbitrarily
from the crowd. The four men, none of whom was used to singing before a crowd
or knew the bride or groom, sang, "One in a Million You."
"But one day the sun came shining through," they sang off key.
"The rain had stopped, and the skies were blue."
One of the grooms, who exchanged vows in shorts and a T-shirt, said
afterward: "We talked about getting married but just couldn't afford it.
And now, I just figured, why not?"
Another summed it up this way: "It's
like being in a new world. A better world" [1]
The Psalmist said it this way:
Weeping may linger for the night,
but joy comes with the morning. (Psalm 30:5)
Throughout the last several weeks –
throughout the season of Lent – we have been humming the third verse of the
familiar hymn, The Church’s One
Foundation, which grew out of the concern and frustration of the 19th
century British pastor and hymnwriter Samuel John Stone over the controversies of
his time that he felt were shooting the church in its own foot. But for all his pastoral concern, anguish and
hand-wringing, Stone makes this powerful statement of faith:
Though with a scornful wonder
the world sees us oppressed,
by schisms rent asunder,
by heresies distressed,
yet saints their watch are keeping;
their cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song.
It had no doubt been a whole weekend
of weeping for Mary Magdalene and the other followers of Jesus whose recent
years had been immersed in the teachings and example of this one who had bent
their view of reality into an entirely different shape. Some of their tears must surely have been the
fruit of regret; their faithlessness and fecklessness haunting them in their
grief over all that had happened in the blur of the past few days. Some had missed the point; some had fallen
asleep; one, for reasons we are still – as recently as this past week – trying
to understand, had turned him in; some had lied about their relationship to
him, and most had hidden as cowards. Could
it really be true that this one who had noticed them, called them, turned them
and traced the constellation of God’s love in stars brighter than any solar
system they had imagined, had been arrested and executed as a criminal of the
state? Or was all that just a horribly
bad dream?
Mary knew the miserable truth. According to John, she had hovered in the
shadow of the cross, a witness to the splinters of the wood and the steel of
the nails; an audience for Jesus’ final words.
A nightmare, maybe, but it hadn’t been a dream. And now Mary is preoccupied with the body. There hadn’t been time for proper care of it
before it was shut away in the borrowed tomb, and she was determined to make it
right – or perhaps that was just an excuse to be near him again; to sit in his
presence once more, albeit on cold and hauntingly different terms. But her mind was on the body, and when she
doesn’t find it, she panics. In her
comments to the disciples, then to the angels, and finally to Jesus whom she
mistakes for the gardener, Mary obsesses about the absent body. Its absence doesn’t inspire faith, but rather
disquiet.
The text says that when the two
disciples looked into the empty tomb, the “other disciple” believed. But what did he believe? It apparently wasn’t that Jesus had been
raised – the narrator says that they didn’t yet understand the scriptures about
Jesus rising, and then reports that they simply left the cemetery and returned
home. Ho hum. That doesn’t sound much like a response one
might expect to a resurrection from the dead.
Apparently what he “believed” was simply Mary’s report that the tomb was
empty. But unlike Mary, he was
apparently unperturbed by the anomaly. It
is dawn, but the “night of weeping” is still veiling the sun.
But with the sound of her name, Mary
sees a ray of light. “Mary,” said the
one she had presumed to be the gardener, and suddenly she knew the larger and
brighter truth. “Don’t hold onto me,” he
continued. “Don’t hold so tightly to
what you have known and the life you grieve that you cannot grasp the new life
breaking open like a bulb into blossom.
Don’t allow your love for what was
blind you to the hope that now is and
can yet be.”
And isn’t that the enduring
strangulation – the temptation to hold so tightly to the earthy reality we have
known that no room remains for embracing the new life God’s love makes
possible?
But Mary makes the turn, as have
others. Lilian Daniel, Pastor of First
Congregational Church in
After her husband was killed, she was
back out there marching with the sanitation workers, and went on to lead a long
and productive life, refusing to choose fear.
She spread the good news, when we all would have understood if instead
she had chosen instead to spread fear.
She did not take the out the public would have given her. And she would not be silenced.” [2]
Instead of spending the rest of her
life weeping in the night, she, too, heard the voice of resurrection calling
her name and embraced the morn of song.
It is a paradox. There is a sense in which everything changes
on Easter morning for the followers of Jesus, and also nothing changes. Roman soldiers still occupy
Would that morning’s song could be
tangible and make everything right. It
would be nice if becoming a Christian alleviated every pinched nerve, and every
broken reality, but that is not the case.
When our mission team was in Nicaragua, we heard from local preachers,
human rights officials, and missionaries about how their country is being – and
I quote them here – “invaded by prosperity preaching evangelists from the U.S.,”
telling the achingly poor that if they give 10% of their possessions to these
so-called “ministries” then God will return it ten-times over. In desperate hope, people are borrowing money
from friends or family and sending it in as a kind of down-payment on the prosperity
promised. But alas, the loans come due
and nothing has changed except a desperate situation only worsened.
But resurrection doesn’t erase a crucifixion
– the nail prints were still in his hands and the sword wound was still in his
side; and Martin Luther King, jr. was still dead and
Or as that Katrina victim cum wedding
guest summed it up: "It's like being in a new world. A better world"
It
is, indeed. Happy Easter!
O God, who has promised that all things will work together
for good to those that love you, grant us patience amidst the tumults, pains
and afflictions of life, and faith to discern your love, within, above, and
beyond the impartial destinies of this great drama of life. Save us from every vainglorious pretension by
which we demand favors which violate your love for all your children, and grant
us grace to appropriate every fortune, both good and evil, for the triumph of
the suffering, crucified, and risen Lord in our souls and life. In whose name we ask it. (From The Essential
Reinhold Neibuhr)