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The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies
St. Martin's Episcopal Church
March 23, 2008
Easter Sunday

The Scandal of the Resurrection

Mary 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 "Rabbi!"

There are moments in our human lives that are so powerful, so significant, so filled with meaning that when they happen, the earth seems literally to shift on its axis. We see everything differently and we know, at that moment, that nothing will ever be the same again.

I had such a moment back in August, when the surgeon doing Gerry's biopsy came out to find me in the waiting room. I knew, before he spoke, that the news was bad - his face was tense, and drawn and sad - and before the words could come out of his mouth, I knew that our lives had changed forever. It was as if my whole existence had narrowed to that one tiny moment in time, the fraction of a second before Dr. Shaberg opened his mouth.

Mary has such a moment there by the empty tomb, when the man she believes to be the gardener turns to her and calls her by name. In that heart-stopping moment of recognition, the world as she knows it shatters, and something unknown and unimaginable is revealed to her. Christ is risen, and nothing will ever be the same again.

Mary comes to the garden steeped in grief. She has waited through the Sabbath, waited for this daybreak, waited for the sunrise so that she can go to the tomb and care for Jesus' dead and battered body. The hours she stood at the foot of the cross were dreadful, tragic - but there is nothing new, nothing earth-shattering in the abuse of power or in the suffering of an innocent man. Mary had seen all that before, and though her grief is terrible, she still stands on familiar ground - the ground of mourning and the rituals of death.

The empty tomb itself tells her nothing. It's just one more wound driven into her already broken heart. All she wants is to find her teacher's body: "Tell me where you've put him, and I'll take care of him." All she wants is to anoint the corpse with herbs and ointment, to wrap it in fresh linen cloth and do for Jesus these last, simple acts of love and devotion.

But the man she thinks is the gardener turns to her and calls her by name, and in that single, tiny fraction of a second - everything changes; everything changes forever.

I imagine that she reaches out to embrace him - that she flings her arms out toward him in utter joy, wanting to hold him, to touch him, to make sure he isn't a figment of her despairing imagination. Jesus is back! It was all some kind of grisly joke, or maybe a terrible dream - it doesn't matter. Jesus is given back to her, to all of them - and now they can go back to the way things had been before - everything will stay the same.

"Do not hold on to me."

No - nothing will ever be the same again. This moment in Scripture is beloved by artists, and in the paintings, Jesus is himself - he is recognizable - and yet, he is not himself. There is a marked distance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. She cannot even touch him, much less embrace him. In many of the paintings, there is a clear sense of movement in both their bodies: Jesus is moving toward God, and Mary is falling backwards, thrown off balance by the encounter. Jesus lives - but Jesus is not the same.

And Mary is not the same either. Mary cannot hold him. Whatever the resurrection reality, it is radically different from her earthly reality. The resurrection is not resuscitation; Jesus isn't raised from the dead in order to go back to the life he led before the crucifixion. He is raised for something entirely new. And in that moment of recognition - as Jesus is both revealed to her and taken away from her - Mary becomes a participant in that new reality.

It is a tiny, specific, exquisitely particular moment in time - as tiny, specific and exquisitely particular as the moment Mary of Nazareth says to Gabriel - "Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word."

Post-Enlightenment thinking, and especially 20th century progressive biblical studies and theology, have painted both the Incarnation and the Resurrection in pretty broad brush strokes. Scholars and theologians have tended to do away with that scandalous particularity that so challenges the faith of modern Christians. The resurrection cannot possibly be true, we tell ourselves. There cannot possibly be any other reality. The resurrection is really just a story told to explain how the first Christians continued to remember and experience Jesus in their hearts. We should understand the resurrection in as generous and inclusive a way as possible - there cannot be any scandalous particularity.

Ah - but our Jewish heritage shows us that God has always been scandalously particular. God's story, and our story as God's people, has always been told through particular, specific human lives and particular, specific human events. Abraham receives a call to leave his home and go to an unknown land; barren Sara is told she will bear a son; Moses sees a bush burning, and turns aside to take a closer look; David, out of all Jesse's handsome sons, is anointed king. And Mary, a simple village girl with nothing special to commend her, becomes the theo-tokos - the God-bearer - the one in whom the Word becomes flesh in order to dwell among us.

It's pretty wild stuff. And of course it strains credulity and makes us uncomfortable - it seems like some unattractive remnant of a primitive past we'd rather forget, an anachronism in a world where we can split the atom, decode DNA and probe the farthest corners of the universe. How can we speak of incarnation and resurrection except to say - our ancestors may have needed to believe these stories, but we don't have to anymore. We know too much - we're too sophisticated - we understand how the world works.

Believe me, I'm not mocking that way of thinking. I think that way myself six days out of seven. I have trouble believing the scandalous particularity of our Christian story, the way God's saving purpose finally narrows to the dimension of a cross, to the height of a man, and the breadth of his outstretched arms. I have trouble believing that in the tiny space of a man's last breath, God's work for us is accomplished.

But maybe, when I focus on the limits of my belief, I am focusing on the wrong thing. We are not gathered here this morning, we are not gathered in this beautiful, aromatic place, we are not singing these glorious hymns because of what we might or might not believe. We are here because of what God has done, because of what God can do, and because of what we hope God will do.

We like to think we are too sophisticated, too full of scientific knowledge and understanding to believe in the resurrection as anything other than a metaphor. We like to think that we are light-years beyond the naiveté of the first disciples. But really, the first disciples didn't believe it either. Mary's eyewitness account is greeted with skepticism - she's just a woman, not even allowed to bear witness in a courtroom - she must be hysterical, mad with grief. First-century non-Christian authors agreed that Jesus' disciples must have stolen the body for their own purposes, nothing else was possible. We may know a little more science than they did, but Roman culture was every bit as cynical, materialistic, narcissistic, and nihilistic as our own. Resurrection sounded just as ridiculous to them as it does to us. Perhaps we're not as highly evolved as we think.

John's Gospel continues with the story of Jesus appearing to the disciples as they are huddled in a secret room at the end of Easter Day. We'll hear this story next week, when the church is much emptier, and the lilies have begun to wilt, and the brass and timpani have gone home. Thomas says he absolutely refuses to believe that Christ is risen, and he states his lack of belief as a challenge - "I'm going to have to stick my hands in his wounds to believe it."

Well, look at just how scandalously particular the story becomes. Jesus says - "here. Put your hand here - don't just look at what the nails did - touch the wounds yourself." And John goes on to say, "Blessed are you who have not seen, and yet believe."

I do not want God's power to be limited by the limits of my own knowledge. I do not want God's sovereignty to be limited by the limits of my own belief. I do not want God's saving work to be dependent on what I do or do not think is possible. And above all, I do not want the scandal of particularity to be diminished so that I can be more comfortable.

At the women's retreat a couple of weeks ago, I realized - as we shared our various stories of faith and doubt and experiences of God - that my faith is most tangible to me when I'm fighting it. God is most real to me when I'm wrestling, and questioning, and doubting and denying. And God is most real to me in tiny, specific, particular moments when I get glimpse - just a glimpse of who God is, and what God has done.

As Gerry and I have continued to live in that new reality that follows a cancer diagnosis, we've learned to experience those tiny, specific, particular moments as revelations of grace and holiness. God has been present to us in a new way, as a source of healing and wholeness that goes far beyond whether or not a disease is "cured". We have, ever so tentatively and with plenty of backsliding and bad days, begun to believe that we are living in the power of the resurrection.

God has created a new reality - in which death has no dominion, where death is swallowed up in victory so that we know longer have to be held captive by the fear of death. I want to live in that new reality, whether or not on any given day I can believe that it's true. I do not want to limit that new reality by the limits of my own imagination, my own knowledge, my own faith.

"Jesus Christ is risen today. Alleluia," we have sung this morning. Christ is risen, the Lord is risen, indeed. Jesus is the subject of the sentence, not us. God is the author of our salvation, not us. The resurrection is a scandalous particularity, an offense against common sense, scientific possibility and human reason. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory in Jesus Christ our risen Lord.