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"No Body"
How unexpected. How totally unanticipated was the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth to those who had been his friends and his followers, who had seen or had heard, or had watched from afar, his death on a cross, his tortuous death on a cross, just a few days, just a few hours, before. They were desolate. They were helpless. They were joyless. They were hopeless. It was the last thing in the world that they expected. His rising from the dead. It was certainly the last thing in the world that Mary Magdalene expected when she arrived at the tomb in which he had been laid – when she arrived there on what was to become that first Easter Sunday morning.
According to our gospels, Mary had met Jesus in Galilee, near her home in a place called Magdala, about seventy miles or so north of Jerusalem. She had been tormented with numerous problems at the time they had met, but just as Jesus had touched the lives of other people, he touched her life and brought some sense of unity, some sense of peace to the "scattered forces of her soul." And so she became a follower, she became a disciple. And she followed him quite literally: she followed him all the way from Galilee to Jerusalem. She joined in with the crowd of the twelve disciples, and with others, including a group of women – and among them, Mary, Jesus’ mother. She followed them, all the way south to Jerusalem. She was there in Jerusalem on the Friday when Jesus was crucified. She was one of the few who did not run away in terror when Jesus was arrested. She was there at the cross when Jesus died. She was there when the body was taken down and laid to rest. And she was there at the tomb again, three days later, Sunday, the Sabbath day over, the first Easter morning. She was there, ready, not to see Jesus alive, but to see Jesus dead, and to anoint his body with the oils and spices of burial. She was there. Each step of the way, she was there. But why? Why there? Why with the crowd and, now, ahead of the crowd? The answer, I suppose, all depends on who you ask. If you were to ask one of the best-selling authors these days, Dan Brown, who wrote The DaVinci Code, he would give you one particular answer -- and some of you may have heard this before. If you haven’t, brace yourselves, because you will hear about it as the movie comes out. She was there, he would probably say, not just because she was a follower of Jesus, but because she was married to Jesus. And not only that, he would say, "well, if you look hard enough throughout Europe, you’ll even find the descendants of Mary Magdalene and Jesus scattered around somewhere. They are there to be found to this very day." Now, to some of us, this may seem an intriguing possibility, while to others of us it may seem outlandish. It’s one of those marvelous thoughts that circulates that you can neither prove nor disprove, which means . . . it can cause endless discussion and bring in the money again and again! But, you know, the possibility really does go back to ideas expressed in some ancient documents -- documents which don’t give us any proof, but which do give us some wiggle room for speculation. Outside our Bible there are a number of gospels, ancient gospels (not as early as our gospels, a hundred years, a hundred and fifty, two hundred years after the life of our Lord Jesus) which refer to Mary Magdalene. One of them is the gospel of Phillip. And it gives us some food for thought. The gospel of Phillip at one point says this, "There were three who always walked with the Lord – Mary his mother, and her sister, and the Magdalene, the one who was called his companion." Well, there’s a word that can lead to a whole book of speculation: his "companion." What does it mean? Well, it may just mean that she was his companion, like all the other disciples. But some say, "Aah, there’s more to it than that," and especially because the gospel of Phillip says something else. It says, "Jesus loved Mary more than the others and used to kiss her." Now, that statement really does sound a little strange, I have to admit. But keep in mind the Gospel of Philip and the gospel of Mary Magdalene, and other similar documents were written a hundred, a hundred and fifty years, after the time of our Lord Jesus, and no earlier writing about a relationship between Jesus and Mary that was "stronger than companionship" has emerged. Keep in mind, too, that with regard to the kiss, in other cultures, even today, a kiss means something different for them than for us – Jesus was betrayed by a kiss from Judas – maybe those in the "inner circle" embraced each other with a kiss . . . and Mary was one of them. SO, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on here. But what we do know from those accounts — those that are outside of our Bible and those accounts that are inside of our Bible — what we know is exactly what we know already: Mary had found new life with Jesus. That much we know. She had found new hope with Jesus. That much we know. She had become a committed follower of Jesus. That much we know. And she followed Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to the cross, from the cross to the grave and there she was. On that first Easter day. Hopeless. Looking for a body. And there was no body to be found. John’s gospel puts it this way: "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.’" An empty tomb. No body in sight. No hope of resurrection at all. Just confusion and despair and hopelessness, until Mary returned to the tomb and with her own eyes, she saw him. Alive. In the body. Hear John once again: "Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and 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, `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. For whom are you looking?’ 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, `Rabboni,’ which means `teacher.’ Jesus said to her, `Do not hold onto 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." Among those to whom Mary Magdalene undoubtedly spoke that day was another of Jesus’ friends, whose name is Thomas. Thomas, who didn’t believe a word that she said. Nor the word that the other disciples said when they themselves said that they had seen Jesus with their own eyes. We call him "doubting Thomas." He did not and he would not believe it. The story had come to him was not a story of some spiritual resurrection – as if he heard people saying, "aah, we felt his presence there outside the tomb. His on-going eternal presence." No, that was not it. And that was not something he would have been expecting anyway. What he heard was about flesh and blood. And so he replied to those who spoke what appeared to him to be nonsense, and said to them, "Unless I see for myself, unless I touch for myself, I can not believe. And I certainly cannot replace this sorrow with joy and this despair with hope." But then, too, quite unexpectedly, totally unanticipated, Jesus came again. The scripture says in John 20, that a week later, his disciples were again in the house, and this time Thomas was with them. All the doors were shut. Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God." How unexpected. How totally anticipated. How impossible. How out of the question was the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth to his followers and his friends who had seen or had stood at a distance and watched him being crucified. So unexpected. So unanticipated that it turned their lives upside down and inside out. It transformed their weakness into power, their confusion and their sorrow into joy, and their despair into hope – a solid hope that despite persecution in the years ahead, would never, ever go away. There are some of us here today who need this kind of transformation that those disciples experienced on that day. Who desperately need it. There are others of us here today for whom this is a good day and we’re quite happy with things the way they are, and so maybe this is not the day that we need an enormous transformation. But the day will come when we will. For some of us here today, though, today is the day in which we feel exactly like those disciples did before Jesus was seen. We feel perhaps as if we are in the tomb, or we’re certainly at a dead end, and there is a stone between us and life, and there is no one to roll it away.
One of my seminary friends in the 1980's was a young man in his twenties by the name of Duncan. Duncan had been a student, a brilliant student, at MIT. He had been on their water polo team. He was healthy and active until he had discovered that he had multiple sclerosis and in his situation, it was moving rapidly. He left MIT, graduated, and headed off to seminary. Following seminary, for seven years before he died, and he did, in the 1990s, God opened up for him a marvelous opportunity to serve and to use his gifts and his talents and his body in Christ’s service. I knew him in seminary, and he moved to San Antonio in Texas at the same time I did, so we met up again there. He had been offered a position as a chaplain in a nursing home affiliated with one of our Presbyterian congregations. And it was absolutely perfect. It was a place to live and it was a place to minister. A place where his youth was a marvelous gift to those who were there, but so was his body. Those there could identify with his struggles, and he with them. And so the interaction in those years was simply marvelous and the sense of God’s call was strong. In a dark moment before that opportunity dawned, he wrote these words. He said: You might think it was hard one day to discover myself grabbing lampposts to keep from falling because my legs simply wouldn’t support me, hard to watch my legs inexorably weaken for the next two years until they don t work at all. But this fall, it's not my legs. It’s my hands. How could I describe the hell of not being able to write: no journal no notes, no articles, no sermons. If I can’t write, I can’t even think, because when I write, I so often learn what I think. Who am I? Who will I be if my body doesn’t work? If
my body can’t do anything? Where is God in all this? Who is God in all this? I want to believe God loves me and gave his son for me. I want to believe God is strong and God will do what God purposes to do. But I wonder: is God strong or is God just a beautiful dream? A beautiful but ultimately empty dream? A weak and ultimately useless illusion . . . In dark despair. In the tomb. The stone blocking any entry to a new life. But then, the stone was rolled away, and in the days ahead, quite unexpectedly, Duncan would know laughter and hope and light and purpose again. But at that moment, at that moment, his mind and his body were trapped, and transformation of any kind, resurrection of any kind, new life of any kind, renewed hope of any kind, an inviting future of any kind, – seemed completely out of the question. As undoubtedly to some of us, it seems as well. But listen up, my friends. This is Easter. And the God of Easter loves to speak to people in the tomb, and at the edge of the tomb, and just outside. Loves to speak to them a word of power and life. The God of Easter calls out, and he calls out by name! He calls us to join our lives together with Mary and with Thomas, and with Duncan and with all those who had reached a point in their life in which it seemed as if there was no hope or future at all, as if the whole world had crumbled down. He calls us to join our lives with theirs who had no expectation or anticipation of any change. And then -- they saw him with their own eyes, and they heard him with their own ears. "Mary!" "Thomas!" "Duncan!" – you, me. If Jesus’s life and not just his soul, but his whole life, body and soul, was in God’s hands in such a time as that . . . if Mary’s life, if Thomas’ life, if Duncan’s life, . . . if these lives were all in God’s hands and safe in God’s hands at such a time as that, then surely, surely, our lives are safe with him too! Let us pray.
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David A. Renwick