John 20:11-18 Invitation into the New Creation

Today’s Gospel is one about grief and love.  “Love is as strong as Death, longing as fierce as Sheol, its arrows are arrows of fire, flames of the divine.” (Eccl. 8:6)  Mary did not come to the tomb to find the risen Savior.  From yesterday’s reading we know that she came to anoint the body of a man they all loved dearly with the precious oils and fragrant spices, mixed with their tears.  Mary is compelled by love to touch Him once more, even if he is dead, as she thinks. 

But the tomb is empty and she is denied even that one little pleasure of reaching out one last time in love.  She is heartbroken.  “They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they laid him.” 

Within this Gospel in the passage before today’s reading Mary has already gone and alerted the Apostles that Jesus’ body is gone.  They have come to see for themselves, and left again.  Mary Magdalene remains, as if still searching for her love.  Desperate, she looks one last time into the tomb.

The Easter gospel brings comfort to the grieving.  As in the original garden when sin and death were introduced into the world, God promised a savior that would come to triumph over these things out of his great love for us.  To herald this savior Mary, held by her grief and love for the one who has saved her from her sins, lingers peering again into the tomb.  Behold, there are two angels one where the head would be, the other where the feet had lain with a space between them, as if it were for God himself; just like the Ark of the Covenant, a new covenant, which Christ came to establish anew with us through God’s infinite love and mercy.

In Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten son, is divine love become manifest.  In the garden Mary encounters the transfigured glorious Christ Jesus, our new Adam. In the midst of sorrow and grief arises joy in the new Creation.  When the angels and Jesus ask, “Woman, why are you weeping?”  That is our cue that the Lord is with us in his glory, we should rejoice and be glad.

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of this new creation.  Peter reminds us today, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.“ Like Mary Magdalene, let us let the Spirit help us to overcome the bonds of the old creation and enter more fully this new creation that has been given to us through the Resurrection.  Amen.

Lk 4:24-30 It was to the least that he came

Jesus while teaching in the synagogue in Nazareth mentions that no prophet is welcome in his own native place and proceeds to give examples of prophets who were in exile from their own people and staying with and helping those who were least of the others.  The people were really angry with Jesus because he was kind of calling them on their hypocrisy.  Why did he do this?  He already knew where their hearts lay, but he also wanted to challenge them, shake them up:  were they complacent in their faith like the people of old to whom God sent the prophets whom they ignored?  Those examples usually led to an overthrow by a foreign king.  The Jews listening to Jesus would definitely not have liked that, and thus like his predecessors, he had to leave them.

A young man asked recently about why Jesus had to die at the time he did.  Here within this Gospel reading we are told that it was not his appointed time, and so he slipped through their midst and left.  Although we have free will to choose, there seems to be an a time for all things:

"There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens. Time to give birth, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant. " Eccl 3:1-2