Right In Front of Us

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Easter Sunday 2016; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  John 20:1-18

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

I get worried about Mary.

Every year as I read through the central part of this text, I find myself concerned for her mental state, worried because here she is, right there with Jesus, and she has absolutely no idea who it is she’s talking to.  She’s raced to the tomb, right after a remarkably traumatic couple of days, and she sees some pretty unsettling stuff.  There’s death, of course, as we read through John’s story, the chance to watch someone you love die slowly, which isn’t exactly the kind of thing to put you in your happy place.  Where she expected to see a tomb, there’s just an empty hole.  That’s going to mess with you.  And then there are there’s Jesus right in front of her...and she has no idea who he is.  

Not a clue.  Not even the faintest whisper of a clue.

And Jesus isn’t just someone who Mary knew faintly or briefly.  Mary was from Magdala, a healthy Galilean farming and fishing community just south of Capaernaum.  Meaning, “Magdalene” not her last name, any more than my last name is Annandale, or y’all all are all part of the Poolesville family.   Every single story of Jesus describes her as part of the inner circle of Jesus, a disciple who followed him just as significantly as the twelve apostles followed him.  We don’t know exactly how she met Jesus, other than that we’re told that there was some sort of healing involved.  She was right there with him, learning and journeying with him from Galilee down south to Jerusalem.

And yet she doesn’t recognize him.  There he is right behind her, saying, woman, why are you weeping, and she turns around and looks right through him.

This is usually a sign that something’s a little strange.  That, plus: there are angels, which is also a bit out of the ordinary.

It’s possible, because we hear it elsewhere in the New Testament, that Jesus is a master of disguise, wearing one of those Tom Cruise Mission Impossible masks, or one of those Tom Cruise Tropic Thunder body suits.  In Luke’s Gospel, there are stories of him walking with other disciples, and they don’t clue in to who he is, either.  Given that we hear elsewhere of Jesus moving effortlessly through angry murderous mobs, there’s probably a paper out there in an academic journal somewhere.  “The Semiotics of Stealth in the Story of Jesus: Implicit  Hensojutsu Disguise Technique in the Johannine Text.”    I’d write that myself, but it’s so been done.

However it worked, Mary just doesn’t see him, even though he’s talking to her, even though it’s him, right there.

It has to do, I think, with her expectations.  

Because nothing blinds us to possibilities like our assumptions, those parts of ourselves that we bring to every moment of our lives.  Every one of us carries with us a set of understandings that govern who we are and how we move in the world.  Sometimes, that’s a helpful thing.  Those expectations are formed and shaped when we are small, as our minds come to terms with the patterns of reality we encounter.  

We expect the ground to be there when we take our next step.  We expect that when we’re walking rhythmically down the beach on a lovely summer’s day, a giant sandworm isn’t going to erupt out of a dune and devour us.

Some things just don’t happen, and it’s perfectly normal for us to expect that they won’t, and live our lives as if they won’t.

Mary just doesn’t for a moment imagine that her beloved teacher and friend is anything other than dead and gone.  She’d been following him as a disciple, filled with hope for that fledgling movement, and the whole thing had just totally come apart.  That’s the reality she has accepted.  That’s the reality that is settled in her heart.

And so that’s the only thing that she can see.  Just a gardener.  It’s what she expected.  So it’s what she saw.

There’s a wonderful classic film about a gardener and expectations, one that’s worth a viewing if you’ve never had the chance to see it.  It’s the 1979 movie “Being There,” starring Peter Sellers as a man named Chance.  He’s a gardener, one who’s lived his whole life in a household in a wealthy DC neighborhood.  He’s ah, well, he’s what they used to call “simple”, in a Forrest Gump kind of way.  He’s never left the house.  He knows nothing of the world at all.

Chance the Gardener knows only gardening, and is completely helpless otherwise.   The only way he knows to interact with other human beings is to 1) talk about gardening and 2) reflect back to them whatever it is they’re saying, or, if that’s too confusing, just repeat lines or mimic actions he’s recently heard and seen on television.

But he’s pleasant and well dressed, reflective and seems thoughtful, and this is so rare in DC that every person who comes into encounter with him assumes that he must be strangely wise.

They see only what they imagine him to be, and not the man himself.  They project their expectations onto the blank slate he presents them, and come away marveling at what he presents them.

As a pastor, I really do appreciate this.

But what’s striking about this as a human tendency, it means that we are often utterly oblivious to both our neighbors and ourselves.

We don’t see the people standing right there in front of us.  Instead, we see the projections we cast onto them.  We see them as categories, or types, or as echoes of other human beings we’ve known.  We see another to blame, another who’s an object, another who’s They’re right there, but we don’t see them.

Even more significantly, we don’t see ourselves.  We see the person we imagine we are.  We see ourselves living and acting and being according to our self-understanding.  Which is fine, if that understanding is healthy and life-giving.

And here, the Easter moment manifests itself in a word, a single word.

Jesus speaks her name, and she suddenly sees herself...and him...in light of the reality right in front of her.  Not her expected reality of despair and failure and hopelessness, but a completely different path, one she was so convinced was real that she couldn’t see it even as it stood there right in front of her.

When we’ve fallen into patterns of life that we can’t seem to shake, when we find ourselves unable to break out, today reminds us that an entirely different reality sits there right in front of us.  

We have only to allow ourselves to see it, and see ourselves in the light of it.  

On this Easter morning, let that be so, for you and for me,

AMEN.