"Seeing More Than Just the Gardner"
Read:
John 20:1-18
There
are some things that you have to do alone. No one else can do them
for you.
Your
birth is your own.
You
must breathe for yourself, eat for yourself, and sleep for yourself.
And, in all honesty, one must die an earthly death for themselves. If
you have faith or not – well, you have to answer that for yourself,
too.
Consider,
then, the individual and somewhat solitary encounters with the
Resurrection that the Gospel of John records. This Gospel tells us
that Mary came to the tomb alone. In fact, she came to the tomb
while it was still dark. Finding the stone rolled back and the grave
empty, she ran to tell the others. Peter and the "Beloved
Disciple" started running together, but they reached the tomb
separately.
Alone
each one looked at the grave. Each one entered alone – saw alone –
believed alone.
Mary
stayed at the empty tomb and heard with her own ears the words,
"Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?" Thinking
that it was only the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have
carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take
him away." Then Jesus called her by name: "Mary," he
said.
Sometimes
I wish that the Lord would call me by name on Easter morning. And so
do many others. The woman who is a widow, who weeps alone; the one
who is in prison alone; the one who bears sickness alone; the orphan
who is left alone; the many "Thomas' " who doubt alone.
Today
we celebrate new life: Especially life that cannot be shut up in a
tomb. Today we celebrate together with those like us who find the
merger in their own existence with the living Lord. Today we begin a
new story – our story.
Frederick
Buechner writes:
"It is precisely at such times as this that Jesus is apt to come, into the midst of life at its most real and inescapable time: At suppertime, or walking along a road. This is the element that all the stories about Christ's return to life have in common. Mary waiting at the empty tomb and suddenly turning around to see somebody standing there –someone she thought at first was the gardener.He never approached from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of real people, in the midst of real life and the questions that real life asks. Sacred moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes, or listen with more than our ears, reveals only the gardener."
The
whole church of Christ is singing of new life on Easter. So in the
midst of Easter morning, we too, look and expect to see the miracle
of the living Lord.
Today
we join our voices and our hearts and celebrate the reality that we,
too, have seen the Lord!
Rev.
Robert D. Wright
