Easter Sunday, the Revd Dr Brutus Green

Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’  She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’  INFSHSA.

My mother used to point to an old man we saw in a park in Swansea, where I grew up, and say it was R.S. Thomas. This was not true. R.S. Thomas lived in North Wales. And he’d died by then. This is a poem by him. (R.S. Thomas, not the other man.) 

There have been times
When, after long on my knees
In a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
From my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love’s risen body.

I went to university at 18, not believing in God. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I was a late bloomer. It just didn’t seem plausible to believe in God, with all the evil, suffering and science in the world. I had, though, oddly, elected to study theology. And I know in high falutin’ places like Oxford they don’t study theology, they read theology. But I didn’t go to Oxford, which is just as well, as I hear it’s pretty second rate anyway. At university I went to church – mainly because a pretty girl asked me – And in a moment that savagely undermined my earning potential and eviscerated my pension-prospects, I felt called by God. I’ve never looked back, (until having a second child).

But before that climactic moment, I’d spent my first year studying the philosophy of religion, largely things like, can you prove God’s existence, why does evil or suffering or Nigel Farage exist? what do you do about all the different religions? are moonies just characters on a surreal CBBC TV show, or is that moomins? The Big questions.

There aren’t concrete answers to those questions. (except Mr and Mrs Farage senior) But education, as it often does, exposed me to better arguments and alternate views, and made me realise my teenage atheist convictions were not as sophisticated or intelligent as I’d thought. Letting go of testosterone fuelled cynicism, and with a new girlfriend, I was able to fold-up those questions ‘like the piled graveclothes of love’s risen body.’

It’s not that the questions don’t matter, and having spent the next 10 years studying theology I didn’t become anti-intellectual, but I found there was more to God than justifying his existence. Sometimes our questions are not answered, but laid to one side. Sometimes the problem we thought most important has a death-like grip on our minds, and needs to be let go.

There’s an odd moment you might have noticed in today’s Gospel. We hear that the other disciple ‘also went in and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead’. It doesn’t obviously make sense. If he saw and believed then how did he not understand that Jesus must rise from the dead? What did he believe? Surely he doesn’t believe Mary, that Jesus’ body has been stolen. After all, he saw the graveclothes neatly folded and the head-cloth rolled by itself. Not the work of grave-robbers.

There’s something here about not understanding but trusting in God. Leaving aside the question of the body, to believe in who Jesus is; Perhaps, Jesus is with the Father. Perhaps, there is some sense, some meaning, some hope in this impossible, horrible world. He has not seen Jesus, he’s not expecting resurrection; He’s just seen an empty tomb. Technically he’s seen nothing. But he’s starting to believe that it’s not for nothing.

Mary is the more central character to this first resurrection experience. This isn’t Mary Jesus’s mother, who is traditionally depicted in blue; But if she was in blue, it would be light blue, because she got there first.

When she enters she sees two angels sitting at where had been Jesus’ head and feet. Through the Gospel and especially in the trial scene, Jesus by himself and his enemies has been described as a temple, not made with hands. When in the book of Exodus the ark of the covenant is made, before its discovery by Indiana Jones; At either end, are two angels with a space in the middle for the mercy seat, a space where the covenant, the ten commandments written on stone, are kept. The ark is the presence of God, kept in the Holy of Holies at the centre of the temple. And here we have two angels sitting either side of the empty space in which Jesus had been laid.

But Mary doesn’t recognise this. She is overwhelmed with grief. In fact, she doesn’t recognise Jesus. She’s been looking for a dead what. She’s not prepared to find a living whom. Once again, becoming stuck on the wrong question. But then Jesus calls her by name. And she turns to love’s risen body. She’s shaken out of her default thinking by something incredibly familiar and personal.

I was once leading a trip of American teenagers around Europe. We arrived in Swansea and took a walk by the sea to get ice-creams. I remember hearing my name called. I turned around and a friend I’d not seen since graduation perhaps 8 years before came running up. What was extraordinary was that she’d recognised me from behind, from 100m away, simply by the way that I walk, which I don’t think was really complimentary. When I was at Sandhurst a few years later a Sergeant Major was so uncomplimentary about the way that I walked on the parade ground that I actually nearly forgot how to walk. Sadly for him, he never got to see me dance.

But that is the experience, when a friend unexpectedly calls your name, and you turn, and suddenly you’re not in quite the same world, because you’ve been woken into this happier reality of friendship and recognition. That is when we can put to one side our preoccupation, our difficulty, our fear and become our truer more alive self. That is when we place by themselves the piled gravesclothes, and turn to love’s risen body.

And so, having mistaken him for the gardener, Mary and Jesus are reunited in the garden. It’s the first day of the week, a man and a woman, and Jesus calls her by name. It’s a picture of a new garden of Eden. It’s a new creation. And equally resonant with the lyric of the Song of Songs we hear so often at weddings, also set in a garden: Love is strong as death, passion as fierce as the grave. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. The piled gravesclothes are placed to one side as she turns to love’s risen body.

This new creation, this new Adam and Eve, begins a new family as Jesus declares: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” The family that will become the church, as like Adam and Eve, Mary is sent out from the garden, But not as an exile from paradise but to take the kingdom of God to the world, as the apostle to the apostles, to be the first to spread the good news of the resurrection; to create this family that welcomes all, that gathers together after two thousand years, the 3 week old baby and the 93 year-old to celebrate in Putney at Easter.

But to find this Easter joy we must first put to one side the folded gravesclothes. The cynicism in which we have lost confidence, or courage, or heart in the coldness of our world. The grief in which, in feeling vulnerable, we shut out God and the world, and stop our hearing. Instead, we must listen for that voice: Perhaps the dimly remembered voice that spoke of our lives having meaning, of the infinite worth of each of us, the importance of belonging to a real community of neighbours, of our hope in life beyond death; Perhaps a voice we have not heard before, that in music and word and silence dares us to believe that we can love one another, we can make sense of the world and feel at home in it; That voice that calls our name, the voice of love’s risen body.