At the heart of the Jesus story, we find human relationships and transformation. Right from the very beginning, they wind their way through, and time and again we hear of lives being transformed and relationships being created and healed. This deeply human story is one we can grasp and make sense of and often it resonates with what we know and the lives we live. When we journey with Jesus in the gospels, we meet people we probably recognise and we hear wisdom about living life that speaks to our time.
The same is true for the Easter story. The story of betrayal and denial, the pain of human violence and suffering, the grief and fear and the deep longings that struggle to find any words will at times be familiar in our lives, and even the story of that first Easter Day, with its confusion and unsettledness, has a familiar tone to it.
This year we are reflecting on the story of Easter Day through the eyes of Mary Magdelene, a friend and a follower of Jesus. A faithful woman, who followed to the end and beyond. Not a prostitute, as tradition has wrongly told us. We find her story in John’s telling of the first Easter Day, and there we read of her deep distress in her words “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him”.
Mary is overwhelmed by panic, fear and confusion: what is going on? Perhaps this is a political act, the body taken by the state to stop his resting place from becoming a gathering point for his followers, or perhaps taken by the religious powers to frighten the followers away so they don’t continue what he started. What of course Mary hasn’t realised yet is that while she, and everyone else, has been sleeping, God has been at work. A key truth of our faith is that the other side of the Jesus story, running parallel to the very human one, is the mystery of what God does when we are not aware.
Mystery is hard. It’s not the easily grasped part of the story and it can unsettle us. So much so, that we don’t see what God is doing. As humans, we can’t know everything and this truth is hard to accept so we push against it. We work to make “explanations”, to tidy things up and put them in understandable “boxes”.
But God, who is at work in the graspable ‘humanness” of the Jesus story, is also a God of mystery – working when and where we do not know or understand. And for all that this is troubling, we do not need to be afraid. Instead, it is something we can treasure.
Let’s look through Mary’s eyes, which of course are filled with tears and so cannot really see. First of all, she sees strange messengers, who speak to her from within the grave, and who speak words that make absolutely no sense at all in her troubled mind. Then she meets a gardener, who knows who she is and who calls her to see what God has been doing. This God, who has been very understandable in so many ways, has been a work when we were sleeping! And this defies us, we can’t get our heads around it, and that’s OK! As long as we don’t dismiss it.
For this is truth: God is often doing things we do not understand. God is often doing things when we are sleeping, or not looking. While Mary had two very fretful nights of sleep and an awful day, God was at work, for God is always at work, and it is sometimes beyond us and that is ok. What it does mean for us is this: we must learn to believe and trust. We must learn to be open and ready, to respond in faith and step out, and not put God in a box! We must keep telling the story: to ourselves, to each other, the world; in our words and in our actions.
Easter Blessings!
Rev Anne
