Easter A

The Easter story from the Gospel of John (John 20.1-18) tells of the visit to the tomb in the early hours of the morning. It is still dark, and by the time you have reached this point in your reading of John you know he is not just telling you something about the time of day. Darkness in John is always meaningful, even when it only seems to be descriptive. Insofar as it is the darkness in the prologue that never overcomes the light, as well as the darkness covering the visit of the benighted literalist, Nicodemus or the darkness into which Judas goes when he leaves the Last Supper to do his dirty work, this is the darkness against which we see the light of the dawning resurrection.

In the church I served in Birmingham (UK) we always held the Easter vigil in the pre-dawn darkness of the otherwise empty sanctuary, the small circle of worshippers lit by their own hand-held candles as they read those long Old Testament lessons of the vigil, intertwined with psalms and prayers and Taizé chants. As the service slowly progressed the stark blackness of the night was gradually overcome by the still colourless grey light of early dawn. The sanctuary furnishings around the fellowship slowly became visible, and finally a stronger light pieced through to the chancel where white linen cloth lay draped over the communion table like discarded clothing.

The story in John has this same slow, gradual movement toward Mary’s joyful exclamation, “I have seen the Lord!”

Notice how the story is layered. First Mary and her companions (only indicated by the use of the word “we” in verse 2) come to the tomb and see that the stone that had sealed it has been rolled away.

Then Peter and the beloved disciple move toward the tomb. The beloved disciple runs ahead of Peter and looks into the tomb. Then Peter arrives at the tomb, looks, and goes in. Then the beloved disciple goes into the tomb. Then they both go home.

Mary, still disconsolate, is standing outside the tomb. Now she, like the two disciples, goes into the tomb, where, unlike the two disciples, she meets two angels. It’s idle to ask why the two disciples hadn’t noticed the angels. The pattern has been established. Each move in the story adds something new.

Why do you weep? the angels ask, and Mary tells them what she had told the disciples. They have taken her Lord. Then she sees (but does not recognize) Jesus, who asks, as the angels had, why she weeps, adding another question, “Whom do you seek?” Mary gives him the same answer she has given before, then Jesus speaks her name: “Mary!”

The manner in which John builds the scene incrementally is a standard stylistic feature of his gospel. Each movement in the story adds a little bit more, teasing us, as it were, until the powerful emotional climax of the recognition, and then comes the denouement in which Jesus explains his coming ascension and Mary runs to exclaim to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!”

Drama is the thing here. I will never forget that Easter at St James United Presbyterian Church in Chicago when Ann Faulkner got us to perform the 10^th century liturgical drama, the Visitatio Sepulchri. St James was a church that itself was experiencing the early stages of a remarkable rebirth. Ann had come to us emerging from a battle with cancer, her chemotherapied head covered in a scarf to hide her baldness. She’d taken on the job of organist among us as a bold move back into the world of the living. She’d borrowed white albs from a local Episcopal church to dress all the players, the small group of young adults who had only recently joined this church. All the parts, of course, were singing parts. When the young man playing Jesus chanted Mary’s name and she looked up from her desolation in recognition, we all felt a lump of emotion in our throats. Doretta actually wept that morning. Whether it was because of the emotional power of the scene itself, or for Ann, or for our own re-birth as a church—it was all the same.

In John, the resurrection story collects rebirth moments that have come throughout the gospel and weaves them together in this moment of encounter. Jesus calls his disciples “brothers” here, recalling the prologue (1.12). To all who receive him . . . he gives the power to be children of God, born not of blood or the will of the flesh but of God. This is not just John’s virgin birth story (the story of our virgin birth). It is our resurrection story. When we take the Word as the pattern of our lives, we are reborn into a new life. Our rebirth is linked with the story of Jesus’ ascension, through which we are brothers because we are all children of the same Father: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (20.17). The ascension of Jesus is the birth of a new community—or a new family.

In John, resurrection has to do with intimacy. In the prayer following his farewell discourse Jesus says, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (17.3). Those who love Jesus do the things Jesus does, and as they do these things, they abide in him, and he abides in them, and so does the one who sent him (15.1-11). Sin in John is thus less like breaking rules and more like withering on the vine.

The light that is such a central motif in John is the light of our deepest humanity, life itself, fullness of life, life abundantly (John 10.10). The resurrection “moment” in our story is the moment Mary hears her name spoken. Think of the Good Shepherd (10.3-4), who knows his sheep and his sheep know him. He calls them by their names. Resurrection in John summons out what and who we most deeply are—this is what abundant life is—just as Lazarus is summoned out of the darkness of the tomb into new life (“Lazarus, come out!”). Those who have made the journey of integrity out of the closet into the full light of day can testify to such a resurrection experience.

As the resurrection stories in John (not just the resurrection story, but all the other ones) are embedded in experiences of encounter, the resurrection of Jesus seems to be connected to the experience of transformation in the life of the believer. Mary’s rejoicing that she has “seen” the Lord is built upon when Peter, later, sees the Lord in an encounter that becomes his experience of vocation (in John the calling of the fishermen is placed at the end of the story, not, as in the Synoptics, at the beginning). “Seeing” Jesus in John is a matter of transformed vision and transformed life, a new way of seeing and being that comes through the kind of discipleship that does what Jesus does. In the beginning of the gospels the followers of Jesus are responding to an invitation to “come and see”. The Greeks who would “see” Jesus must learn to die as the grain of wheat must die before it bears much fruit (12.24). They must learn to live as Jesus lives.

It seems, therefore, to me, that resurrection in the Gospel of John has very little to do with what happens to us after we die, as if the preservation of the self was what the good news were all about. John is all about how we live now in a transformed humanity that has taken on the image and likeness of God. Resurrection in John is an incarnational sort of thing, putting flesh on God, a rebirth into the world, a commissioning, as Oliver Davies says in Transformation Theology (55), to serve and act here and now in relation to that specific time and place where a particular faithful people constitute the living body of Christ. Christ ‘R’ Us.

In her acclaimed book, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1335, Caroline Walker Byrnum traces the the ways in which the early Church and medieval Christianity turned the idea of resurrection from an image of transformation to one of nervous continuity. I think it is is critically important to recover the earlier sense of the experience of transformation, giving our people the genuine hope that comes with other-directed discipleship, rather than the false hope of holding on to what they have.