John 20:1-18
Woman, why are you weeping, the angels ask Mary. Woman, why are you weeping, Jesus asks Mary.
Woman, why are you weeping we might ask Mary – right after we ask the people who create the lectionary cycle why they chose for Easter Sunday a text with Mary weeping – as it stands in such conspicuous counterpoint to the joy and delight we expect in our celebrations of this day – why is she weeping – why isn’t she amazed like the disciples we heard about last night in Luke’s gospel, why isn’t she unambiguously joyous – as we are – when we proclaim that Christ is risen, he is risen indeed, Alleluia!
This weekend I’ve hosted the monastery’s Holy Week Silent Retreat for 18 people who, after the Maundy Thursday worship entered and kept silence until just before the vigil last night. Each morning, we spent some time in contemplation of the scriptures for the day or of related spiritual readings or poetry – and we’d also examine the events of the day – Jesus’ death by crucifixion on Friday, yesterday’s liminal space between crucifixion and resurrection – a solemn time touched with the grief and mourning that attends the death of someone beloved.
A retreat during these days of Holy Week, and especially a silent one, encourages a sometimes almost uncomfortably sustained attention to the details of the passion story, the images it conjures, and the emotions it stirs, an almost uncomfortable immersion in the meaning – or meanings – of it all.
From within this kind of deep time perspective, I was particularly struck this year by the physicality of the passion story – bodies bending, feet being washed with intimate touch, a betrayal with a kiss, the sheer brutality of the beating of Jesus’ body, the pounding of nails into his flesh, the agonized wails of a mother and friends who witness a gruesome and gruesomely slow death … and then there were so many of your bending bodies, your gestures of devotion in washing each other’s feet, your gestures of your devotion to the cross, your touches and kisses.
For me, how the retreat experience sustained my attention to the events of the days also drew me in to a more deeply empathetic imagining – and again, uncomfortably sustained – there were no disconnects from the experience like turning on the radio in the car on the way home from worship, no stopping at the grocery store, no start to spring cleaning or getting ready for company coming for Easter dinner, no settling in to watch the season finale of Matlock. My thoughts and imaginings were kept trained on what it must have been like for Jesus, for his family and friends in real time.
Yesterday, Holy Saturday, asked of us to not leap too quickly to the Easter proclamation – but rather to stay with how Mary and Peter, John and the others did not know Jesus would be resurrected, that they woke to a day not unlike a day many of us have wakened to at some point in our lives – that first day of a life changed, that first day of a life that would be lived out from then on without a beloved one present – a life to be lived with a new emptiness. Mary and Peter, John and the others did not have the knowledge that you and I have, being as we are on this side of the resurrection.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that in having experienced the retreat’s deep time, contemplating and imagining what those days would have been like for Jesus and his first followers in real time, I realize that it should be no surprise at all that Mary would be weeping.
In real time, she certainly would not yet have even begun to recover from the trauma of Jesus’ death and the manner of that death – she was likely still in some kind of state of shock. In real time, she would have been in a painful liminal space, wondering, mystified at how life was going to go on for her without Jesus; Mary would have still been overcome and overwrought with the pain of fresh grief. When she comes to Jesus’ burial place, surely we can appreciate her need to see in order to believe – not the resurrection – but the death, to help herself believe that the unbelievable was in fact true, to force herself to reckon with the reality of his death, a reality that felt beyond her reckoning. Surely it is not beyond us to imagine her ache to be close to him still, to return to the place where he is – even if it is just to be close to his body. And surely it is not beyond us to imagine just how awful it would be to discover his body missing. Do we really think she could have simply toggled a switch on her emotions from excruciating grief to exuberant joy? Really, can we?
I wonder how many of us have come here today – weeping ourselves, wondering where is the body of Christ, feeling the condition of our inner lives in conspicuous counterpoint to the joyous acclamations of today’s texts and prayers and songs.
Yesterday, in the “in-between-ness” of Holy Saturday, the Holy Week retreatants considered some words from Rainer Maria Rilke – and I want to share them today, because I think they illuminate something very profound in this particular Easter gospel from John – how there is good news here for us, how a joyous Easter proclamation is deeply true in Mary’s weeping – and in our own.
Rilke wrote:
“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, it is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”
Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus. Like every single post-resurrection appearance in the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, the resurrected Jesus is not recognized by those who were closest to him. It is actually quite easy for us to miss resurrections in our own lives if we expect them to look like something we’ve known, something familiar.
Jesus asks Mary not to touch him, not to cling to him. There is probably something important there for us to sit with – that we not cling to what we’ve known, not cling to what has been familiar to us – that in welcoming resurrection in our lives we will have to stop clinging to forms and expressions, relationships and ways of life that are usual and safe. This can – and will – make us weep.
In real time, in the time in which you and I really live, resurrection is the guest who has already entered our houses, has entered our hearts, has entered our bloodstreams. In all those moments where something we trusted and were used has been taken away, in all those moments where we stood – maybe where we stand – in the midst of transitions where we feel we cannot remain standing – the spirit of the resurrected Christ has already entered. Because we wonder and weep, do not for a minute believe that nothing has happened. The resurrected Christ is always unrecognizable to us at first – but the love of Jesus the Christ for us has entered, will transform us and be transformed in us – individually and collectively – even if it is long before we see or feel it happen. This is how resurrection happens in real time. We can pray to make it our own – and we can rejoice that this is our fate.