Outside Looking In

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April 5, 2015 - Easter Sunday

John 20:1-18

¹Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. ²So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” ³Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. ⁴The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. ⁵He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in.

⁶Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, ⁷and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. ⁸Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; ⁹for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. ¹⁰Then the disciples returned to their homes.

¹¹But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; ¹²and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. ¹³They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” ¹⁴When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. ¹⁵Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” ¹⁶Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). ¹⁷Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” ¹⁸Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

Sermon: “Outside Looking In”

Do you know what it’s like to be an outsider? 

I do.  I was labeled an outsider my whole life – and somehow, even more after my death.

You know me as Mary Magdalene, the woman often judged by history as an adulteress or a prostitute.  I was neither. 

But I was an outsider.  You see, from a young age, I had been what we called in my time “possessed by evil spirits.”  In your time, you might call this mental illness.

I’ve noticed how those affected by mental disorders are still treated as outsiders.  If someone has an obvious illness, like cancer or diabetes or heart disease, people rally around them to show support.  Not so for people like me.  I was kept an outsider because I wasn’t quite like everyone else. 

But then someone came along who changed all that.  You know his name, too.  Jesus, whom we called Christ.  He brought me healing – what we called casting out demons in my time, but what you might call therapy in your time.  He also brought me the one thing I never expected.  He brought me community, and I didn’t feel like an outsider anymore.  I, Mary from Magdala, belonged.

Now, I know you’re wondering, so let me set the record straight – this doesn’t mean Jesus and I were an item!  (No matter what Dan Brown says.)  A single woman is somehow threatening, and so people had to invent a romance between Jesus and me.  They had to twist our story until I was depicted as a red-headed lovesick puppy following Jesus around.  Love comes in many forms.  Just because my love for him wasn’t romantic didn’t mean it was somehow less than important.

And Jesus loved me just as I was, outsider and all.  He didn’t care if being associated with me made him an outsider, too.  In fact, he seemed to be drawn to us outsiders (something the insiders, namely the religious and political leaders, did not look too kindly on).

I never left his side.  When others abandoned him at the sight of death, I didn’t.  I stayed with him at that cross the insiders put him on.  I watched as he took his last, weary breath.  I was there when his body was taken off of that cross and, though it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I, along with Jesus’ mother Mary and others, prepared his lifeless body for burial in the Jewish custom. 

He had told us he would rise again in three days, but that might as well have been an eternity away when I was in that moment of grief that made every single breath painful.  What would happen now?  Would those demons he had so compassionately casted out return to haunt me now that he was gone?  Would I ever find the sort of love I found in his friendship?  Would I be an outsider forever?  Could God really be dead?

I’m not sure what it was that led me to go to the tomb that dark morning on the third day.  Maybe it was that I felt closer to Jesus being near his body, even as I knew he wasn’t really there.  Maybe it was that I didn’t have anywhere else to go.  And maybe, somewhere buried deep within all of my sorrow and loneliness, there was a flicker of hope that he was telling the truth, that he would live again.  Ah yes, that absurd ability to hope in the face of despair might just be the greatest gift God has given us human beings.

As I got there, I immediately knew something was wrong.  The large stone door to the tomb had been rolled away.  But my first thought was not resurrection.   It was robbery!  I ran and brought some of the men who also followed Jesus to help.  When they got to the tomb, they immediately went inside.  They saw the empty grave, the empty grave clothes.  They didn’t really know what to make of it…so they left, and went home.

But I stayed outside the tomb, weeping.  I am used to being an outsider, remember.  Finally, though, curiosity got the better of me, and I looked inside.  When I saw two angels, I worried that it was all a figment of my weary, unwell mind.  But then they spoke, “Woman, why are you weeping?”

What a stupid question to ask!  Why was I weeping?  How could I not be?  My best friend had died -- no, not just died, but been murdered by the state.  And people who I thought were my friends – his other followers – had just left me all by myself at that dark tomb, not caring how dangerous that was for a woman in that time.  I was desperately, completely alone, the kind of loneliness that fills every part of you, until you feel invisible, an outsider in a world of insiders. 

I didn’t much feel like explaining all that was behind my tears, so I settled for, “They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where he is!”  Then I got a prickly feeling on the back of my neck that someone else was there.  I turned around and saw who I thought was the gardener.  Grief does funny things to a person.

That gardener asked me the same question, “Woman, why are you weeping?”  My sorrow turned to anger and suspicion.  “If you’ve taken him,” I yelled, “tell me where he is!”  That gardener just looked sad to see me in such a state. 

And then he said one word, the most beautiful word a person will ever hear, the first word we hear at birth and the last at death.  He said my name.  “Mary.”  Suddenly I realized that it was Jesus!  He was alive!  He survived!   I knew then that I could survive, too.  I hugged him and he told me to go and tell others.  I ran and ran, telling all who would listen, “I have seen the Lord!”

I, Mary Magdalene, am still telling that story – even after my death.  Because I believe it matters that Jesus rose from the dead.  But, just as importantly, I believe it also matters that I – an outsider – saw him first.  If he’d appeared first to someone more powerful, perhaps people would have believed his story immediately.  I’m certain many didn’t accept the resurrection because it was me who told them about it. 

But, you see, Jesus never cared much for fame.  He’d never have been my friend if he did!  He cared about bringing new life to those who most needed it – freeing outsiders from the prisons society kept us in.

And that’s what still matters to him.  My friend and Lord wasn’t raised from the dead to prove his power or divinity or glory.  The Son of God doesn’t have anything to prove!  He was raised from the dead to raise us all up from the dead with him.  To bring new life, to call us by name and not just by the labels people place upon us. 

In the end, I honestly don’t much care that history has labeled me as a prostitute, a sinner and an outsider.  But I do care that the church gets it right and realizes that Jesus himself was an outsider.  He associated with struggling people like me, breaking every barrier down, even the barrier between life and death itself. 

Because that’s what resurrection does.  That’s what Easter means – all those seemingly unmovable stones we’ve so carefully placed between the insiders and outsiders might as well be pebbles to skip along the seashore.  They have no power to divide.

 

All of you who feel like outsiders because of illnesses you keep hidden, or doubts you never voice, or vulnerability you never show – Jesus rose for you.  And he is still is in your midst, casting out the demons of isolation and judgment and fear.

And all of you who feel like insiders who hold the keys of heaven in your hands and whose lives are more certainty than doubt, oh Jesus rose for you, too.  He rose to show the insiders that the only “inside” you need concern yourself with is your own heart. 

He rose for us all, to turn this world inside-out, until we stop obsessing over labels and categories and instead call one another by name, forming a community of compassion where every person who encounters us says to anyone who will listen, as I have done, “I have seen the Lord!”  Alleluia!  Amen.