*Rejoice -- Alleluia*
Acts 2:24-28
But God raised him from the dead,
freeing him from the agony of death,
because it was impossible for death
to keep its hold on him...
David said about him:
‘I saw the Lord always before me.
Because he is at my right hand,
I will not be shaken.
Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest in hope,
because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
you will not let your holy one see decay.
You have made known to me the paths of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence.’
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Imagine Mary on that early Easter morning, her feet damp with the dew, the first to trod the path to the tomb's entrance that day. Lo and behold: the boulder is rolled aside, the body gone missing...
She rushes away to gather friends, who return with her this time, to see what she has seen. But then again they leave the scene; what a frightening few days for them it must have been ...
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Then the disciples went back to their homes, but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?"
"They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him."At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
"Woman," he said, "why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?" Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."
Jesus said to her, "Mary."
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" (which means Teacher).
Jesus said, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, 'I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.' "
Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: "I have seen the Lord!" And she told them that he had said these things to her.
Rob Bell, the founding pastor and preacher at Mars Hill Church in Grandville, MI brings this marvelous thought to this story for this morning. ...
Here is Rob Bell’s important observation. "It must be such a letdown to rise from the dead and not have your friends recognize you."
And Jesus, whom she thinks is the gardener, said to her, "Mary."
And she replies, "Rabbouni."
Pythagoras said, in 500 BC, "The beauty of music isn't created by the notes, but in the spaces between the notes." That is also the real secret of Jazz. It is also the painful reality of singing in a choir. Paying attention to the rests in a sheet of music can be maddening. But the genius of music is just there in the pauses. At least that’s what members of our Band of Praise tell me. I’m always ignoring the rests. I always come in too early or too late.
So it is that the genius of comedy exists in a sense of timing–a dramatic pause between words at the end of a joke. So is the genius of story-telling.
And now to the point: there must have been an extraordinary pause between the two words, "Mary" and "Rabbouni."
It just couldn’t have been as quick as the text seems to make it sound. "Mary/Rabbouni."
Like two businessmen had met in the hallway. "John!" "Bill! How are things? The kids? The wife?"
There are no stage directions in the Gospel text. There had to have been a pause there, and into that pause we could fit an entire universe of meaning and hope.
"Mary"
A long moment of distant recognition. Mary is not looking at the Gardener, I think. Her eyes are filled again with tears. She’s looking at the grass under her feet. She hears this voice uttering her name. "Mary."
She looks up at a point between the grass and the face of the gardener. Pauses there to consider the uttering of her name.
Confused at first.
Disoriented. The recognition has to take some time.
In that moment, she has to reconsider her theory that the body has been stolen as she stares at that middle space between the grass at her feet and the face of the Gardener. She has to rethink all the next steps she needs to take in order to give her friend Jesus an honorable resting place. Can you grasp for a moment all the "stuff" that had to have gone into that instant between those two words, "Mary" and "Rabbouni"?
She looks at the gardener, stares deeply into those eyes; lets her own eyes clear and then says perhaps more as a question than a statement, "Rabbouni?"
I just think that this is one of the great moments in Gospel history. [ed.: emphasis mine.]
The space between the words "Mary" and "Rabbouni" could account for
every heartbreak,
every disappointment,
every terror of the human heart resolved in the uttering of a name.
In that space between Mary and Rabbouni is everything we believe.
In that space between Mary and Rabbouni is this extraordinary claim of the Christian faith.
That all that we thought of as the way things are have been undone. The old order of things has been broken. Our cynicism about life is dramatically reassessed. Things don’t have to be this way. Empty tombs don’t have to be explained by stolen bodies.
Maybe God is somehow at work to make all things new!
Maybe what we have become adjusted to doesn’t have to be the end of the story.
Maybe justice can be done for the poor and the broken after all.
Maybe the proud have been scattered in the imaginations of their hearts after all.
It may well be that the powerful have been brought down from their high thrones and those of low estate have been lifted up.
Maybe the hungry have been filled with good things and the rich have been sent away empty.
Maybe all of this Gospel story is true after all!..
And it is in this silence between "Mary" and "Rabbouni" that we are given to think about all these extraordinary things.
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Finally, let me close my Easter morning blog post with a nod to our new Catholic pope, who has chosen to emulate St. Francis of Assisi, another accessible life story .
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