Easter Sunday sermon

The one Jesus loved

The gospel of John tells us that there were three people who were there to witness the empty tomb. They were Mary Magdalene, Peter or Simon Peter, and one other disciple – who is called simply “the one whom Jesus loved.”

 

Who was that unnamed disciple?  That’s a difficult question to answer, at least if you are looking for a historically accurate response.  The gospel itself is not very conclusive. It might have been the disciple John, as tradition has always suggested. 

 

Or perhaps it was one of Jesus’ followers who had good reason to hide their identity, like the Jewish teacher Nicodemus or the leader Joseph of Arimathea. They had something to protect by staying anonymous.

 

Or maybe it was another disciple or a follower, someone so insignificant that nobody actually remembered his or her name.  

 

Unfortunately, without actually being there, it seems that we will never really know who that unnamed disciple really was.

 

But this gap in our historic knowledge of the resurrection gives us a unique opportunity to answer the question from the perspective of faith instead of logic.  Who was that disciple that Jesus loved? Well, maybe that disciple is YOU! Maybe that disciple is ME! Maybe we are the ones who have witnessed the surprise and the mystery of the empty tomb.  Maybe we are the ones who find ourselves scratching our heads, not really understanding, but still sensing that somehow something wonderful has happened. Something so amazing that we will never completely understand it.

 

Does that sound too fanciful, or too unbelievable to be the truth? Maybe the experience of that resurrection seems so far-fetched that you could never really imagine it happening in your own life. I have no doubt that Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter must have felt the same way when they witnessed it. The gospel writers describe confusion and amazement and flat out disbelief in response to their witness: “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” 

 

In one of the gospels we are told the women who witnessed the empty tomb were so shocked that they went away afraid and told no one what they had seen. And in John’s gospel, even after Mary’s heart-felt testimony, “they still did not understand.”

 

Jesus’ friends were ordinary people, people like you and me,  But their lives were transformed by much more than just one single experience of the resurrection.  The Easter story was more to them than just a theoretical struggle to believe that their friend Jesus had been raised from the dead.  Instead it was the fulfilment of what they had already seen happen in their own lives, and indeed so many lives touched by the holiness and wholeness of Jesus’ faith.

 

Mary, Peter and that “other disciple” experienced God’s love over and over, transforming the lives of people being raised from death, and disease, despair, persecution and injustice. These were all resurrection experiences that had given their lives and their world new meaning. God’s love working through Jesus, and the people he touched.

 

Mary Magdalene, we read in scripture, was a woman terrorized by seven demons, experiencing what we would today call an emotional or mental illness. In fact, her life was broken by the illness itself, plus the added distress of the prejudice against her because of her illness.  In his travels Jesus came to Magdala, where Mary lived.  He healed her as he had healed many others before her. So Mary trusted her connection with Jesus.  And Mary knew the widest and most wonderful definition even before that morning at the empty tomb.  

 

And then there was Peter.  Once an ordinary fisherman, a man who worked with his hands. A man who believed only what he could see right in front of him.  Then Jesus came into his life, and started to show him amazing and surprising things. Things born of the Spirit, rather than tradition and logic. Peter saw the hungry fed, and the oppressed set free.  He was witness to miracles and healing.

 

Jesus had opened a whole new realm to Peter, not just out there in the world, but opening a whole new understanding of life IN HIS OWN Soul.  Peter never knew he had a spiritual side, until he met Jesus. So that was already a resurrection experience for him. The empty tomb simply fulfilled his understanding of God’s power at work in creation and in human life.

 

And the disciple “whom Jesus loved”? We can’t possibly know HOW Jesus transformed their life, when we don’t know who the person was. 

But we can take the place of that disciple at the empty tomb, as a witness to Jesus’ resurrection. We wouldn’t be here today if there was not some Easter story that took place in our own lives.  Like Mary and Peter, resurrection happens in the lives of ordinary people, if only we give God the credit for the new life we experience, even in the midst of grief, or conflict or suffering.

 

I’ve seen it happen in the life of a woman who was struggling with post partum depression as a first-time mother.  The contradictory messages she got from doctors and public health nurses, friends and family left her in a state of rage. She had this beautiful new baby to care for, and it had always been her dream. But she was absolutely overwhelmed by the decisions she had to make and the 24/7 responsibility and all the times when she just didn’t know what to do.

 

When the doctor said it was an emotional illness, she raged at him “This isn’t just a feeling, this is reality!” The more angry and anxious she felt, the more isolated she became.

 

Then she had a visit from a well-intentioned member of her church. After walking the baby until he fell asleep, and making the mother a cup of soothing herbal tea, the woman asked: “Will you have your baby baptized?” 

 

The younger woman was startled because the question made her think outside her own distress. “Can I trust God to help me care for this child? Maybe I’m not as alone as I thought.” It took time, but the fears gradually lifted. Whenever she felt the terror returning, she would say to herself: “We’re in God’s hands too.” And she found she could step out into the world again, knowing that she and her child would encounter beauty and trouble, sorrow and joy, but somehow they would cope with it. They were held in God’s hand through every season. So, in a way, even two thousand years later, she took the place of that unnamed disciple, the one that Jesus had loved and who witnessed resurrection in their own way.

 

It can also happen in the life of a community.  A young man was drowned while canoeing with friends at the family cottage. As always, there were lots of questions about how and why the accident had happened. Was alcohol involved? Were they wearing pfds? Why were they canoeing that part of the river, that time of the evening?

 

The family was weighed down with guilt and grief. They couldn’t even imagine going back to the cottage and were talking about selling the property when I visited with them to plan his funeral.

 

“He died doing what he loved,” his twelve year old sister said to her parents. “Maybe he did something stupid in the canoe, we all do stupid things. But he was in his favourite place in the whole world. I feel like I can talk to him here, and that makes me feel better.” I asked if I could say that at the funeral, and she told me “No, I’ll do it myself.”  I think the whole community experienced resurrection by her witness.

 

It can also happen in the life of a congregation. In the old Presbytery system, I used to pastoral relations and pastoral oversight work in the Presbyteries I served in Saskatchewan. One of the congregations had a minister who left very abruptly. It was for different reasons than what you have experienced here, but the grief and the anger, the questions and the frustration were all very similar. 

 

This was a little rural church, the majority of members were seniors, the Sunday school seemed to be in decline, the community around them was shrinking and they had already lost their school. 

 

I was asked to go to a congregational meeting to talk about the situation. Someone asked the question: “Should we just close the church and go worship in the next community?”

 I asked them whether they thought there was still ministry to be done there, whether they felt God still had a mission there. “Maybe we feel like giving up,” someone answered “but I don’t think God has given up on our village yet.”

 

And when they talked about what they would like to see happen, that grew into a calling or vocation for the congregation. And in the year that it took to get a new minister (that was the reality in Saskatchewan) they found ways to do ministry themselves and to represent God’s mission in that place. The minister who eventually came there was excited to see how they were already in ministry, and eager to become part of the team.  

 

They couldn’t change the demographics of what was happening around them. But they did start seeing signs of new life, and a depth of commitment and community that was built on love, rather than duty or guilt. 

 

So maybe they were the disciples that Jesus loved. Because they would also be really good witnesses to God’s spark of new life in a situation where they were thinking of death and closure.

 

The Easter we celebrate today is the same Easter that has been celebrated for two thousand years. It began as a witness to one extraordinary event. But it became the metaphor for many other transformations and surprises.

 

Not only did the resurrection transform Jesus from a dead martyr to a living saviour, it changed all the people touched by his story. A people of despair became a people of new life.

 

Simon Peter and Mary, John and every other friend of Jesus were convinced that it could be true.  They were convinced because Jesus heped them see how God was already gifiting them with new life, a kind of little resurrection in their own stories of death and suffering.

 

And we too take our place, as witnesses at the empty tomb. Whatever we may believe about the physical resurrection of Jesus after he died, whether we believe it to be a physical resuscitation or a life-giving metaphor, what really matters is what we do with that faith.

 

We are invited to witness to the Easter promise every time we hold up the hope of new life for someone else, every time we experience new life ourselves and tell the story so others will hear. We can never be that fist unnamed witness, at least not in a historically accurate way. In faith, however, we can give witness to the promise of new life. A new life born in us again and again, not only at Easter, but in every time and place. 

 

Praise God, hallelujah, forever and ever, Amen.