The Elusive Movement of Resurrection (Easter Sunday)

Reading, John 20:1-18
Image, Kateryna Kuziv (Ukrainian, 1993–), Mary Magdalene Stood Crying, 2021.

First, a poem, from one of the great post-WWII Jewish poets, Anthony Hecht:
It out-Herod’s Herod. Pray you, avoid it.
 
Tonight my children hunch
Toward their Western, and are glad   
As, with a Sunday punch,
The Good casts out the Bad.
 
And in their fairy tales
The warty giant and witch
Get sealed in doorless jails
And the match-girl strikes it rich.
 
I’ve made myself a drink.
The giant and witch are set
To bust out of the clink
When my children have gone to bed. -
 
All frequencies are loud
With signals of despair;
In flash and morse they crowd   
The rondure of the air.
 
For the wicked have grown strong,   
Their numbers mock at death,   
Their cow brings forth its young,   
Their bull engendereth.
 
Their very fund of strength,   
Satan, bestrides the globe;
He stalks its breadth and length   
And finds out even Job. -
 
Yet by quite other laws
My children make their case;   
Half God, half Santa Claus,   
But with my voice and face,
 
A hero comes to save
The poorman, beggarman, thief,   
And make the world behave   
And put an end to grief.
 
And that their sleep be sound   
I say this childermas
Who could not, at one time,   
Have saved them from the gas.
 
Hecht knew well the horrors of his century. He fought in WWII, was present at the liberation of Flossenbürg concentration camp, and was charged with interviewing its prisoners. He was well acquainted with the 20th century as Leonard Bernstein described it: a century of death. And yet, despite the gap in time, works such as Hecht’s resonate with us still, because judging from these last 26 years, the C21st seems so determined to share that mantle.
 
This might appear a peculiar place to begin the Easter Sunday message. And yet, the Day of Resurrection, as the gospel passage makes clear, begins in darkness: Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb. Mary begins her day in the grip of death and grief, the shadow of loss and mortality, of finitude and failure.

And Mary’s morning goes from bad to worse. The stone has been rolled away and the body of the Lord taken. She runs to the disciples, she runs back to the tomb, frantically searching for the body of Jesus. Indeed, all her early dialogue in the passage concerns this loss: First to Peter: They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him / Then to the angels: They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him / And finally to the gardener: Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.
 
It is little wonder then that she clings fiercely to his resurrected body. Is it not the case for all of us weighed down by death, fear, stress, loss, and unknowing that when we get a glimmer of hope, of promise, of joy, of life that we cling to it! Hold it in place, keep it close at hand.
 
This is why we can cling to fairy tales and westerns, to the image and promise of a hero come to save, righting wrongs, sealing up baddies, and putting an end to everything but happily ever after. Amidst the unceasing cavalcade of bad news a simple story of good beats bad can become something to cling to, to hold up against the tide. 
 
But resurrection (like faith, hope, love, joy) is not something that can be clung to. We cannot put it behind glass and preserve it in stasis. All the resurrection stories point immediately to movement. In Mark, Jesus isn’t even at the tomb, just a young man telling the women that Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee. Likewise in Matthew an angel tells the women that Jesus is going ahead, and even when Jesus suddenly appears before them, he just repeats the message they are to tell the others to go to Galilee where they will see him. In Luke, we get a similar scene and the immortal lines why do you look for the living among the dead, as well as the walk to Emmaus where Jesus only becomes recognisable in the final instant at the table before vanishing from sight. There is an elusive movement to the resurrection appearances. Even in John, where we have the longest scene with Jesus at the tomb, not only does he tell Mary not to cling, but the moment he appears to Mary has a strange quality where the location of Jesus is kind of impossible to pin down.
 
Let me quickly demonstrate: As [Mary] wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying. So Mary is looking into the tomb… They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘They have taken away my Lord…’ When she had said this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there… Ok, so she is now looking away from the tomb at Jesus… but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him ….’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni!’ Where is Mary looking at this point? She was facing the Jesus as the gardener, but then hearing Jesus she turns back, seemingly to the tomb where the angels were and the body wasn’t to see Jesus and exclaim Rabbouni!
 
Jesus seemingly is both in the tomb and out, both among the living and the dead. And while a whole Easter Sunday sermon could revel in the wonders of this mystery, I cite it simply as another example of the strangeness of these resurrection scenes, their elusive movement, the inability to hold them down, to press them into shape, to cling to them and keep them still. Resurrection is not like anything else; its strangeness and mystery cannot be denied.
 
It is perhaps for this reason that those fairy tales and westerns feel, for Hecht, so hopeless against the reproducing evils of the world. They are stuck in place, contained within the neat packaging of morality tales. The kids go to bed thinking all is quiet, oblivious to the loud signals of despair that ring through the night. The kids go to bed thinking all is settled, oblivious to the restlessness of evil busting from the clink. To be clear, such is the prerogative of children. But as we put away childish things, the static neatness of these stories becomes a flimsy thing to cling to in the face of evil and the wake of horrors.
 
And so, what I want to say, is that for the resurrection to hold its power, for the resurrection to remain a site of hope and resistance in the face of evil and death, it too must be able to bust out of the clink of our own expectations and imaginations. It cannot be reduced to the neatness of a fairy tale or Hollywood western. The resurrected Christ must remain unpossessable, himself striding out across the breadth and length of the world leading us on into the work of life, mercy, hope, and justice. The resurrected Christ is not an object or story we can have and hold, that we can press like a flower or butterfly and frame on our wall. The resurrected Christ is one we must always be turning to see and find anew. Turning to see and find at the table, in the body of the church, and in the least of these (the hungry, thirsty, the stranger, the imprisoned – who society is all too ready to teach us to turn away from).
 
Because this captures something of the chilling power of that final stanza:
And that their sleep be sound  
I say this childermas
Who could not, at one time,  
Have saved them from the gas.
Hecht had seen the true horrors of his age, and like many who did, knew the problem this posed for easy appeals to cheap hope, to the goodness and power of God, to the promise of providence, and the best of all possible worlds. This stanza reminds us that if the resurrection is reduced to something pat and pithy, a trump card we trot out to silence all griefs, woes, worries, and complaints, it will become as empty and hollow as those TV westerns and Santa Claus faced heroes.
 
The elusive movement, the tremendous mystery of these scenes of resurrection (which so often mix the hard-won relief, hope, and joy with fear and astonishment) point out beyond themselves to what is coming, to what we are called to do: the work that awaits us in the manner and image of Christ. It is this movement that is essential to keeping resurrection hope from being reduced to something cheap and shallow, unable to bear the weight of the woes and wounds of the world. The death and resurrection of Jesus is the central mystery of our faith, the cornerstone on which we build a life. It is very understandable then that we, like Mary, wish to cling to it, to hold it fast, to keep it still and stable, able to be possessed like an object (fixed and unchanging). But we are dealing with something living, not dead, something dynamic, not plastic, something in motion, not static. The resurrection of Jesus is something we have to keep turning to see, keep moving to catch up with, keep imitating to understand. It is in the strange fullness of its mystery that the true beauty of the resurrection comes into view, and so seen, is able to offer real promise and hope for those who, like Mary at the beginning of that day, wake while it is still dark.

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[1] Anthony Hecht, ‘It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It’, Collected Earlier Poems (1990). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49087/it-out-herods-herod-pray-you-avoid-it