Wednesday, April 3, 2024 – Easter: Jesus asks! Tough Questions for a Resurrection Faith

Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” 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.” (John 20: 15, New Revised standard Version)

               It had been a very long, hard, trying, upsetting, mournful weekend for people like Mary, those who had followed Jesus, right up his crucifixion. Nothing much else could go wrong.  Yet now, to Mary’s dismay, the tomb is empty, Jesus’ body not there, no clue as to what had transpired. For Mary, it is the last straw to a miserable experience.  She is already broken-hearted and now she cannot even pay her last respects to her friend and teacher. She does what many of us might do in the face of great sorrow – she breaks into tears. Under the circumstances, it is understandable, reasonable, necessary, unsurprising.

                Then a voice from behind her speaks to her and asks, “Why are you weeping?”

                What causes us to cry out in hurt, sorrow, loss, bereavement?  Do we weep in the face of war, brutality, children’s deaths, crimes against humanity itself?  Do we weep for lost opportunities, broken relationships, personal failures, moral failures, or broken promises? Do we weep because of illnesses and diseases, infirmities, frailties of mind, body and spirit? Do we weep for those we have lost but can never forget? Why are you weeping?

                Some might ask, in light of what we see and read on the news, why are you not weeping?

                Like Mary, in the face of grief and sorrow, disappointment and disillusionment, we look for the logical reasons, the simple explanations, the obvious choices to justify our tears. The voice belongs to a mere gardener, Mary assumes, and he has taken the body away. “Let the dead bury their own dead,” Jesus once said. Mary is dead in spirit and she wishes to deal with Jesus’ death in her own way. As some say, no one has ever seen a dead person come to life. Mary had no illusions that this time was any thing different.

                But it was different. Radically different. Transformatively different. “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’” (20:16)

                He called her by name and her world was turned inside out and upside down. Previously, Jesus had made the commitment, “So you have pain now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” (John 16:22) Mary was the first to experience the total reversal of loss and sorrow which the Resurrection brings to us. “Your pain will turn to joy.” (16:20)

                Because Jesus knows each of us, by name, then he also knows what makes us weep, what makes us sad, what causes our griefs. But because he knows each of us by name, he interacts with our lives and lifts - raises us - out of our despair and despondency. The Risen Lord offers us an alternative to sorrow. The Risen Jesus offers us a life-line tethered to hope and God’s compassionate, comforting Love. The Risen Christ reveals himself as One wo conquers even death on a cross and thereby frees us all from deadly sorrow and suffering.

                Jesus gives us a foretaste of the future in which there will be no more weeping, no more tears.

                “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?...  No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8: 35 -39)

             I come to the garden alone,
            While the dew is still on the roses;
            And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
            The Son of God discloses.

            And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
            And He tells me I am His own,
            And the joy we share as we tarry there,
            None other has ever known. (C. Austin Miles)

 Dale