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| The Episcopal Church of the Holy Apostles on this Easter morning! |
Holy God, let my words be your words and when my words are not your words, let your people be wise enough to know the same. Amen.
There’s an Easter tradition within the Church, which I quite like. On this the Day of Resurrection, we tell jokes. Not just any jokes—we tell, terrible dad jokes about Easter! I mean why else would priests be called father if not for their awful sense of dad humor.
· Do you know what the forecast was for this morning? 100% chance of Son rise!
· Why did the easter egg hide? Because it was a little chicken!
· Knock, knock! Who's there? Wendy. Wendy who? Wendy Easter egg hunt taking place? It’s after the 10:30 service, by the way.
· When Jesus was resurrected what happened when he saw his shadow? Seven more weeks of Easter!
Okay, I’m sorry. Those were bad eggs. Yikes, so was that. Alright, moving onward, you may wonder why we tell these yokes… I mean jokes on Easter. Well, it’s because there is a belief that this, the Day of Resurrection, is the greatest joke of all time. This was God’s way of pranking sin, evil, and death. Some say that this was Jesus’ way of getting back at Satan who beguiled our first parents, tempted Jesus in the wilderness, and even wooed him in the Garden of Gethsemane. Regardless of whether you are envisioning a glowing Risen Lord laughing at a man dressed in red spandex with horns and a pitchfork or something more metaphysical, it’s clear that God does have a good sense of humor! Even our Gospel lesson for today seems a bit humorous.
First, there’s the way John subtly refers to himself. Mary Magdalene found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. What did she do when she saw it like this? She ran to tell others this mysterious news. Whom did she tell? Peter and some other guy—the disciple whom Jesus loved. That’s the pseudonym John the Evangelist gave himself, like how Samuel Clemens wrote under the alias of Mark Twain, or Peter Gene Hernedez is better known as Bruno Mars, or how we don’t call the world class performer Alecia Beth Moore, we call her Pink.
So, that’s one funny detail, but then we get to the disciples’ Easter morning 5K.
Peter and John faced off in an epic race. After hearing from Mary that Jesus’ body had been taken, they sprinted off to see the tomb for themselves. John described it this way, “The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.” In your face, Simon aka Peter the Rock—I guess if he was the rock he was not a rolling stone. What’s even more comical to me though is what happened after they reached the tomb.
Peter looked inside first. Then, the other disciple (John, we know it’s you) peeked in his head presumably after catching his breath. When he went in, he believed—maybe. For John stated they did not understand the Holy Scripture yet, and they left. This is so odd. It’s a moment of disbelief, which makes sense. We are talking about Resurrection here. Even after 2,000 years we are still in the dark about this great joke that God has played on death (and us). The next funny thing may very well be the most touching.
Mary wasn’t ready to leave. She was exhausted, she had to be. She had watched her beloved friend and teacher, the one whom she thought was the Son of God, she had watched Jesus die a gruesome death on the Cross. Then, when she went to check on his grave, she found it agape. She sprinted back and forth from the tomb to the disciples and back to the tomb. Then, when they left, she was all alone believing that Jesus’ body had been pillaged. In this exhausted state she saw into a realm that makes no logical sense. She saw angels in the tomb, Mary even had a conversation with them.
They asked why she was weeping she expressed her theory—they took him away. Then, not by magic but by something much more powerful the angels gave way to a mysterious figure. It was Jesus, but the funny thing was that Mary could not recognize him.
The man asked her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” I can imagine this tired woman being about fed up with all of this. She turned towards the man, and she scolded him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Why did she do this? John wrote she did this supposing he was the gardener.
Supposing him to be the gardener is a low key truth about God that John casually drops in as a funny line here in the Resurrection story, but it’s beautifully touching. He wasn’t a gardener, he is the gardener—as one song from the camp I grew up attending attests, “He’s a peach of a savior, he’s the apple of my eye, and he trims away the branches when the branches get to high, he will never ever leave me, so I’ll never, ever die, so that’s why I’m bananas for the Lord.”
The Gardener of Eden, the tender of our souls, the Divine One who gives all growth is truly who Jesus was, but no he was not the gardener of this graveyard. Mary would soon discover this truth, but not before another funny moment. Mary assumed that Jesus was the gardener who had hauled away Jesus’ body. It is on one level true though, he was not the gardener, but Jesus had in truth taken away the body. So, Jesus did something that is simply lovely.
He called her by name. In saying her name, “Mary,” the apostle to the apostles, this first messenger of the Best News that God has triumphed even over death, finally could see the truth she had begun relaying to others. She would then be able to fully announce that she had seen the Lord or as she calls him Rabbouni (meaning teacher).
This Day of Resurrection encounter as told by John is full of these little moments of peculiarity, these comical bits that push me to not only see the best joke of all time that death is no more, but also to understand more truthfully the Best News of all time. There is nothing, nothing, not sin, not evil, not death, nothing you have done or left undone, no mistake too big, no crisis too tall, nothing that separates God’s love from you.
We may though not always be able to feel this love. We might like Peter and John be too interested in competing against one another. We might like those disciples be too impatient hurrying off before the fuller bits of the Great Mystery are revealed. We might even like Mary have vision too clouded by grief or loss or exhaustion to see the love incarnate standing right in front of us. Still, God’s love persists through sin, evil, and even death.
God’s love persists for you, for all, forever. And that is no joke. Amen.
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