Acts 10.34-43, Matthew 28.1-10
Queen Camel, Weston Bampfylde, Easter Day, 20 April 2014
Are you a morning person?
Mary Magdelene and the other Mary must have been morning people, for they rose before dawn on the first day of the week to go and see the tomb where they had laid Jesus to rest two days before.
They were morning people - but what sort of morning people? Either the sort who get up early simply because they can’t sleep - for anxiety, sickness of the heart or mind? Or the sort who can’t stay in bed because they are so keen to grasp the potential of a bright new day - lovers of life, longing to get out and embrace it?
They could have been either sorts of morning people, these two Marys - restless throughout the Sabbath, recalling the terrible events of the day before, sleepless for fear of what may have happened to Jesus’ body. Or, their hearts believing what they had heard Jesus tell them - that he would rise on the third day - not wanting to waste a moment to go and discover whether this joyful event had occurred.
It’s quite possible that they might have been all these things combined - for as you and I know, our inner life seldom runs smoothly, and especially at times of crisis we fluctuate between hopelessness and hopefulness, anxiety and assuredness, joyfulness and fear. No doubt that Mary Magdalene, the other Mary and all the disciples who shared in the revelation of the risen Jesus, would continue to feel a combination of these things that day. Indeed Matthew tells us that after the angel had given them the resurrection message, ‘They left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy’.
There’s a deeper sense in which we can say that these two women were morning people.
They were morning people because they had embraced the good news of God’s kingdom in their lives; they had seen its power at work personally and in the new community of believers to which they belonged; and that morning they had seen its power at work more clearly than ever - resurrection power, the power to overcome death.
Mary Magdalene first embraced the good news of God’s kingdom and seen his resurrection power at work, when Jesus cleansed her of "seven demons" [1]. It was some form of mental or physical illness she was suffering - an illness which would have caused her to be excluded from the rest of society, ostracised because in her madness or sickness they would have dubbed her ‘unclean’. When Jesus healed her he revealed the nature of the kingdom of God - that it was a way of life in which the excluded ones were now included. When Jesus healed her she felt the power of the resurrection change her life - she was whole in body and mind - and in status too, fully restored to society - and in that moment her life began again.
And the woman who Matthew calls ‘the other Mary’ - who was she? Not Jesus’ mother, or Matthew would surely have said. Perhaps Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who had once anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair and to whom Jesus revealed his resurrection power when he raised Lazarus from the dead. [2].
It is perhaps more likely that ‘the other Mary’ is the one Matthew earlier mentions being with Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross when Jesus died, and at the tomb when they placed his body there - ‘Mary the mother of James and Joseph’. [3] We know nothing else about this Mary - except that she was clearly part of the first group of those who had embraced Jesus’ teachings about the kingdom of God, grasped its significance and felt its power in their lives. A morning person, for it had dawned on her that in Christ she was a new person - not constrained by the laws which radically diminished the role of women in that society, but raised to the same level as all the other believers. This Mary, like all the other women in Jesus’ company, and all the other outsiders and ordinary folk he embraced, experienced the new reality of God’s kingdom which Paul later expressed to the Galatians: that in Christ ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ [4]
Morning people are those who have been resurrected to a whole new way of seeing the world. No longer contained by tribal identities, no longer limited by their gender or class or constrained by their political or religious identity, but many different people, all one in Christ.
Morning people are those who have been resurrected to a whole new way of being in the world. Now able to embrace as brother and sister those who they would previously have avoided, or demonised, or fought. In a community where all the old tribal barriers have disappeared, all the old anxieties raised by our grasping at the things we feel necessary to keep our place in the tribe have disappeared, to be replaced by a generosity of spirit which is based on nothing in this world except the way of Christ’s kingdom breaking in by the power of the resurrection.
We can be like the two Marys, morning people full of fear and great joy at the new life which Jesus invites us now to live. A challenging life in its rejection of all the dreams we hold for our status and our comfort, and its invitation to embrace the way of God’s kingdom which Jesus taught in his parables and sermons. A radical life in its rejection of our identity as members of a particular class, or club, or nation, or faith, and its invitation to see Christ in all people, to find Christ in community with people radically not like us.
We can be like the two Marys: or we can be like the guards - morning people who only feel fear, for Matthew tells us that when they saw the angel at the empty tomb, ‘For fear of him [they] shook and became like dead men’.
No wonder they shook - for the angel’s appearance was unlike anything these guards would have ever seen, something outside their ordered world of rote and rule, of fixed identities and lines of command. And even worse - they shook for the sight of the empty tomb, the tomb they had been ordered to guard closely for their commanding officers’ concern that any loss of that particular body would cause great trouble for them in the restless ferment of Jerusalem at Passover time.
Fearing for their punishment, the guards were way too scared of the angel and his announcement to perceive the power of the kingdom of God to release them from their captivity to their ordered, limited world into a new social order eclipsing all they had ever seen or known. It’s a fear which many of us share when woken to the claims of the kingdom of God and the power of the resurrection, for it is hard to leave behind the security of our old ways of being and allow ourselves ‘to be transformed by the renewing of our minds’ (as Paul puts it [5]) and to embrace Christianity not as a tribal thing, not as a class thing, not as a means to get us to heaven, but rather something which will do that but first will liberate our relationships with others on earth so that we experience heaven here and now and forever, and death becomes just a stage on our joyous journey.
The good news of Easter is that, like Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, we can be morning people - full of fear and great joy at the news of the resurrection, embracing the way of God’s kingdom.
The world needs these sort of morning people today: the sort of people who when they step out of bed each day, have one foot in the kingdom of this earth, in the society in which they live and work, and one foot in the kingdom of God whose resurrection power they have embraced and whose ways they seek to follow. For them, eternal life has already come, it’s for their future but it is also for here and now, in the way they live their lives to and for others.
They are the ones equipped to shake the world out of its destructive patterns of tribalism and misplaced desire, to help humanity to find new ways of being together. These are the Desmond Tutu’s and the Pope Francis’s of the world - and they don’t just live in bishop’s palaces, people like them live in villages like these, they sit in pews like these, you’re among them today.
Do not be afraid. I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is risen. Go ahead and look for him. You will find him. This is the good news of Easter: we can be morning people. Halleluia!
Notes
[1] See Luke 8:2 and Mark 16:9
[2] John 11.1-45
[3] Matthew 27.55-61
[5] Romans 12:2
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