Alleluia! Christ is Risen! - Easter 2023

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Easter Sunday, April 9, 2023 by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

 Alleluia! Christ is Risen!  I picture us today with Mary Magdalene early on the first day of the week while it is still dark. Inky shadows. Stars fade into first light like a sedge of cranes in snow. Bird song and leaf-rustle in the easy coolness of the day. A feeling of grief’s sharp, stunned, in-betweenness. Wandering in her desert lostness something draws her onward. The horrors of Golgotha replay themselves in the mind as she feels her way one tender, probing step at time in the blackness. Her people had a pillar of fire by night, a cloud by day, but she has only this desire to see her Lord, to collapse against the stone rolled against the tomb and water the parched  earth with her tears. 

Arriving there, something is amiss. The stone is rolled back. So she runs to Peter and the Beloved Disciple to tell them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” They race to the tomb. The first hangs back, peers in: Linen wrappings. Peter, huffing and puffing, pushes past and enters in. A second look reveals linens, yes, but also the cloth that covered Jesus' head rolled up in a place by itself. The first disciple, emboldened now, crosses the threshold on eggshells joining Peter. A shudder of recognition as the Beloved Disciples’ eyes widen. But, inexplicably, they leave that empty place, flee the terrying vacancy, the silence, returning to what they still think of as “home.” 

And Mary, now more lost than ever, stands stunned and weeping, unable to move. She gazes into the bewildering emptiness. She looks again. A third time. Her eye finds some purchase in that dizzying darkness: the linens, the cloth rolled there. Scrolled there. Placed there. Through her tears two blurry angels frame the place where Jesus had been lying. She gazes into the space between the Cherubim. The play of presence and absence. Linens and darkness. To the question “Woman, why are you weeping?” all she can blurt out is, “I do not know where they have laid him.” 

At the empty tomb we are given not answers, but a disposition. The invitation, the call, to look. Look. And look again with the eye of the heart. To enter into that place of darkness and dizziness and bewilderment and confess we do not know: “By love, God can be embraced and held, but not by thinking….” The call to look, to willingly befriend this unknowing, enter it. We gaze on that empty place between the Cherubim, gazing and not-knowing: the dancing flicker between the darkness and linens and the cloth rolled there, scrolled there, in a place by itself. Look. Look. Look again: like Cézanne at his beloved Mont Sainte Victoire: 36 paintings and 45 watercolors. Look. Look. Look again. Stay with the darkness, the emptiness. Stay here. Remain here. Watch here. And the promise that in that baffled staying and remaining and gazing into the darkness, the empty tombs that pock our lives–a depression, a loneliness, a grief, despair at a world gone mad–the promise that in that emptiness, that can’t be grasped, imaged, thought through, or resolved, something, someone,  is pregnant. Love kicking in that tomb, that womb, waiting to be born in us, with us, for us. A faith beyond mere pipsqueak belief that turns us slowly ‘round. 

Turns us slowly ‘round in hope, an over the shoulder glance, only to hear those words again, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” spoken by the gardener. But look. Look. Look again. Love Himself turning us ‘round, entering into dialogue, eager to wake us to his presence, hidden here, in the unlikeliest of places. We enter into that place of barrenness where words fail and the mind balks. We look and look and look and stay and remain there. And something turns us ‘round. Love’s ever present voice teasing us out of self-enclosure into relationship, exchange, encounter, not with an easy answer, but with a question that calls us into question (“Whom are you looking for?”); a question that makes a space for green-thumbed Love to meet us, to greet us, open us to the wondrous truth that God’s not done. 

Tombs turned to wombs. Red Sea turned a Royal Highway. The Cross a Tree of Life whose apple we are to take and eat and see that the Lord is good, good, very good. Crooked ways made straight even as we take life’s inevitable twists and turns: “Mary! Mary! Mary!” Her name, our name, spoken on Love’s lips, called from nothing, created anew on this first day of the week, the breezes rustling the olive trees. Let there be light. And there is. And it is good. Light that shines in the darkness that no darkness can swallow up for darkness is not dark to you, O God, my Lord, hidden as a gardener, speaking Mary’s name, your name, my name, calling us into life that is truly life: child of God, you are beloved just as you are.

And now Mary sees: “Rabbouni! Teacher!” She crumples against his chest, the scars on hands and feet and head and side glorious and shining “worn as an everlasting trophy of His victory.” No, Love’s not done. The joy, the bafflement, and the desire now to hold onto Him, to never let him go. But green-thumbed Love, hidden there in a gardener whispers, ““Do not hold on to me.” We wake to the indissoluble bond of love, know ourselves unshakeably spoken in each moment from Love’s lips, only in the open-handedness of letting go and letting be. “Let me go,” says green-thumbed Love, “so that I might ascend to the Father and thereby descend to the depths of your heart. Let me go so that ungrasped I might be all in all and never leave you comfortless, that ungrasped I might play, dance, and body forth in ten thousand places, face, and traces. Do not be afraid. Open your hands. Let yourself be loved.“

  And so she goes, as we go, from that dizzying darkness, from staring into that apparent absence framed by Cherubims with love now on our lips, “I have seen the Lord. I have heard my name this day spoken on his lips. And your name and yours and yours and yours. He is risen! And descended to the depths to make of earth a heaven. No longer boxed in the ark, penned up in some tabernacle, pinned behind a curtain. That’s torn in two top to bottom. He is with us. Here! In the heart. Whispering our name anew each moment: Mary! Mary! Mary!”

O death, where is your sting? O hell, where is your victory? Love’s not done. Alleluia! Christ is risen! Amen.