Easter Sunday March 31, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
Rejected, betrayed, slandered, murdered, and buried, what good is love to Jesus? That question doesn’t even occur to Mary Magdalen early on Sunday morning. She goes to the tomb, ready to anoint him, to fulfill the duties placed on her by law and personal affection.
She does not have a plan for the stone across the tomb, yet she goes anyway. She is not willing to let foresight or prudence delay her love even a moment. Whatever she expected, she persevered and when she arrived found that love had already overcome the obstacle of stone.
Yet, she did not know this. For all her affection, she still sees only with the eyes of a human love. So assuming that, because evil has killed Jesus, it must have come back to steal away even his corpse, she runs for comfort, for friendship. And that friendship is not without its merits. Peter and John run to see, to share in her concern and grief and do what they can to assuage it. Mary surely must have followed behind.
And what did they discover? The tomb, empty just as Mary said. Yet, that emptiness was filled with more than mere space. The tomb was empty because it was filled with that mysterious love only partly revealed in the Last Supper, only temporarily killed on the cross.
Love endures. When someone we love dies, we grieve. You can say that grief is love persevering beyond death. Yet this is not the kind of enduring love revealed in Jesus Christ. No, in comparison to the love of Jesus – the love that makes his own even those who would betray him, the love that is willing to die to reveal to the truth to those he loves – in comparison to that love, ours falters. The love Jesus offers does not simply grieve in the face of death, it overcomes it.
For all they’ve seen, not one of Jesus’ followers manages this kind of enduring love. Not one of them believes that Jesus is greater than death. There is but a tiny glimpse in the way Mary Magdalene so zealously goes to go to the tomb so early despite knowing that stone blocked the way. There is a pale shadow of this in the way we often refuse to believe someone we love is really gone. Are we not often the same way? When we love, do we not often follow that love into apparent foolishness? How many stories, poems, and legends are about lovers attempting the impossible, often with tragic results?
Yet, this is no fictional expression of human tenacity. This is not some myth to console us in our very loving, but still very mortal grief. For the stone was already gone by the time Mary arrived. Her grief, her love, her perseverance had nothing to do with it. And what the Apostles find when they enter the tomb explains what did happen. It is not our love that overcomes stone, death, and theft, it is his love that does so.
In the drama of this scene, it’s easy to miss, but John has an eye for detail and he never wastes words. He does not just tell us the tomb was empty, but how the cloths were laid out. The cloth covering his head is rolled up in a separate place. He “saw and believed” in part because of this detail. Why?
Because it means the cloth didn’t just fall there. Someone put it there, carefully rolled up. Death does not do laundry. Body-snatchers raiding the guarded tomb of a well-known man do not take the time to unwrap it, much less neatly set aside the face cloth.
No, this is the work of someone who took their time. Besides all this, John has seen someone rise from the dead before. Just a few weeks before, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. But do you recall the details of that event? Someone else had to remove the stone. Someone else had to unwrap Lazarus after he came out of the tomb. This scene – the stone rolled away and the cloths neatly rolled up – it hints that Jesus raised himself from the dead – as he said he would – and set aside the cloths knowing that John would indeed catch such a detail.
Unlike our human grief that grasps at straws, wishfully thinking that maybe our loved one isn’t gone, John’s conclusion, his belief turns out to be to correct, confirmed by Jesus himself later that same day. Mary, Peter, John, and many more actually see Jesus alive again. Not alive symbolically in their hearts, not alive in their memories and willingness to imitate him. Literally, physically alive, walking, talking, eating, and comforting those who thought they lost him for good.
But we aren’t there yet, are we? The Church doesn’t give us those readings this morning, those scenes of direct proof just yet. She invites us into this moment, this liminal time, the tension of having reason to believe he’s alive without yet having the proof right in front of us. She does this because this is very nearly the situation we live in now.
You are here this morning and that says something about your credulity. Either you believe it yourself or someone you love believes it and you’re willing to entertain their belief enough to be here with them. This candle, these believers, the words we’ve read, the ministry entrusted to me… these are all like that rolled up cloth… signs, circumstantial evidence that Jesus is alive.
But we don’t see him. And with maybe a few vanishingly rare exceptions, no one is going to physically see him later today. I never have and I know no one who has. Yet I know he lives. Many of you know that he lives, not in the way your deceased grandparents or friends live in your hearts and memories, but in a totally new way.
So, to answer the question I began with, what good is love to a man who is dead and buried? If you have only human love, only human ways of seeing, none. But there’s two differences here. For one, Jesus is not dead and so loving him is no waste. For the other, his resurrection means that even the dead can benefit from our love. Whoever you’ve lost, whoever you miss the most, whatever tragedy has taken something precious from you – hear me – all is not lost, even if you’ve let that grief drive you to do terrible things or simply turn your back on good things.
On this Happy Easter morning, I offer you two things: hope that really comforts and love that really lasts. If you are struggling to believe, even if you do not believe, take hope from what you see and hear this morning just as John took comfort in the rolled up burial cloth. Let our belief that death is defeated be a comfort to you. Let the beauty of this church, the eagerness of disciples who run to the empty tomb, the comforting formality and tradition of these prayers and rituals be a sign to you that whatever love you’ve lost, whatever grief you feel, whatever fear you face… maybe, just maybe there really is a way for what you’ve lost to be reborn, renewed, raised from the dead and given back to you in a way more glorious that ever before. Death has not won!
Then, if perhaps you’re afraid to love again knowing that it will just be taken from you, try this love. Try a love that cannot be taken from you. Everything and everyone in this world will pass away, so you’re right to fear loving them enough to have to grieve when they do. But I do not ask you to love someone who is only in this world. Present bodily in the Eucharist, Jesus is in this world! But by his resurrection, he not only set aside burial cloths and stone tombs, he set aside the limits of mortality. To love him is to love someone that cannot pass away. Unlike any other love, you will not have to lose him and then learn to live without him. You will have to grieve him, yes, for he did die for our sins, but it is a grief without loss and a grief without permanence.
How can this be? How can loving him offer such guarantees? Because it is not our love that wins, but his. His love that casts aside the stone, rolls up death like a burial cloth, and comes to us day-after-day, week-after-week, year-after-year in word, sacrament, and community.
Weak or strong, faithful or doubting, grieving or rejoicing, sinful or suffering, able to receive communion or not yet ready to, this is where you belong. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. This is why we have hope. This is why, despite the inevitability of death, we can love without fear. For, if we let him, he will fill our own tombs with such grace, such love that they can no longer hold death. And all that will be left is the glory of a love that never fails.