Easter B 2018: Truly Known

Posted by DJL on Mar 27, 2018 in Dear Partner | 3 comments

John 20:1-18

Dear Partner in Preaching,

I know this is your busy week, our busy week, and rather than close with a word of gratitude, I want to start there. So many people will come to hear a word of hope and healing this Sunday. So many will come not knowing what they need to hear, just that they need to be there. So many will come not even aware of their need, perhaps coming out of habit, or to please another family member, or just because it’s Easter. And you will greet all of them the same, proclaim the good news to each as if the only thing that matters is that they are there to hear God’s good news of resurrection, healing, courage, and hope. Thank you. Even more, thank God for you.

So a single and, at least to me, new thought struck me this time around as I was reading John’s account of the resurrection: The space between “woman” and “Mary” is perhaps the distance between the cross and resurrection and, for the purposes of this reflection, the distance between being recognized and being known.

Perhaps it will help to set the scene. It is the morning of that first Easter and the early action of this account revolves almost entirely around the empty tomb. Mary Magdalene is the first on the scene and, finding the grave abandoned, runs to tell Peter and the Beloved Disciple. They in turn race to the scene. Peter, trailing the other along the path there, enters first and leaves confused. The Beloved Disciple, entering just after, sees and believes. (What, exactly, is not clear, just that he is quicker, both in the uptake and as a runner!) They go on their way and Mary is left to grieve alone. Yet she is not alone, but rather accompanied by angels, though she apparently takes no comfort in their presence, perhaps not recognizing them as angels. They ask why she is grieving. After answering them, she turns and sees, but once again does not recognize, Jesus, and presumes he is the gardener. He also asks her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” After asking Jesus if he knows where her Lord has been taken, Jesus calls her by name, “Mary,” and her eyes are opened as she recognizes her beloved Lord and Teacher.

This scene from John, as with so much of the Fourth Gospel, is not simply packed with symbolism but is largely constructed through symbolic word, action, setting, and scene. While John constructed the scenes of Jesus’ crucifixion with signifiers drawn largely from the Exodus story, this scene of new life, truth, hope and, preeminently, unexpected grace upon grace, like the opening verses of the Gospel announcing the same (1:14-16), are furnished with imagery from Genesis. “In the beginning,” John writes at the outset of his Gospel (1:1), announcing his intent to tell a new creation story with a level of chutzpah you can only admire. Now he brings the narrative full story, as Mary – “Woman” – finds herself in a garden and is about to experience the death set in motion in that first garden overturned by the One who is both the gardener and not-the-gardener at one and the same time and who, significantly, addresses her by name.

For though she doesn’t recognize Jesus, he recognizes her. “Woman,” he calls her, inviting her to represent not just Eve but all people, women and men, who have lived unable to “see God” until God is made known in Christ (1:18). But then he moves beyond recognizing her as a symbol or representative but instead receives her as a person, as someone he knows and loves by calling her by name: “Mary.” And that personal address assures personal knowledge and acceptance and, thereby, makes all the difference. Known, she knows. Seen, she can see. Loved, she loves… and then goes and tells what she has seen, known, and loved.

It occurred to me as I read this passage that we live at time when, increasingly, we seek to be recognized – noticed, friended, acknowledged, retweeted and more – whether or not we are truly known (for being known is far more risky than merely recognized). Further, the primary claim to recognition is our difference. Indeed, it feels like we live in a cultural moment that focuses particularly on those differences and that we are regularly invited not only to note them or even to understand ourselves in light of them, but actually to define ourselves not in terms of what binds us together but rather what separates us. In a world of endless channels and a cacophony of voices clamoring for recognition, the most distinctive voice seems most likely to gain attention.

But the potential price we pay, I think, is falling prey to the temptation to define ourselves relentlessly over and against each other rather than in relation to and in communion with each other. You know how it goes: I’m white, you’re black. I’m male, you’re female. I’m rich, you’re poor. I’m liberal, you’re conservative; I’m straight, you’re gay. I’m American-born, you’re a Somali immigrant. And so on, until all you have is a collection of distinct, individual, absolutely unique persons each clamoring for attention and recognition based on what makes us different with little to no sense of what we share in common.

Now, on the one hand, I can understand why, if you are part of a group that has been underrepresented, marginalized, or not recognized, this stress on difference matters. If your opportunities have been limited in the workplace because of your gender, for instance, or you’ve been underestimated or overlooked because of your race, then it makes total sense to ask, even demand, that those differences be recognized and affirmed rather than denigrated or overlooked.

Yet while I appreciate the importance of our differences, I grow concerned that we’ve allowed what is descriptive to become definitive. Indeed, I worry that if we seek our primary identity in what is distinctive about us, we risk losing any sense of what we share in common. And when this happens, all we can do is build higher walls or dig deeper bunkers protecting the increasingly narrow tribe of “us” from the growing and frightening hoard of “them.”

Perhaps this stress on difference and desire for recognition is the best we can do in a fallen creation. Certainly the temptation to define ourselves over and against each other is one of the more striking, if understated, results of the Genesis tragedy – “The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me the fruit…” “The snake tricked me” (Gen. 3:12-13). It is perhaps inescapably human to seek recognition through our difference. Yet when the Gardener is revealed also to be the Second Adam, tending not just the tragedy of Eden but the hope and resurrection of Easter, he moves beyond recognizing Mary by calling her by name and inviting her to a different reality and relationship governed not by creation but by new creation.

Affirmation, recognition, these are on some levels good and desirable and perhaps even necessary thing. But affirmation ultimately is not acceptance and being recognized pales in comparison to being known. This story has helped me perceive that part of Easter’s promises is that we can hope for more than recognition, our moment in the sun, but instead are invited to be truly and fully known – that is, to be seen and accepted – as we are, which in turn frees us to know and accept others as they are. As Jesus says, reinterpreting another Genesis story, “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36).

This is a lot, I know, Dear Partner, for any single Easter sermon. But it has been for me a helpful reminder that we are not preaching an event that happened a long time ago or an idea we hope people will consider. Rather, we are making a confession that Jesus is the first member, as Paul says, of an entirely new family, that his resurrection inaugurates a new creation that continues to this day (1 Cor. 15:23). For this reason, through our proclamation we are announcing and indeed ushering in a new reality, one where important differences are acknowledged and affirmed but do not define us, for we are those now defined by resurrection grace, promised a place in the household by the Son, born from above by the One who reveals God’s parental heart, and pursued by God’s love for as long and far as we may run until, hearing God call us by name, we realize that we have been known and loved all along.

Blessings on your Easter proclamation, Dear Partner. Your words, witness, and life make such a difference.

Yours in Christ,
David