Transcript
From John’s Gospel: “But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb.” I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
My first job was funded by private equity. My investment bank, my Dad, gave me the venture capital, a quarter, to buy my first tank of gas, accepting the risk that I could monetize the property of the United States government. Soldiers knew they had to keep their lawns within regulations. I pushed the mower around White Sands Missile Range, helping them do that.
The second job was lumber-jacking aspen or poplar with my Dad and my Grandpa Jack and my Uncle Rod and two whip-smart draft horses named Duke and Dan.
But as I reflected on our Gospel reading this Easter Day, it’s my third job I want to speak of, digging graves. I dug them by hand, with shovels and pick-axes. In his later years, my Grandpa Jack was sexton of the cemetery in Bergland, Michigan. We split the fifty bucks he paid us to dig a grave.
He died on 3 July 1976. The night before his funeral, as a family we were in the house where my father was born, and my Dad asked me if I wanted to sleep next to Grandpa Jack. I did. So my Uncle Rod gave me a pillow and a blanket. And Dad walked with me the fifty yards over to my grandparents’ house. He tucked me in on the couch in the living room beside Grandpa Jack who lay in his casket.
That night I wanted what Mary Magdalene did, the company of the dead. Why? Because love does that.
In February 1971 Milledge Boyce, my father’s friend, died. He was a few months into a tour in Vietnam in late 1970, when cancer struck him. The Army flew him home. And within two or three weeks, at age 43, he was dead. I remember my mother condoling Rita. My folks were close with them.
In the military, you don’t leave a dead body unattended in transfer. My father accompanied SGM Boyce on what was supposed to be a non-stop flight from El Paso to El Centro, California. But a mechanical issue came up that forced a layover in Phoenix.
Passengers would be put up in a hotel. A flight attendant told my Dad that SGM Boyce’s body would be placed in a hanger. “I won’t need the hotel,” my Dad told her. “I’ll be staying with my friend.” He was given a blanket and a pillow. He slept that night in the hanger, on top of the casket.
When he got to the funeral home in El Centro, he asked the funeral director to open the casket so he could examine the body. The funeral director, a good man, said, “We don’t like to do that.” And Dad said, “I understand. And I have to see the body.” They opened it. The body had been jostled slightly by the transit. My Dad returned it to a more dignified posture. Because love does that.
The two Marys went to the tomb in that early morning darkness, Mary the mother of the disciple James, and Mary Magdalene who was herself one of the followers. They were there because they loved their friend. “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” (John 13. 1) His own love him back. He loves you to your end, too, and you’re here this morning because you love him back.
Darkness has a way of confusing your vision as you stare into it, and you can’t be sure what you’re staring at any more than the two Marys could be sure as they waited at the tomb for the breaking of a day they must have both yearned for and dreaded. Yearned for because of what they hoped it might bring; dreaded because of what they feared it wouldn’t bring.
None of the other disciples had come, the eleven of them that were left having stayed in the city, terrified that if they were identified there might be more crucifixions that week. They were none of them safe. What would have been the point of their coming anyway, they might well have thought. He was dead, the one they had looked to to save the world. “We had hoped,” one of them said on the road to Emmaus, “that he was the one to redeem Israel.” Just the pluperfect of despair: “had hoped.”
So only the two women had come to the garden tomb to be near the only thing that was left, the broken souvenir of his body.
You can usually tell God’s judgment in the Bible because he causes his enemies to die by their own weapon. You see this in 2 Samuel 23, where Benaiah with a club did combat with an Egyptian who had a spear in his hand. Benaiah snatched the spear out of the Egyptian’s hand and killed him with his own spear.
What we witnessed on Good Friday was the supreme example of what I like to call the Benaiah principle. At Golgotha, at the crucifixion of Jesus, Satan attacks the Lord’s anointed with his greatest weapon, death. Jesus absorbs that blow, and runs the bastard through with it, winning victory for all the people of God. He redeems all our days by this victory.
I conclude with these words from the sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. He writes:
“Mary Magdalene wants Jesus back as she remembers him; failing that, she wants his corpse in a definite place, she wants a grave she can tend. Jesus appears to her – in one of the most devastatingly moving moments of the whole Bible – and her first instinct is to think that yes, he is back as she remembers, yes, she has hold of him after all. He has not disappeared, he has not been taken away to an unknown destination.
But Jesus warns Mary Magdalene: he is being taken to a destination more unknown than she could imagine. He is going to the Father. From now on, there will be no truthful way of speaking or thinking about him except as the one who lives alongside the source of all things. These simple, abrupt words already contain all the mysteries we celebrate when we say the creeds, when we break the bread of the Holy Communion; they tell us that Jesus gives exactly what the Father gives – life, glory, forgiveness. Through death he has passed into the heart of reality; he has returned where he came from.”
In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
