Suggested Readings: Acts 10:34-43 or Isaiah 65:17-25, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, I Corinthians 15:19-26 or Acts 10:34-43, John 20:1-18 or Luke 24:1-12
Suggested Readings: Acts 10:34-43 or Isaiah 65:17-25, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, I Corinthians 15:19-26 or Acts 10:34-43, John 20:1-18 or Luke 24:1-12
Called to New Life
The Gospel of John’s Easter story is powerful and unsettling. In the first part of the story, Mary discovers the empty tomb and tells Peter and the beloved disciple the news. They run to the tomb to discover that it is empty. There is an unsettling energy to their discovery, as they don’t fully understand what they are experiencing. Even so, we are told, the beloved disciple “saw and believed.”
Mary is unsettled. Her grief feels overwhelming. She was distraught by Jesus’s death, and now is troubled, repeatedly indicating that she thinks his body has been taken from the tomb, and she doesn’t know where it is. When the risen Christ greets her as a gardener, she doesn’t recognize him. Only when he calls her by name, “Mary,” does she recognize him. When she does, the world feels settled again.
Yet Jesus won’t let her cling to a settled past or present. Instead, he points her to the future, and he gives her a vocation: Go. Tell. And so she goes and tells the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!”
Mary would have preferred a settled world, one in which Jesus just returns from the dead and then everything returns to normal. But it is not the reality of what is occurring, nor is it the vocation to which the risen Christ is calling her. He is calling her to new life, complete with a new vocation of witness.
Too often I live as if Easter is about Christ uncrucified, rather than Christ crucified and risen. I would like to pretend that nothing bad really happened. Christ’s dying and rising points me, and us, to a new and unsettling future. It is a beautiful future, bearing witness to the Easter Hope of Christ’s resurrection, a future of new life.
But because it is new, it is unsettling. Can I leave the shore and launch into the beautiful, deep, yet wilder seas? Even if I know that the Risen Christ is calling me there?
The Gospel calls us to Easter Hope, to a belief that, as an old Avery and Marsh song puts it:
Every morning is Easter morning from now on; every day is resurrection day, the past is over and gone.
Am I ready to live every day as resurrection day? Long after the Easter celebration, will each morning be, for you and me and the world, Easter Morning? I hope and pray so.
L. Gregory Jones
