April 4, 2021
/Easter Day
Acts 10: 34-43; Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24; John 20: 1 - 18
The Rev. James M. L. Grace
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. AMEN.
In John’s Gospel we all return to Jesus’ tomb early on Easter morning. We are there, in the dark, with Mary Magdalene visiting Christ’s tomb. When she arrives, she discovers, much to her surprise that the stone had been removed from the tomb’s opening. Upon seeing this, she leaves the tomb out of fear, and runs to Peter to tell him what she saw.
Then Peter runs to the tomb with another disciple, but John tells us Peter was kind of slow, and another disciple beat him to the tomb. They confirm Mary’s description of the empty tomb, they see the linen which once wrapped the body of Jesus on the ground, and probably go into panic mode – thinking that the tomb had been robbed, or worse, desecrated. The disciples go home.
But Mary stays by herself in the tomb, she turns around, and sees Jesus. She doesn’t recognize him, mistaking him to be a gardener, but once Jesus says her name, she responds, rabbouni, - rabbi – teacher. And she rushes to Jesus, and holds onto him, out of love, out of want. Jesus offers this response to her: “Mary, do not hold onto me, because I have not yet ascended.” In other words, Jesus says “you can’t hold onto me, Mary.” What a hard thing to hear, and what an appropriate thing for Jesus to say.
Do not hold onto me. If I were in her shoes, I would want to hold onto Jesus and never let go. I would never want him to leave. I so identify with Mary here, because there are things I hold onto tightly; desperately not wanting to let go of.
One of those things I have held tightly to was my mother, who died in 2007. A night or two before her death, I spent an evening sitting beside her bed. My sister was there as well. I don’t remember what we were talking about but I remember feeling so sad. I knew what the outcome of this was. I was crying, I was sad because I didn’t want her to leave me.
My sister was getting ready to go home, and as she made her way to the door, I told mom, “mom I’m going to stay here with you.” And my mother replied, “no – go…go with your sister.” Those were hard words for me to hear. I didn’t want to leave with my sister – I wanted to stay with my mother. But that is not what my mom wanted. She had work to do – to ready herself for the new life she was going to be stepping into in a matter of days, and my clinging to her was not helpful.
As a young boy I remember losing my mother in a grocery store, and crying feeling like I lost her forever, when in reality she was just one aisle over looking for bread. Leaving her that night felt like that. I didn’t want to let go of her. But letting go is exactly what Easter is about. Easter is about letting go of our loved ones, because we trust them to God’s care, as Mary did so beautifully on that first Easter morning.
There is a phrase we use in the church to describe this idea of letting go. The church calls this kind of letting go a “paschal mystery.” A paschal mystery is the process of letting go of what we love dearly for the sake of being born anew. It is about trusting God that even when we let go, God will be there to uphold us so that we emerge even more alive than before.
In a few days I will preside at my older brother Randall’s funeral in a nearby cemetery. This is another paschal mystery, another painful letting go. It is not accidental that the burial liturgy in the Episcopal Church is an Easter liturgy, a service that proclaims and affirms our Easter hope. And my Easter hope is simple - we will be okay, even when like Mary, we must let go of what we love, because we let go in faith. We let go in trust because we know God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
When we let go, we become less burdened and less burdensome. We become light. Angels fly, because they take themselves lightly. Be light to yourself and to others this Easter. Let go. Let God. AMEN.