TRINITY SERMONS

Trinity Presbyterian Church

2200 North Bell Avenue # Denton, Texas

Rev. Craig Hunter

April 12, 2009

Gospel According to Mary Magdalene

Scriptures: Isiah 25:6-9; John 20:1-18

"Every year we preachers eagerly look for help with the daunting challenge of preparing an Easter sermon. Never are we as acutely aware of our own limitations, intellectual and spiritual, as when we try to find words to express the reality that a dead man didn't remain dead."

These words written by John Buchanan in the April 21st edition of The Christian Century pretty much captured my feelings earlier this week as the preparation of this sermon loomed ahead of me. The mystery and wonder of the event we celebrate this day, the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, don't seem to quite fit into any words. It often feels that they can more appropriately be celebrated through silence or song.

But as I pondered our text this morning from John's gospel, with its story of Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved rushing to the empty tomb, my attention was quickly brought to perhaps the main character of this passage, Mary Magdalene.

Do you ever think about Mary Magdalene? Have you ever thought about what these events were like for her? The gospels don't tell us much about her, almost nothing at all. We don't know what she experienced as she witnessed Christ's crucifixion, the gospels don't tell us what she carried in her heart as she journeyed to the tomb in today's passage. We only know that she is weeping, grieving, looking for the body of Christ.

My thoughts and ponderings about Mary Magdalene were guided by poems I read in David Cunningham's book, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: Literary Reflections on Suffering, Death, and New Life (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). The poems are by Janet Morley and appear in her collection, All Desires Known (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2006). The first poem fits our Biblical text for today, it is told from the perspective of Mary Magdalene and begins this way:

"It was unfinished

We stayed there, fixed, until the end,

women waiting for the body that we loved;

and then it was unfinished.

There was no time to cherish, cleanse, anoint,

no time to handle him with love, no farewell.

Since then, my hands have waited,

aching to touch even his deadness,

smoothe oil into bruises that no longer hurt,

offer his silent flesh my finished act of love.

I came early, as the darkness lifted,

to find the grave ripped open and his body gone;

container of my grief smashed, looted,

leaving my hands empty.

I turned on the man who came:

"They have taken away my Lord -- where is his corpse:?

Where is the body that is mine to greet?

He is not gone I am not ready yet, I am not finished --

I cannot let him go I am not whole." (See "They Have Taken Away My Lord," p. 108.)

Since then, my hands have waited, aching to touch even his deadness, smooth oil into bruises that no longer hurt, offer his silent flesh my finished act of love. Smooth oil into bruises that no longer hurt -- those words have been with me all week. Those few words conjure such an image of tenderness and love that . . . These words have been following me all week, there is a haunting beauty to them and to the image they conjure up of Mary and her grief.

Peter and the beloved disciple have been to the tomb. They have examined the evidence, verified the fact of Jesus' absence, the fact of the empty tomb. And then they moved on, they went home. What remains for them at this point in the story is a puzzle to be pondered -- what has happened, and why, and what does it mean.

But Mary stays behind. With Mary there is something more. It is not only an intellectual matter, not only a matter of the facts, just the facts. No, her grief seems to have more dimensions to it. She is less concerned with a puzzle to be pondered, and more concerned with a body to be touched. Her grief has an intensely physical dimension to it, like Mary the mother of Jesus in Michaelangelo's Pieta, she wants to hold the body, she needs to hold the body, to "smoothe oil into bruises that no longer hurt," to give physical, sacramental release to the tender, loving grief that wells up within her.

Mary's grief, with its intense longing to touch, points to the profound connection between the physical and the spiritual. Mary's grief suggests that loving someone is a physical affair, it involves our bodies, it involves touch and smell and the physical presence of the other. It is through our bodies that we so often give and receive grace -- a hug, a smile, a grasped hand. I think in particular of babies, for whom being loved means being held, for whom there is no love that is not physical. I think of the elderly, of the lonely. Indeed, I think of all of us.

We so often forget this connection between the physical and the spiritual. Perhaps that is especially true for us Presbyterians, as intellectual as we tend to be. But Janet Morley's poetry powerfully evokes the connection between the physical and the spiritual, as in the following two poems.

and you held me and there were no words

and there was no time and you held me

and there was only wanting and

being held and being filled with wanting

and I was nothing but letting go and being held

and there were no words and there needed to be no words

and there was no terror only stillness

and I was wanting nothing and

it was fullness and it was like aching for God (from "And You Held Me," p. 115)

And in another of her poems:

With your warm hands heal me

In your body know me

to your darkness draw me

at your breast hold me.

For I was homesick and you brought me home;

I was alone, and now I am in touch;

my words were alien to me,

you spoke my mother tongue. (from "With Your Warm Hands," p.114)

There is something about this physical, embodied language that probably would have been disconcerting to many in the first century. More to the point, there was something about the tale of Christ's resurrection that we read today that would have gone against the grain of the Greek intellectual world that existed at the time of Christ. You see, the Greeks were never really very comfortable with our bodiliness. The Greeks saw the decline and decay of the body as a sign of its inferior status. In contrast, they adhered to the belief of the immortality of the soul. The body was seen as excess baggage, to be shed upon one's death. It was a kind of prison -- indeed, in Greek the difference between the word for body and the word for tomb is one letter. Death was a moment of release.

As Cunningham writes, "Within that thought-world, nothing would have been easier than to claim that although Jesus had died, his soul had risen and his flesh had fallen away. Nothing easier than to render his body irrelevant to the story of his life beyond death. In fact, in the world of the ancient Greeks, the best marketing strategy might have been to make Jesus into another Socrates, describing him as calmly setting aside his broken body and giving thanks for the liberation of the soul. But that is not the story the Gospels tell." (Cunningham, p. 138)

Separated by almost 2000 years, we are not so different from the Greeks. We, too, are not quite comfortable with our bodies. As Cunningham writes, "Like Peter and John, we are uneasy with Mary Magdalene's attachment to the fleshly body of Christ. We're really more comfortable with the Platonic myth of the ascending soul" (Cunningham, p. 141). He goes on to write, "Modern culture encourages a love-hate relationship with the flesh. We love our bodies, and we work very hard to improve and preserve them; but since our projected ideal body is practically unachievable, we become disillusioned about our bodies, and even start to feel somewhat relieved by the opportunity, finally, to put them away. We find a certain relief in the idea of being disembodied and thereby freed from the impossible standards to which we are held. We have come to see the body as the cause of most of our troubles: our sicknesses, our temptations, the various forms of difficulty that we get ourselves into -- these are all problems of the body, of the physical flesh. If we didn't have our bodies to worry about, we would not be tempted by our appetites, nor would we be limited in our inability to be in two places at once. And wouldn't that be convenient?" (Cunningham, p 142)

It may be convenient, but God's grace, redemption, isn't about convenience. No, the Easter story suggests that God's grace penetrates deeper than that, God's grace penetrates into the core of our being, the physical core. God's grace includes our bodies because there is something sacred about them, something holy. God loves our bodies, creation, the physical and material stuff of existence, better than we are able to ourselves.

Janet Morley captures some of the holiness of our bodies in her poem, "The Bodies of Grownups."

The bodies of grownups come with stretchmarks and scars,

faces that have been lived in, relaxed breasts and bellies,

backs that give trouble, and well-worn feet:

flesh that is particular, and obviously mortal.

They also come with bruises on their hearts,

wounds they can't forget,

and each of them

a company of lovers in their soul

who will not return and cannot be erased.

And yet I think there is a flood of beauty

beyond the smoothness of youth;

and my heart aches for that grace of longing

that flows through bodies

no longer straining to be innocent

but yearning for redemption.

What this poem affirms, what the resurrection of Christ suggests, is that our bodies matter. Our bodies matter, they are holy to God, they are the means by which we love one another. Indeed, the salvation history as related in the Bible is a very physical one, and Christianity is the most material of all great world faiths. Sin comes into the world through the physical act of eating the forbidden fruit, the Son of God comes into the world through a pregnant woman, the Word becomes flesh, healing of the lepers comes through touch, reconciliation with sinners and tax collectors comes through shared meals, betrayal comes through a kiss. Nowhere is the story more physical than in the resurrection story. The resurrection that we celebrate today, and every Sunday, is a resurrection not of the soul, not of the spirit, but of the body. Every time we say the Apostles Creed, the oldest Christian creed dating back at least to the first part of the second century, we affirm the resurrection of the body. Or at least that is what I thought until I learned something new this week. Actually, a better and earlier translation of the Latin in which the creed was written reads, "I believe in the resurrection of the flesh." The flesh, in Latin the word is "carnis", "meat," which is to say, we believe in the resurrection of the very stuff of the world, we believe that not even Christ's broken body, not even ours, are excluded from the resurrecting and redeeming power of God's love.

Janet Morley ends her poem about Mary Magdalene with these words:

"And then he spoke, no corpse,

and breathed,

and offered me my name.

My hands rushed to grasp him;

to hold and hug and grip his body close

to give myself again, to cling to him,

and lose my self in love.

"Don't touch me now."

I stopped, and waited, my rejected passion

hovering between us like some dying thing.

I, Mary, stood and grieved, and then departed.

I have a gospel to proclaim."

My friends, we too have a gospel to proclaim, the gospel of an enfleshed God loving even our flesh, loving all the wonders of creation. Easter is not an escape from the world into our private spiritual salvations, no, Easter sends us out into the physical and material world with the assurance that God loves that world. Easter sends us out to celebrate, to give thanks for chocolate and for green, to roll in the grass, to laugh and to sing, to hug and to kiss, to touch and be touched, and to witness with our bodies to this wondrous love. Alleluia! Jesus Christ is risen!