A sermon on John 20:9 by David Sceats, prepared for online worship on Easter Day 2020
‘For as yet they did not understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead’
The Revised Common Lectionary offers two alternative readings for Easter Day this year: this one from John chapter 20 and another from Matthew chapter 28. Both are accounts of the day of Jesus’ resurrection and the discovery of the empty tomb. Both are clear that it was women who made that first discovery, but nevertheless the way the story is told in each is significantly different.
Matthew’s story is full of abnormal happenings – angels, earthquakes, lightnings, guards struck down and rendered lifeless – and, above all, of a sense of certainty. When Mary Magdalene and ‘the other’ Mary meet Jesus they know him immediately; and immediately, without question or debate, they worship him, as though this was the most natural thing to do. There is no surprise. They experience no fear. There is no sense of alarm at suddenly encountering someone who is supposed to be dead! It’s as though they had been expecting the resurrection from the outset.
The story that John tells in our gospel reading today is quite different. Apart from the two angels that Mary sees in the tomb, it’s a sequence of perfectly ‘normal’ events. Behind these events, of course, lies the quite extraordinary fact of the resurrection, but the story that John actually tells is just a simple account of what people saw and did – and it’s full of uncertainty, confusion, and misunderstanding – as you might expect if you’d gone to take flowers to the grave of someone whose funeral you attended last Friday and found the grave opened, the coffin empty and the body gone.
The story begins with Mary Magdalene coming to the tomb and finding the stone rolled away. The impression John creates is that she immediately makes an assumption. Without even looking in the tomb to see what has happened, she assumes that ‘they’ have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and she goes straight to Peter to tell him so. We don’t know if Mary was prone to conspiracy theories, but she certainly infers a conspiracy now – which is hardly surprising in the circumstances; after all, the death of Jesus was itself the result of a conspiracy! Years ago I had a colleague who had formerly been head of RAF procurement in the MOD. One of his mantras, developed from years of working as a civil servant, was ‘in the evidence of a conspiracy, assume a cock-up’, but this is advice which wasn’t available to Mary Magdalene, though, from the point of view of the Powers that had sought to silence Jesus his resurrection was a cock-up of monumental proportions!
The story continues with Peter and John running to the tomb. John gets there first and looks in, then Peter arrives, and first Peter and then John go in. They see the evidence: the tomb is empty; the grave cloths are discarded; in an authentic touch, the head-cloth is lying separately from the rest as though unwound afterwards. And John tells us that the beloved disciple ’believed’ – but believed what? Not, presumably, the resurrection, because in verse 9 he specifically says they didn’t understand this yet. So presumably what he believes is that the tomb really is empty – the body of Jesus really is gone. And Peter and John go home.
Then the story goes back to Mary Magdalene. Understandably upset and confused she too looks into the tomb and sees two angels, but all they do is ask her why she is crying! They bring no message; they offer no instructions; they provide no explanation or reassurance. So Mary turns round and sees a stranger (it’s actually Jesus, but she doesn’t know that yet) who asks the same question: ‘why are you crying?’ Mary’s reply betrays her confusion, her sense of loss and despair, her inability to comprehend what is happening, and it’s only when Jesus calls her by name that she finally gets it.
This is a beautiful story, beautifully told, and it’s all about a group of people with no exit strategy! They have no way forward from the death of the one on whom they had pinned their hopes. They are in a situation they’d never been in before – and never expected to find themselves in in the first place – a situation where all the familiar landmarks of life had suddenly been removed; where everything they had taken for granted as part of the fabric of their lives was suddenly undermined. A situation where fear had replaced hope, and they were therefore confused, disorientated and lost. And the last thing they wanted to do was to embrace change!
Does that sound familiar? Parallels between the position these first disciples found themselves in and our situation in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown are not hard to find! And it’s tempting – and easy – to go straight from there to using the message of Easter as reassurance for us in our situation – to suggesting that Jesus’ victory over death is a sign that Covid-19 will be defeated, and that his resurrected life is evidence that things will soon be back to normal and we can resume our lives from where we put them on hold three weeks ago. It’s tempting – and easy – to suggest that our anxieties about the future are misplaced and our fears about the effects of these strange times on our prosperity, our social structures, our mental health, our travel plans, and the patterns of living we used to take for granted are groundless. That (in words that Julian of Norwich did not say) all will be well because all will be back to normal.
That’s a message we all want to hear: a message of reassurance – a message of comfort in difficult times. But I’m not sure that it’s the message of Easter. Whatever Jesus’ resurrection was, it wasn’t a return to how things were before Good Friday.
Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t a resuscitation – a coming back to life, a returning to the way things were before. It was a going-beyond-death, not a mere reversal of dying. It was not a restoration but a transformation, and his new life was precisely that – a new kind of living altogether. But it was also an invitation to his disciples to enter into a new kind of living too – a kind of living set free from the power of everything represented by death. Because death, in this context, is a metaphor as well as a reality. It stands for all the Powers that hold human life and the created world in thrall to manipulation, control, suppression, dominance, oppression and violence; and all the vices through which those Powers exert themselves in our experience; malice, cruelty, greed, envy, lust, hatred, self-worship.
It took the disciples a while to get this. They made more than one attempt to go back to how things were before the death of Jesus. Thomas wouldn’t believe without physical evidence. Peter wanted to go back to fishing. But eventually they got the message that life was never going to be the same again; that the resurrection was a summons to move on – not an opportunity to go back.
And that’s always the message of Easter. Even in this time of coronavirus, Easter’s not a reassurance that all will return to normal, nor even that life will eventually go on; it’s a summons to us to discover how this brush with death leads us to new life – life that triumphs over the System’s power to grind us down. Easter is both a call and an empowerment – to new ways of being; to a new set of values; to new priorities; to new kinds of relationships; to new ways of caring. It’s a call because Jesus Christ – our Lord and leader – is risen and has gone before us. It’s an empowerment because it’s the power that raised him to new life, triumphant over death and all it stands for, that is at work in us to transform our lives – and through that transformation to transform the world around us.
And this time of coronavirus is nothing if not an opportunity for Easter …
David D Sceats
9.4.20