“SURPRISE ENDINGS”
John 20:1-18

Preached at StPLC, Wyoming
Easter Sunday, 2010

Dear Friends in Christ, Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Mary Magdalene was a puzzle. She believed yet she didn’t believe. She was a picture of attentiveness and devotion to Jesus Christ. She wanted to anoint him again, to complete the burial routine, to do some good deed for the one whom she called my Lord.

Yet Mary Magdalene was convinced that Jesus was dead. She was so convinced that she mistook the risen Lord for the gardener and asked him where the body of Jesus had been placed. Mary believed, but her belief was incomplete. She believed in a Lord but in one who could be so firmly caught in a cold grave that she would be left to search and grieve and weep. Mary Magdalene was one surprised lady when she came to that tomb. This was not the ending she had anticipated in the first place and now the end that she had witnessed with her own eyes just 2 days prior was being torn asunder.

Mary’s conflicting beliefs had to be brought into harmony. She had to get beyond her preoccupation with nard and linen. She had to see not a gardener but the risen Lord. When that had happened, when Mary looked at the stranger in the garden and recognized him as the resurrected rabbi, she did not feel lonely again.

It has been suggested by scholars that the Christians who lived immediately following the resurrection increasingly felt abandoned, forsaken and orphaned by God and that John wrote his account of the resurrection to combat those feelings, to bridge the breach by focusing on the belief of some disciples, particularly Mary Magdalene and the beloved disciple.

The beloved disciple’s belief was not in conflict with itself. It was straightforward. It was immediate. It was mature. It was like the beloved disciple always had been; open and uncomplicated, warm and quick to respond. The beloved disciple outran Peter, peered into the empty tomb, saw the evidence of abandonment, and immediately believed. Without worrying and wrestling with misconceptions, the beloved disciple believed.

Without agony and anxiety, the beloved disciple believed and went home to wait for the living Lord to come near.

Have you ever felt that keen, exquisitely painful feeling of abandonment? Have you ever felt orphaned and looking for just one place where you can feel at home? Have you ever felt so alone and lonely that your heart hurt?

Several years ago I was an invited guest at a banquet. The invitation read:

“The Father requests the honor of your presence at the marriage supper of his Son”.

I had just minutes to accept the invitation and I had to go to the banquet just as I was. It was the end of a very full day of talks and activity. I felt dirty and tired and not at all like going to a party. All of the guests were told to come to the door leading to the room where the banquet was to be held and to wait there until we were invited in. Imagine my surprise when a man dressed in a tuxedo opened the door, stepped forward, took my hand, placed it on his arm and escorted me into the banquet room, as if I were an honored guest!!

I was astounded to see the most incredibly transformed gymnasium I have ever seen. The banquet tables were arranged in the shape of a very large cross. The first thing I noticed when we began the walk to the seat reserved for me was an empty chair with a crown of thorns hanging on the corner and a drape of deep purple satin over the back of the chair. It was clear that the Son would not be physically present at this Wedding Feast. The presence of the absence of Christ was so very real in that moment I began to cry ever so gently. Soft, quiet tears continued to slide down my cheek through out the entire meal. It was as if a dam had sprung a leak or maybe even burst inside me. Later I could identify the deep, deep feeling that the empty chair with those glaring reminders of the crucifixion had unleashed in me. It was a most empty, lonely feeling and all I could think of was how incredibly lonely Jesus must have felt on that cross. I fully understood his pain. My tears, of course, were for my own loneliness. A loneliness that I had not allowed to surface before this night. Such is the nature of the truth that sets one free.

Jesus said, “For this I was born, to testify to the truth.” My truth that day was that being single again, this time with children was a very alone and lonely place to be just then.

The banquet experience was one of those surprise endings that turn everything upside down. Not so unlike the ending of the Good Friday experience on that first Easter morning.

Have you noticed that although Easter seems to put a new face on an old world, the new face doesn’t last long, in fact it is almost only momentarily. Today we rejoice in the beauty of the flowers surrounding the altar. But these flowers will fade and the new apparel that covers any decay in our lives will grow old perhaps more quickly than we expect. Easter might be said to be as a passing joy that sees cool spring become sweltering July.

For an instant this Easter environment makes us feel better: hopeful, uplifted, joyful. But the feeling passes, and tomorrow we feel as abandoned as ever. Tomorrow when life starts with its sticks and stones and pain again, we feel bereft. With tongue in cheek the story for us might continue:

“And on the second day of the week, Joanna woke up with a migraine headache; Mary the mother of James had an extra load of laundry to get done because of all the soccer games played over the weekend; Peter got up and grumpily went back to work after the long weekend; and John went back to the oncologist to find out what the latest round of chemo had accomplished. For it is on the second, and third, and all the days after Easter that we discover if the stone has really been rolled away, and new life has come for us.

Easter’s environment doesn’t change—forsakenness doesn’t change. But the truth of Easter, when it is believed, does change things. The fact of Easter, when it is believed, surprisingly builds a bridge across the gap between God and us.

Once Mary Magdalene had made that lonely and difficult journey from misunderstanding to understanding, from focusing on the physical to the spiritual, from clamoring for the temporal to the eternal, from tears of sorrow and loss to tears of joy and heavenly gain; once Mary Magdalene believed that Jesus Christ had been raised from the dead, she could join the upper-room band of disciples in the changing world. Now she could go about ordinary life in an extraordinary way. Now she could see everything from the perspective of Christ’s victory. Truly he was where she and two or three others were gathered. Always he was there to enable her to realize that she was in the kingdom of God.

Once the beloved disciple perceived the point, once John began to comprehend what the discarded grave clothes meant, life became a different matter. Now his competition with Peter was a mere memory. Now he was in a harmonious and lasting relationship with not only the Rock but also the risen Christ. Like the thief on the cross, he was in paradise with Christ.

This is what belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ means for you and for me. It is a surprise ending to any feelings of abandonment or loneliness. Among other things, the risen Lord Jesus Christ is the bridge between you and me and our God. This bridge reaches across all those barriers that banish us to a life of loneliness and misery. It bridges those barriers that make life feel hopeless and unhappy, that makes us feel awful. It places us in an enduring and eternal relationship with God.

When we believe in the resurrected Christ, we are not orphaned, we are adopted. We are not forsaken; we are fortified by a familial relationship with God. We are not abandoned; we are advanced in an association with the living Christ that gives us a different motivation and a different appreciation for all that we do. Our belief in Christ’s resurrection bridges the gap and opens the way to one surprise ending after another!

Easter can be one of two things for persons like you and me. It can be a nice ritual of spring that brings a momentary breath of freshness to an otherwise dull year, a happy face momentarily painted on a pained life, a short season of smiles succeeded by more sadness. Or it can be a magnificent and lasting comfort that colors and changes everything we experience during the remainder of eternity.

Which Easter it is depends to some extent on each of us, on you and me. Our belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ founded and fostered by the Holy Spirit through the word and sacraments, can bridge the gap and enable us to live a life of wonderfully surprising endings. My Easter prayer for all of God’s people, and most especially for each of you, is that you will know the truth to which Jesus testifies and that this truth will indeed set you free. Ephesians 2:10 says it well: “God has made us what we are, and in our union with Christ Jesus he has created us for a life of goodness which he has already prepared for us.” May this Easter Day and the Easter Season that lies ahead carry you into the fullness God has created for you. And don’t ever forget, God loves You with a never-ending, all-embracing love! Amen.