St Luke’s, Havelock North – Easter Day 2008 - Sermon

^“17Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me”

I want to talk for a moment about death. I know it’s not what we usually talk about at Easter, I know it’s not what you probably want to talk about at Easter, but I want to say that it’s precisely what we should talk about at Easter because when it comes right down to it death lies at the very heart of everything Easter is and represents.

Forget for a moment the religious aspects of Easter – and it’s possibly the first time you’ve heard that said in church. Where though do we think all the Easter Eggs and chocolate bunnies come from? Mostly The Warehouse, I know, but originally they were symbols of pagan fertility rituals – rituals focused on the coming of new life, on Spring, which is of course what the other side of the world is welcoming right now.

That focus fits in with our focus too of course. Resurrection and new life a fairly synonymous with one another, but here’s the simple fact – Easter Day will always follow Good Friday. You just can’t have the resurrection without the crucifixion and you can only get new life after something dies.

There would be no Easter without death.

We don’t really want to think about though do we? Someone asked me after last Sunday’s service why we read the story of Jesus’ death on Palm Sunday and then again on Good Friday. I’m a good Anglican so I just told her it was a tradition, but I didn’t explain why it’s a tradition, which is because many, many years ago it was realised that the great majority of people don’t attend the Good Friday service, or any of the other Holy Week services. For those people their Easter went straight from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem to the empty tomb, ignoring everything in between. So we read The Passion on Palm Sunday just to ensure that everyone understands that death is an integral part of this story, and death changes everything.

That’s the harsh reality Mary Magdalene to come to terms with in our Easter gospel reading. We don’t know precisely what her relationship was with Jesus, although it’s highly unlikely they were married, but she may well have been a disciple. This isn’t the time, but we could well ask why it is that all four gospels tell us the first people to see the risen Christ were women? Leaving that to one side though, we know Jesus and Mary were close, so naturally Mary is devastated by his death, just as we all are when we lose someone we’re close to.

So Mary goes to the tomb to grieve, and he’s gone. She panics because she needs a body, she needs something she can cling to, something concrete to focus her grief on, and it’s gone. Then later Jesus appears and speaks her name and suddenly the sun begins to shine and she thinks, “he’s back!” She doesn’t know how or why she just knows it is and now everything can go back to the way it was, in the good old days, before the Garden and the trial and the cross and the tomb, before the drums in church and the removal of the pews, things can go back to the way they were, the way they should be.

And Jesus said to her, “do not hold on to me.”

I think another translation of that verse captures the tone of the scene far better, with Jesus saying ‘do not cling to me’. It’s a natural human desire to hold on to, to cling to, the past. We want things to be the way they were when we were happy, when things were going well, but what Mary had to discover was that if she wanted to grasp the risen Christ she had to first let go of the crucified Jesus.

Things are not as they were.

Why didn’t she instantly recognise Jesus when he appeared? In almost all the post-resurrection stories Jesus’ closest friends fail to recognise him at first, why is that? Perhaps because new life can never be the same as the old? Resurrection changes things, forever.

This and every Easter is an invitation to discover new life. All of us I’m sure have experienced our own resurrections, some of them small, some of them huge, and in every case, I’m equally sure, those resurrections only came about as the result of something else dying.

So it’s for that reason that this and every Easter is also an invitation to think about death, to consider what it is that we’re holding on to, clinging on to, that we need to let go of if new life is to begin.

“Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.”

Thanks be to God.