Easter Day 2009 – ‘I Have
Seen The Lord’
“I have seen the
Lord.”
Five words that changed the world. Five words that moved a desperate,
disparate group of left-behind disciples to go on and create a movement, a
Church, which two millennia later still drags out millions every year to sit
and stand and kneel in buildings like this and not to here again the same story
they heard the year before and the year before that and the year before that
and every year before for two thousand years, when it all began with one woman
and five simple words, “I have seen the Lord.”
I sometimes wonder if we’ve heard that story so often that it no longer
has the power to move us the way it should. Mary is distraught with grief,
drawn to the tomb of the man she had watched die, not for any practical purpose
– he had already been prepared and laid out before the Sabbath – but just
because she had nowhere else to go. So she goes in the dark to the tomb and
finds it open. In her shock she doesn’t think to look inside, or maybe she does
but decides against it, so she runs to the only people she knows she can run
to, the disciples who, like her, are lost and afraid and unsure what to do, and
she tells them that the tomb is open so they run too and getting there they do
look inside and see the cloths and the emptiness and one believes and two have
no idea, and they turn and go back home.
Mary doesn’t though. She stays and does the only thing she can do, she
cries, and as she does two beings in white appear and ask her why she’s weeping
and she tells them he’s gone and then the gardener arrives and she asks whether
maybe he knows where the body is, and then she sees and knows, and everything
is as it never was before. So she goes again to the disciples and simply and
plainly announces, ‘I have seen the Lord.’
I wonder if they thought she was joking. I doubt it somehow, it doesn’t
seem like a very humorous sort of atmosphere and Mary is never really made out
to be much of a joker. They might have thought she was mad of course, or
possibly self-deluded, driven insane by her grief maybe. We’ll never know
because John didn’t see fit to tell us, but I have my doubts that they all
jumped up and shouted Alleluia. Some of them might have believed her, but
probably not all, yet still she marched in and still she stood her ground and
still she told them, ‘I have seen the Lord’.
And that’s the real heart of this story, not what happens in the tomb,
not whatever Jesus did or didn’t do or experience between the cross and the garden,
we never hear a thing about that. At the heart of this story are those five
words – I have seen the Lord. At the heart of this story is the simple exchange
with whom Mary thought was the gardener. At the heart of this story is the
unexpected and at first unrecognised encounter with the risen Christ. And it
wasn’t a one-time thing.
Jesus
unexpectedly appears no fewer than four more times in John’s account of the
story, and each time the effects are life-changing for those whom he meets.
While it’s clear throughout the gospels that encountering Jesus in his life was
a moving and potentially miraculous experience, meeting the risen Christ is
unavoidably transformative. No one emerges unchanged from such encounters,
whether they like it or not.
That’s why Mary
could stand before the disciples and tell them she had seen the Lord. And
that’s why we too can say them same. That’s the real reason why we’re here this
morning. It’s not for the organ or the choir or the flowers or the words or the
prayers – all those things are here to help us do what we’re really here to do,
which is, as one of those prayers reminds us, ‘to both remember and reveal’ the
presence of Christ among us, to stand as Mary did two thousand years ago and
announce that we too have seen the Lord.
Thanks be to God.