Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025

1 Corinthians 15:19-26
John 20:1-18

“I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

There are two things of which we can be sure about the events of that first day of the week. The first is that Jesus’ body was missing from the tomb. If the corpse had been quietly lying where Joseph of Arimathea had placed it, the Romans would have displayed it as soon as rumours began to spread that an executed man was appearing to his followers. In the Gospel according to Matthew there is a story of the priests bribing soldiers to say that Jesus’ disciples had stolen the body to explain its absence (Matthew 28:11-15) and another Jewish story had a gardener named Judas removing the body and later returning it. Whatever else we believe, we can be sure that the tomb was empty.

The other thing of which we can be certain is that it was women who first discovered that emptiness. No one at the time would have considered women to be reliable witnesses. When Paul lists the resurrection appearances to the church in Corinth, he does not even mention the women as among those to whom Jesus revealed himself, because their testimony is so irrelevant. (1 Corinthians 15:4-8) Yet every gospel says that the first people to find the tomb empty were the unimportant women, and in every list of these women the name of Mary Magdalene comes first. (Matthew 28:1, Mark 16:1, Luke 24:10)

The author of the Gospel according to John always prefers to portray Jesus interacting with individuals rather than with groups, and so in today’s telling Mary Magdalene is the only woman to come to the tomb. She does not come to anoint Jesus’ body; that was done before his death. (John 12:1-8) She is there simply to weep. When she sees that the stone has been rolled away from the front of the tomb she comes to the obvious conclusion: someone has stolen the body. Jesus has been murdered, and now she does not even have the comfort of grieving at his grave.

The other women have been removed from the scene so that readers can more closely identify with an individual protagonist; but now a character is added: ‘the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved.’ This ‘other disciple’ was the founder of the Johannine community, so naturally he gets a starring role. He beats Peter to the tomb, which led early Christians to believe Peter was an old man and the beloved disciple a young one (although the ninth-century Ishodad of Merv argued that the beloved disciple was faster than Peter because he was not married). Although the beloved disciple looks into the tomb he does not enter until after Peter has done so; Peter keeps his primacy. At first all they see is an empty tomb and presumably they, like Mary, believe that Jesus’ body has been maliciously stolen. But then the beloved disciple sees that the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head is not lying with the other linen wrappings but has been rolled up in a place by itself. Grave robbers would be unlikely to strip a body and leave the wrappings behind; no one removing the body for nefarious purposes would take the time to carefully roll up the head cloth. The beloved disciple believes that something has happened here that is beyond ordinary grave-robbing, but what that something is neither he nor Peter yet know. They return to their homes.

Mary Magdalene does not. She stays, weeping, outside the tomb. Her sorrow is so overwhelming that for her the two angels she now sees in the tomb are not signs of the miraculous but simply beings to whom she can continue to lament, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ She turns and sees Jesus, but again her sorrow is such that she does not recognise him. There have been commentators who have chastised Mary Magdalene for this, seeing her as a helpless woman who ‘foolishly misses her cues, only reaching her faith after  her sight has been bombarded with symbols of new life.’[1] Such commentators are, of course, both sexist and wrong. Mary’s tears may blind her to the symbolism of the angels, they may at first prevent her recognising Jesus, but they are tears of love and determination as well as of mourning. Unlike Peter and the beloved disciple, she has not returned to her home or given up her search for Jesus’ body. The author of the gospel is presenting her to us as an example to follow.

Now Jesus speaks her name and, as the lamb she is, Mary Magdalene recognises the voice of the Good Shepherd. (John 10:1-5) The author of the gospel tells us that she says, ‘Rabbouni!’ which in Hebrew means ‘teacher’. It may be bad manners to correct the author, but Mary is speaking in Aramaic and what she says is, ‘my teacher.’ In this moment of extreme surprise and deep joy, she returns to her mother tongue and addresses Jesus with love.

But Jesus is no longer simply her teacher. He has not been raised to continue his previous life; his resurrection is not like that of Lazarus, who would die again. (John 11:1-44) This is not a story of a reunion with a beloved thought lost. Mary Magdalene cannot hold on to Jesus. She must let him go, to ascend to the Father and send the Spirit. While Jesus was alive, he had a unique relationship with God as the Son of the Father. Now, through the Spirit, we can all become children of the Father. In the Prologue of this Gospel, we read that: ‘[The Word] came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.’ (John 1:11-13) Jesus is ‘ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’. The disciples that he called ‘friends’ on the last night before his death (John 15:12-15) he now calls ‘brothers’. All those who receive Jesus and believe in his name are now children of the Father and so his siblings.

I have a habit of listening to Jesus Christ Superstar over the Easter weekend. In the same way that Satan is the real hero of Paradise Lost, Judas is the real hero of that musical, voicing the arguments of the twentieth and twenty-first century West. As Jesus is being crucified Judas sings:

Every time I look at you, I don’t understand.
why you let the things you did get so out of hand.
You’d have managed better if you’d had it planned.
Why’d you choose such a backward time in such a strange land?
If you’d come today you could have reached a whole nation.
Israel in four BC had no mass communication.[2]

This hints at the ‘scandal of particularity’ – why did the eternal, transcendent, universal God become incarnate in an individual human man? – with the added question of why, if the eternal, transcendent, universal God was determined to become human, God became human in a Palestinian peasant, whose life and death mattered to so few. Of course, the very fact that a hit musical asks that question two thousand years after the events it portrays shows that media limitations were not fatal to God’s agenda. Jesus the man, Mary Magdalene’s beloved teacher, could engage with only a small number of people, he was restricted to his century and his country. Through the Holy Spirit, the resurrected Christ continues to engage with humanity throughout time and space, which is why we are here and what we are celebrating today.

Today’s reading ends on a note of joy, with Mary Magdalene announcing to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord;’ even if they do not yet believe her. We the readers feel that joy with her. But we are also in the position that Paul describes to the church in Corinth. We hope in Christ, that in time and in order God shall raise all the dead as God raised Jesus. Until then death is still with us, one of the two certainties in life. (Incidentally, I looked up where the saying ‘death and taxes’ comes from and apparently it was used in a letter by American statesman Benjamin Franklin, who wrote in 1789, ‘Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.’) Jesus has not yet ‘destroyed every ruler and every authority and power,’ and Mary Magdalene reminds us that grief in the face of death is proper, a measure of our love for the one who has died, or even a measure of our humanity, because to mourn is to be human. Dr Gabor Mate, who survived the Holocaust as a child and now specialises in child development and trauma, says to those of us whose hearts are breaking for Palestine:

The very fact that in the face of all the propaganda and all the withholding of truth so many people’s hearts are broken is a tribute to humanity, and if it’s your heart that is broken that’s a tribute to you. Even if you feel broken-hearted and helpless and hopeless and in despair, don’t let that get to you, because you have a larger goal here which is to contribute to the light and the truth in the world as best you see it, and that is a long- term struggle, it’s a long-term calling, and all of us can contribute to it.

In a broken world, joining Mary Magdalene and weeping outside the tombs is a sign of moral strength.

‘The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’ In the meantime, we have the example of Mary Magdalene to follow, her courage, her sorrow, her joy, and her faith. We, like her, have heard Jesus address us by name and so we, like her, have been called to announce to others what Jesus has said to us. Amen.

[1] Dorothy Lee, Flesh and Glory: Symbolism, Gender and Theology in the Gospel of John (2002) p. 221.

[2] ‘Superstar,’ Jesus Christ Superstar, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Murray Head, and Tim Rice (1970).