Colossians 3: 1 – 7; John 20: 1 – 10
Happy Easter! [whispered] It seems very special and appropriate to be up for an early service on Easter Sunday. Some places even have services at dawn, although I have never attended one. The Gospels tells us that it was early in the morning that the disciples discovered the empty tomb. This morning, in Hampstead Parish Church terms, we too have the privilege of getting there first. We’re the first to glimpse the Resurrection.
The theologian Frederick Buechner remarks that while in the telling of the Christmas story the Gospels give us a colourful cast of characters and a great deal of detail about the birth of Christ, for Easter it’s entirely different. This is a quiet story, whispered not shouted. That’s why, when I said Happy Easter to you just now, I deliberately said it quietly. It’s not even easy, from the different accounts, to be quite sure precisely what did happen. If you were going to invent a Resurrection narrative, you wouldn’t do it like this. That’s why, despite the inconsistencies and all that isn’t said, the account of the empty tomb has the ring of truth about it. Here are real people, still grieving their loss, faced with a completely unexpected and unimaginable event. They’re bewildered, and they run to and fro in their bewilderment. Or most of them do.
Mary Magdalen doesn’t seem to look into the tomb. She just sees that the stone has been moved, perhaps assumes that the grave has been robbed – a common occurrence at the time – and runs to fetch the others. Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved arrive next. We’re told the beloved disciple looks into the tomb and sees the linen wrappings lying there but doesn’t go in. Simon Peter, always impetuous, is the one who goes in first. So the beloved disciple perhaps has a few moments to take in what he has just seen. When he does go in we’re just told “He saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead” (John 20:9).
“He saw and believed”, but he didn’t understand. He knew that something extraordinary and momentous had happened, but perhaps for a moment or two couldn’t put it into words, or even into thoughts. Yet at some level he just knew. What he saw made sense, although he couldn’t at that moment have articulated what that sense was.
I wonder if you have ever had an experience like this one? When you knew something in your heart but didn’t understand it in your head? Here is something analogous which happened to me. When I was a teenager we lived next door to an art shop. I used to look in the window when I passed. For several months there was a picture in the window which seemed to me extraordinarily beautiful. Sometimes I stopped to look at it, and I told my parents how much I liked it. It was a reproduction on blockboard – about this big [gesture]. On it were a number of figures, mostly women, dancing or gesturing in what appeared to be an enchanted forest with golden fruit hanging from the trees. There was a suggestion of darkness towards the edges of the painting. I had no idea who had made the painting, or when, or what it was portraying. I just knew I loved it. Well, you may have guessed part of the story. For my next birthday, the picture turned up as one of my presents. And then I discovered that it was a reproduction of Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ – one of the most celebrated paintings in the world. I still loved it, but now I understood a great deal more about it, and knew that other people, for several centuries, had responded to it as I did.
My point is that it’s possible to know something in your heart, and to respond to it, without understanding it in your head. I don’t mean by this that we shouldn’t apply our minds to our faith – only that sometimes, for some people at least, the heart comes first. I think that is perhaps what happened to the ‘beloved disciple’ at the moment when he entered the tomb. He knew in his heart that the empty tomb was “right,” that Jesus could not be there. Only later, as they encountered the risen Christ and came to understand the Scriptures, did he, and the other disciples, come to understand why this was so.
It’s still early in the morning. May we receive with joy what our hearts are telling us this morning and seek to grow in our understanding. Because this story which comes to us in fragments, in whispers, is the most powerful story the world has ever known. For those who believe, it changes everything.
Alleluia. Christ is risen.
Amen.