It Takes Love to Recognize Resurrection
An Easter sermon (from a few years ago)
Christ is risen—but it takes love to recognize Christ’s risen presence.
John’s gospel is known for its theme of love. Here are some highlights of what love looks like from John’s gospel lens: God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son. This Son, the same Word that was with God in the beginning (John 1:2), radiated divine light in hopeless places. Jesus had a spiritual consultation with a troubled religious leader named Nicodemus by night (John 3). He traveled to enemy territory and sat at a well for a life-changing conversation with a Samaritan woman (John 4). A man in the Jewish temple had been lying on a mat, sick, for thirty-eight years, praying that God would hear his prayer (John 5). Even though it was the Sabbath, Jesus prioritized healing and life rather than religious rule-keeping. He said to the man, “Stand up, take your mat, and walk.” Jesus fed five thousand hungry people (John 6). He spit on the ground and wiped mud on a blind man’s face so he could see (John 9). He lingered outside dead Lazarus’s tomb, and with faith that nothing can separate us from God’s love, not even death itself, he shouted for Lazarus to “Come Out!” (John 11) On the eve of his death, Jesus demonstrated God’s self-giving love by kneeling on the ground and washing his disciples’ dust-caked feet (John 13). Then he launched into a so-called farewell discourse in which he summed up his entire teaching with one commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).
In John’s resurrection story (chapter 20), Mary’s love compelled her to vigil outside Jesus’ tomb as early as she could after the Sabbath sundown. She saw the stone missing and sensed something was not quite right. Resurrection was not foremost on her mind. Rather, she was thinking: “what did those Romans do with the body?” She spread her panicked announcement to Simon Peter and to the disciple John says Jesus loved. Peter and this man had a race to the tomb. We’re meant to infer that love itself sped up the unnamed disciple’s feet. He outran Peter and got there first. He saw the dead body’s linen wrappings lying there, notably without a body, and paused. He paused while Peter, never one to hesitate when action can be taken, strolled right into the empty tomb. John doesn’t tell us Peter’s response, but he does tell us how the other disciple responded, the one whose heart and feet were set on fire. This disciple entered in, took a look around, and believed. The content of his belief was not clear yet—who knew that God would raise their teacher from the dead? Yet the love of God that this disciple experienced through and with Jesus somehow enabled him to see that this was not a case of a stolen corpse. This was a case of the glory of God forging a way where there was no way.
Photo by César Couto on Unsplash
While this drama took place, Mary stood by the tomb weeping. Unlike Peter, who denied his discipleship when the situation heated up, Mary Magdalene had been present all the way through the bloody end. John named Jesus’ inner circle in chapter 19 by those who tarried at the cross’s tortured scene: there was the disciple whom Jesus loved and there were three Marys as well. There was the woman we associate as Mary, Jesus’ mother, although John doesn’t name her; there was Mary his mother’s sister; and there was Mary Magdalene.
A day later, Mary Magdalene was still grieving her lost love. After Peter and the unnamed disciple headed off, Mary peaked into the tomb and saw two angels where her Rabbi’s dead body should have been. Was this encouraging, or terrifying, or both? They asked her, “Why are you weeping?” (John 20:15). She repeated her panicked claim that the body had been stolen: “They’ve taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Then she turned around and bumped into the gardener. We, the readers, are let in on the secret—wink, wink—that this was no ordinary gardener, that this was the Divine Gardener, the Risen Christ. Mary didn’t recognize Jesus’ clothes or his person, but the love of God that Mary experienced through and with Jesus readied her to recognize her teacher’s voice, alive, calling her by name: “Mary!”
It’s very easy to miss recognizing the Risen Christ. For those who value the life of the mind, and I consider myself in this camp, it’s easy to use reason as a way of keeping distance from the resurrection. Progressive rationalists often dismiss resurrection as a fairy tale, a myth to be “demythologized” or something impossible to be rejected. But the temptation towards intellectual dismissal itself impedes our vision of God. If we encounter the Resurrection only at the level of historical criticism or scientific speculation of what can and cannot happen to dead bodies, we miss the point. It’s an urbane cynicism that is all too common. An emotional skepticism of Easter’s buoyant beauty often sets in. So few of us fall in love as Mary or the beloved disciple did.
Yet this story tells the universal truth that love entails loss. That’s why we pledge in marriage vows to stick together in sickness and in health, in poverty and in riches, until death itself does us part. Why should it be any different with God?
In Jeremiah’s time of Babylonian exile and deportation, the Israelites lamented their perceived abandonment by YHWH. Jeremiah, like John’s beloved disciple, and like Mary Magdalene, saw the almost imperceptible truth: “the people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness. Then he continues: “Thus says the Lord, I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 21:2–3). It turns out that the experiences of exile and loss have all been undergirded by a covenantal, mutual love, a love that transcends turmoil by abiding in the midst of it.
The love that recognizes Resurrection is not Easter bunny chocolate or cheer. In John’s gospel, Jesus modeled a love that abided with God through thick and thin. In chapter 15, Jesus and his disciples recited their spiritual marriage vows. He told them: “Abide in me as I abide in you” (John 15:4–11). John used this Greek phrase forty times in his gospel. Abiding for John is this central theme of reciprocal, flowing love between our hearts and God’s heart regardless of circumstance.
It’s one thing to join trumpet blast and angelic chorus on Resurrection morning; it’s quite another thing to wait by the cross and wail. It’s all too easy to give up on love when it becomes inconvenient. At the first sight of adversity, not to mention the horror of crucifixion, many of us flee or deny. However, Mary’s abiding love, the love that recognizes Jesus’ voice is a love that stays in the game. It’s a love that sustains us through grief and lingers in vulnerability while it is pierced in the side. This love faces sleepless nights, and it runs to the empty tomb with feet afire. It’s with this very same abiding love that we fall into the arms of the resurrected Christ, and with which we perceive that God is making all things new. Even and especially now.
This opening line is a great summary of all of John's Gospel. I've come to cherish it the most of the four because of how relational it is. I love all the stories of arguing with his mother at Cana, Nicodemus, the woman at the well, the man at the pool of Bethsaida, Mary and Martha at the death of Lazarus, and with Peter around foot washing, and forgiving and restoring Peter at the end. It fleshes out the teachings.
A wonderful day, thank you and Happy Easter!