EASTER SUNDAY

"I Have Seen the Lord"

by Jackie Logue,

Aspiriant Cooperative

"But Mary was standing outside the tomb weeping. Then as she wept, she stooped to look inside..."

John 20: 11-18

I imagine Mary this morning, her thoughts racing, her pulse elevating as she finds the stone rolled from the entrance of the tomb. Immediately, she reacts. In her panic, she decides she knows what the problem is: Someone has taken his body. And she’s going to do everything in her power to fix it.

Her anguish, which causes her to see the empty tomb as a problem that she needs to fix, threatens to block her receptivity of the gift of the Resurrection, her identity as well as her mission. If she stays within her grief and never empties herself of it, she will receive her identity from that grief and be forever know as the angry, bitter woman at the empty tomb wailing, “They have taken my Lord away!”

Fortunately, this is not how the story ends!

But how does Mary move out of this false responsibility? How does Mary come to RECEIVE her identity in the love of our Resurrected Lord and RESPOND in mission?

I think the answer is in her weeping. She empties her heart out to God. Can you imagine how each and every molecule in each and every tear carried with it the complicated contents of her heart? As she empties herself of anguish I imagine that the Holy Spirit infuses her soul with an awareness of her identity, the one she received the day she first turned to the Lord. She belongs to Jesus. She is His. As this awareness breaks through the waves of grief, freedom returns.

Then, with the courage of a bride in search of her bridegroom, she moves into the dark tomb where she expects to have her suspicions confirmed. He is gone. But it is precisely in what she thinks will be an abyss of loneliness that she discovers that she is not alone. Exactly where she expects to find nothing she finds everything. All her assumptions are up-ended. She receives the gift of the Resurrection, and in it, her deepened call to mission, personally and particularly. It all happens there in the darkness of the grave in the presence of her beloved Jesus.

Jesus, in my anguish I have no capacity for imagining the awe of your plan, to dispel all evil, wash guilt away, restore lost innocence, and bring mourners joy. But when you speak my name, my heart harkens back to the first time I heard your voice and received my identity as your bride. I remember the love you stirred in me back then, and in gratitude, I am filled with desire to receive more of you, to RECEIVE my identity once again and RESPOND in mission as Mary did.

“Go to the brothers, Mary. Tell them I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and to your God.” With her identity deepened and mission reiterated, her anguish transformed, she runs to her brothers and sisters saying more compellingly than ever, “I have seen the Lord!”

EASTER SUNDAY