Easter Sunday March 27, 2005

In some ways the story of Easter, the story of the Christian faith is a story of mistaken identity.

As I have read over the gospel reading for today, over the past few weeks, I have been drawn again and again to that encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, where Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener.

How could this happen? She knew him very well. It doesn’t say he was wearing a disguise. No big sun hat or carrying a hoe.

It must have been the context, I think. She didn’t expect to see Jesus, and so she didn’t.

We usually see what we expect to see. Information comes in… sights, sounds, whatever. But then it gets sorted and placed into pre-existing patterns that we already have in mind. When something doesn’t fit the pattern it often just gets ignored or it isn’t noticed at all. Sometimes it gets misperceived, and filed as something else. (That’s how I get away with saying some of the things I say in my sermons!) In this case Mary didn’t expect to see Jesus, so she saw the gardener instead.

It’s like the crowds that lined the road to Jerusalem that we read about last week, who saw Jesus as the fulfillment of their hopes and expectations, a conqueror to restore the throne of David, so they missed the real Jesus. They thought he was bringing heaven on earth, when what he was really about was bringing earth into heaven.

When Mary initially found the empty tomb her immediate conclusion was that someone had taken the body. In spite of Jesus’ prior talk about resurrection, the reality of it was outside of her field of vision, outside her frame of reference.

Beyond blindness and misperception, the encounter with the unexpected can also lead to fear. Mary initially runs away from the empty tomb, just as the disciples had fled the garden and wouldn’t go near the cross.

Last week, at the end of the Passion Gospel, Matthew tells about how the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate and asked that Jesus’ tomb be sealed and guarded so that nothing unexpected could take place. And Pilate says, "Go make it as secure as you can."…As secure as you can.

Our sense of security is at stake in seeing things go as we expect them to go. The violation of that makes us feel insecure.

And we’ll protect that security, even if it involves sealing up life in a tomb…placing a stone in one form or another…setting a guard. That’s what repression is about, political repression socially, or emotional repression individually.

What’s needed of course, is a change in perspective, an opening of the context, "thinking outside of the box", as they say.

I’ve told the story associated with another Gospel reading about the mother of a friend of mine who grew up in the Arizona desert, the only daughter of two working parents, and, thus, alone most of the time. She was a very bright little girl.

Her grandmother had given her a Bible and she read in it that if you had faith only so much as a mustard seed (which is to say, very little faith) that you could move mountains. So she looked at a distant mountain, willed it to move…but it didn’t move.

She shut her eyes and visualized it moving, thinking it was moving. And then she opened her eyes…but it hadn’t moved.

So, figuring she just needed a little more faith she tried one last time, really believing, not just wishing, believing that the mountain had moved. Then she opened her eyes, but the mountain hadn’t moved.

This was a very disconcerting crisis of faith, and it sent her into deep thought. She bowed her head and walked away down the road out into the desert, down a dry wash. Just walking and thinking about faith, thinking about God, thinking about her grandmother, and reassessing everything.

Then she looked up and to her amazement what she saw was different. The mountain had moved. It wasn’t right in front of her any more, but over to the side. And, where before she had only been able to see the rocky side of the mountain, now she could see around the corner to the forested side.

Then she realized that it wasn’t the mountain that had moved. In her walking she had moved. And that had changed her perspective on everything.

And that was how God could move mountains.

We can’t fit the resurrection into our way of understanding things. As I point out in the article I’ve written for the upcoming April newsletter, we can’t fit eternity into time.

We can’t let God into our life. But in the life of Jesus we are shown a way into the life of God.

Now, it’s important to notice that this change in perspective in the Gospel today didn’t just happen because Mary changed her mind. Jesus calls her, calls her by name, calls her out of their intimate relationship. And it is from within that relationship that she’s able to see things in a new way.

And notice, too, that in John’s gospel it’s always "the disciple whom Jesus loved" who sees things first, believes things first. Faith follows love.

In the story we’ll hear next week, about Thomas touching the risen body…in the story for the week after that, of the disciples and Jesus at the Emmaus inn…in the story of the risen Lord sharing breakfast with Peter on the beach telling him to feed his sheep, it’s never just a question of "thinking" about God, or doing this or that ritual or just being good. It’s always in an openness to relationship that true faith finally comes.

"Mary"…"Rabuoni"…"My teacher"…Now I see. Something, someone, called my friend’s mother to look up. She did. She responded.

I think all that means, in part, that we need to be open to the possibility of mistaken identity. Open to the possibility that our ideas about Jesus, our ideas about God, our ideas about reality, may be in part based on truth, but in part based upon pre-existing patterns that we project onto Jesus, project onto God, project onto reality. And these patterns most certainly have blind spots. They may very well be mistaken, may say more about us than they say about Jesus, or God, or ultimate reality.

We need to be open to change, and willing to face the fear, the insecurity, and the vulnerability that such openness and change always brings.

And, as I said last week, we may need to empty ourselves as Jesus emptied himself… empty ourselves of what is filling us up now, in order to have room for what God wants to give us.

We need to be ready to respond when we are called. We need to be response-able.

Mostly we need love. We need to be ready to love, and even more, we need to be open to receive love. And sometimes that’s the hardest part, receiving love, believing that the God of the whole universe loves us particularly.

But see, this mistaken identity thing cuts two ways.

Not only are we often mistaken about who Jesus is, or who God is, or what reality is. We are just as mistaken about who we are as well…and just as blind to the unexpected in ourselves…and just as afraid to encounter the truth.

But in the same relationship, the same connection where Mary realizes who Jesus is, she also becomes aware, for the fits time in her life most probably of who she really is… a child of God, a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven….and so are you.

"You have died," Paul says, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

Thanks be to God.