The One We Can’t See

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Easter Sunday 2014; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: John 20.1-18

We can miss things, miss them completely, and be staring right at them.

Mostly, it has to do with our being really small creatures.  Like this morning, if you got up early for the Easter Sunrise Service up there on Sugarloaf.  Four thirty in the Ey Em, if you’re coming from Annandale.  You get up, and you clamber out of bed, and you heave yourself into the shower, which you wish by some miracle would actually be a shower of coffee.  Yeah, you wouldn’t get clean, but you really wouldn’t care.

Then it’s out into the day, only it isn’t day, it’s far before morning, long before the earth rotates around and brings that star we orbit into view.  The day has not yet begun, and when you look up heavenward, you see that darking dome, sprinkled with points of light.

Though you’re looking right at it, you can’t quite process what it is you’re looking at.  It’s a funny thing, about the sky in the early morning.  Oh, sure, we know what we’re looking at, and we know all about the distances involved.  Neither our eyes or our minds can quite grasp what we’re staring into, this immensity.  We see twinkle twinkle little stars, our mind spooling out a two-dimensional dome above us.  That sense of volume, of depth, an impossible depth stretching out to the fastness, that’s lost to us.  We’re looking right at it, and we can’t recognize what we see.

It’s like when you look into the face of your newborn child, just hours old.  You see that little tiny baby in your hands, that scrunchy-faced bit of a thing, and you don’t have a clue who you’re looking at.  Oh, they may have a name, assuming you didn’t just get lost in the sea of options.  And they may look a little like someone, more like the mom or more like the dad.

But in your hands, you hold a life that has within it potentials that are completely beyond you.  Behind those little eyes, struggling to focus on a world that just suddenly got a whole lot larger and brighter, there rests the possibility of a person that you do not yet know.  You hear that little voice...well, not so little, when they want you to do something...and yet you can’t hear them singing.  You don’t hear the voice of the woman or the man they will become.

You can stare at them all day long, and often, you do.  You just sit there at the side of their crib, and look at that sleeping face...finally sleeping, thank you Jesus...and still not know the truth of who it is they will be.

That message is the same as the Easter message we’ve heard in John’s Gospel this morning.  The message is one of a powerful transformation, of a shift from brokenness to grace, from ruins to a new being.  It’s a hard thing to see and move towards, because we really struggle to see it.  It’s the kind of thing we can’t wrap our brains around, like the immensity of the heavens.  It’s the kind of thing that is completely beyond us, like the future that rests before that child in our arms.   

Even if it’s right there in front of us, we struggle to see it and understand what it means.

It’s like Mary Magdalene, standing there, weeping at the empty tomb.  She’d discovered it, on her way to mourn, and rushed back to tell everyone who cared about him that things were not copacetic back at the tomb.

Others come, and they look around, and they see nothing.  They leave, and she stays.

Then there are some random strangers, chilling in their white rhinestone leisure suits.  She’s otherwise occupied, and is unphased by their appearance, and so they ask her why she’s crying, and she tells them.  Not just of her loss, but that now, she doesn’t even have what she needs to properly mourn.  Not even a body.  

And then there’s a man with her, asking her why she’s crying.  She looks up at him, her vision clouded by her tears.

He asks the same question, and she asks if maybe, just maybe, he knows where the body is.  “Tell me, and I’ll take him away,” she says.

He speaks her name, and suddenly, she sees.  She knows who he is, and she knows who she now can be.

The heart of Easter is that story of resurrection, of having our eyes opened to a new way of living that transcends death itself.  It’s a story that first plays its way out by the empty tomb, in a garden, in a conversation between a woman and this strange man who seems like an unknown, and yet becomes known.

Where there had been the certainty of death and loss, Mary is opened to the possibility of something so wonderful that she could barely bring herself to see it.   

That, for us, is the heart of the the resurrection promise we proclaim this morning, as we bear witness that things can be made new.

Because as difficult as it might be for us to look up at the face of the heavens and see them for what they are, and as much as we might struggle to grasp just what we’re seeing when we look in the face of that little one, we struggle most mightily to grasp who it is we are to become.  That person that we are not yet, that self that we have not yet encountered, we have trouble perceiving that.

It’s us, of course, but we don’t yet know what that looks like.  It’s easy, in our yearning to make ourselves, to become just more of what we know.  We can allow ourselves to be trapped in the tombs of our making, dead to newness, dead to the promise that rests in all of us.

But on this day, we trust that our renewal in body and spirit comes from God, who we know through Christ and his teachings.  It comes from God’s own Son, living a life filled with God’s own Spirit.  In the recognition and in the joy felt by Mary, we have a taste of what that truly new life is like.

It’s not just a materially successful life, not as the world defines it.   It’s not wealth.  It’s not power.  It’s real newness.  It’s change that transforms our view of the past, alters our  actions in the present, and sets a bright hope to guide us towards our future

It’s a recommitment to newness of joy, and a renewal of our life, every day.  It is the hope of restoration, of a city that rises from the ruins in which the only tears are tears of joy.  It is the hope of transformation, of a stone rolled away and a life made new.

On this Easter morning, see this with new eyes.

On this Easter morning, live this joy with a new heart.

He is risen.  Alleluia, AMEN.