Sometimes we can’t see Jesus when he’s standing right in front of us.
Mary of Magdala goes to the tomb in the early morning and finds the stone rolled back from the tomb. She immediately runs to tell the others. Two disciples, Peter, and the one Jesus loved,
rush to the tomb. The one Jesus loved looks into the tomb but doesn’t enter. Peter steps in and sees the grave clothes, lying there where Jesus had lain. The men return to their home. Mary stays behind, weeping. She stoops to look into the tomb and sees two angels. They ask why she is weeping and she tells them what she believes—that Jesus’ body has been taken away. Then she sees Jesus. She doesn’t recognize him, the man whom she has loved and followed. She mistakes him for the gardener and assumes he has taken the body away. Then Jesus speaks, gently, tenderly. He calls her by name, and in that moment, she recognizes him.
Sometimes we can’t see Jesus when he’s standing right in front of us.
During the six weeks of Lent, our faith community has been thinking and praying and wondering about how we can see Jesus—how we can see the risen Christ—in the faces of the people we see every day and in the faces of people whom we’ll never meet. That’s what the promises of our baptismal covenant boil down to: seeing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in all the world and following his commandment to love one another as he loves us. In a few minutes, we will be making those promises again, and I think most of us will be glad that our vow includes the words, “with God’s help.” I know I will. I know that without God’s help, I don’t have any chance of keeping my promise.
The thing is, living into these promises doesn’t seem to be something that comes easily and naturally to us. If it did, we probably wouldn’t need to make vows about our behavior as followers of Christ, any more than we need to promise to continue breathing or to eat when we get hungry or to sleep when we get tired. But it doesn’t seem to work that way. Jesus said that he came so that we might have life and have it more abundantly. He never said it would be easy. Filled with blessings, yes. Easy, no. So why do we keep coming back? Why do we keep trying?
Perhaps we keep coming back and keep trying because there are moments when we understand that God sees the face of Christ the Beloved in each one of us. Perhaps we keep coming back and keep trying because Easter brings us into that moment of understanding.
Easter is our celebration of God’s grace right here in our midst. One more time, we come to this place to rejoice in our story as the people of God, and—one more time—God meets us here. That is the gift of this morning and the gift of our lives as Christians. We make our promises to God and ourselves, we fall short of our hopes and our promises, and still God comes to us—ready to forgive us, to comfort us and to strengthen us—ready to bring us into Christ’s resurrection—ready to bring us into new life—one more time.
When we consider God’s persistent, surprising, absurdly extravagant love for each of us, the question changes for me: How could we stay away?
Today we celebrate that we are an Easter people. We tell our story again and again, and we hear that Jesus died and Christ rose from the dead. We celebrate his resurrection every Sunday of our lives together. We remember the mystery of his death and resurrection in the prayer that joins us as the Body of Christ. We listen to our story more times than we can count—but even as we walk through the events of Holy Week, the washing of the feet and the institution of the Holy Eucharist, the betrayal and humiliation, the pain and desolation of the cross—even as we walk through those events, we can only be present as people of the resurrection, people who know the end of the story, people who cannot easily imagine a world before the good news of Christ’s resurrection.
Because we are Easter people, people of the resurrection, we gather this morning with a hope that the men and women who went to the tomb that long-ago morning could never have known. Our individual reasons for coming here this morning are as varied as we ourselves are. But at the core of our decision to be here is our hope—our yearning—our deep desire to touch the Holy and to be brought into new life. We come in hope because we have experienced the resurrection in our own lives or because we have seen the resurrection touch the lives of others. Each of us comes to this morning hoping for the resurrection—we come here hoping for a miracle.
We come here hoping for a miracle—and God’s grace meets us here. Once again—one more time—God meets us here in the resurrection, calling us into the miracle of new life. One more time—God sends Jesus to show us a new way.
Jesus is no longer in the tomb. Jesus, the one who came to tell us of God’s love for each of us -
Jesus, the one who loves us so much that he died rather than stop telling the truth of God’s love –
Jesus is no longer in the tomb and he calls us out of the tombs of our old lives. He goes ahead of us on the road and he waits for each of us as we come to this altar this morning. He waits to forgive us and to comfort us—one more time. He seeks us out—one more time. He calls us by name—one more time. And we turn to see him in the face of the person sitting next to us—in the faces of our neighbors—in the faces of the people whom we’ll never meet. For at least one brief moment, we can see the risen Christ standing right in front of us. And in that moment we can move into new life. In that moment, we can move into the wonder of God’s love, into the wonder of God’s new world, where peace and justice rain down on every person.
Alleluia! Christ is risen---the Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!