For Whom Are You Looking?, Rock Springs, WY Easter Sunday, April 24,2011

“For whom are you looking?”
By Rev Steven R Mitchell
First Congregational UCC, Rock Springs, WY 4/24/2011
Based on John 20:1-18 and Acts 10:34-43

In the movie “Torch Song Trilogy”, Arnold the son of a grieving mother who had just lost her husband, was asking his mother what she thought she would do now that “dad” was dead? Her response was, “I guess I’ll move to Florida.” “Florida? What for ma, you don’t have anyone down there, Phil (the other son) and I live here in New York. Why would you want to move down there?” “When your great-grandfather died, your great-grandmother mother moved to Florida, when my father died, my mother moved down to Florida, now that your father is dead, I’ll move to Florida. That’s what we do, we move to Florida!” Arnold responded with, “But mom, what do you want to do?” She quickly responded by saying, “I want to die, but until then, I’ll move to Florida.”
That scene was dealing with rituals. And rituals are great things, they help us get through periods of our lives, that otherwise would be so difficult that we would not be able to navigate through. The most dramatic being, when we suffer a sever loss in our life. When we lose someone very dear to us to death, we go into a period of shock, as a defense so as to not load our feelings with more grief than we can bare. It’s as if we have an internal breaker box, that when too much pain comes, the breaker trips, shutting down our emotions. But it isn’t only our emotions that shut down. Our ability to reason, to make decisions, even to recall simple events that are only an hour old, we can also become paralyzed; our whole system seems to shut down, to where only the bare minimal in activity seems to be allowed to function.
I am sure as we think about this morning’s reading, many of us here can put ourselves in-part, into the shoes of Mary and the disciples. For they were having to cope with this terrible lose, with the execution of the man they had looked to as their “rabbouni”, their “teacher”, the one that Peter had declared as “Messiah”! They surely were operating under a great deal of shock, as they start to deal with the death of their beloved, Jesus. They not only were dealing with his death, but also must have been concerned about their own safety, wondering if they too would be picked up by the authorities.
We have this amazingly beautiful story of Mary going to the place where they had laid Jesus, temporarily during the Sabbath, and finding that the tomb had been opened and Jesus’ body wasn’t where they had left him. But amid all of the fear, doubt, and confusion, we see where Jesus appears to her and speaks with her. The story doesn’t go into the technical details of “how” Jesus” was raised, but rather the story focuses on how Mary experienced “Jesus’ resurrection!”
The resurrection story is an amazing story on many different levels. First off and most importantly, the story talks about an event that goes beyond all logical and physical reasoning. When a person dies, the body doesn’t come back to life, at least not normally. This event, is telling us that something supernatural has occurred, and that this event has ongoing implications for the world.
Another very important part of this story, deals with who Jesus is appearing to, who He is having conversation with, and who has been entrusted in sharing with the world, this most important news! In a world where men where the shakers and movers, here we see God once more picking the lowly, in this case a woman named Mary, to become the new bearer of the “Good News” that God has not died but yet still lives!
This particular account of the resurrection story has an intriguing question being posed to Mary, thus being posed to us by Jesus when he asked Mary, “For whom are you looking?” Or it could be said in another way, “What are you looking for, Mary?” “What are you doing here? What do you expect to find?”
When we come to church; when we come to worship, be it on Easter Sunday morning, or Christmas Eve, or any Sunday of the month for that matter, what is it that we are looking for? Whom do we seek? What are we hoping to find? Do we come to worship out of tradition? Do we move to Florida, because that’s what others before us have done? Or, this is what we do on Easter Sunday, we come to church. Or our families have always come to church on Sunday and that’s what we do, because, it is programmed into our DNA, to come to church on Sunday? But when you get here, what do you expect to happen? Do you expect to find God here? Are you suppose to feel better for coming to church? Are you shocked when you come and do not find Jesus here? Or do you see only an empty tomb?
Do you ask yourself, “Am I the empty tomb?” Do I ever think that God has died within my own life, and I’m hoping beyond all hope that God is truly alive, living in a church, and that possibly by coming before The Cross, I will find God? Will I experience a “resurrection” within this empty tomb? You see, it isn’t a matter of whether Jesus raised from the grave as the scriptures describe, but rather, how we personally encounter Jesus.
Is Jesus alive within us, this morning? Have we this personal encounter with Jesus, as Mary had a personal encounter with Jesus there at the tomb? Jesus didn’t appear to Peter or John when they came running and found that the body of Jesus wasn’t where they had left him. Jesus didn’t speak to them at the empty tomb; they left, not having this experience that Mary ended up having, at least not at that point, for as we continue to read on, we know that Jesus did come to the other disciples later on.
Why did Jesus appear to Mary and not to the two disciples who had come to investigate the report from Mary about the empty tomb? Possibly it was because when John saw the wrappings of the burial cloths neatly placed in the tomb; he remembered what Jesus had been telling them about his death and would arise from death into eternal life. Maybe it was because Mary was needing personal comforting to ease her anxieties and soften her grief that Jesus appeared to her. For when Jesus first appeared to her, she didn’t recognize that it was He. For me, the lesson that I see in this part of the narrative, is that we encounter Jesus in many different ways, and often, we do not immediately recognize Jesus being with us, but that it can come over time.
This morning as we come to Christ’s table, we celebrate the “empty tomb”! We celebrate the story of “resurrection”. We do experience resurrection daily in our lives, but like Mary, we might not recognize it immediately, but in time, as we are able to comprehend the story, begin to understand it. God’s love for us is so great, that life renews itself, even during times when we cannot see it! I ask the question that Jesus asked, “For whom are you looking?” I think we are here today, looking to understand that death has no victory over us, but rather, life is eternal. This is the message of the “empty tomb”, God loves his creation so much that death has no lasting sting, but through “resurrection”, life has victory! Amen