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Easter year A Sermon 

Luke tells us… she’d been delivered of seven demons by Jesus…she’d been rescued…
set free from the spiritual chains that bound her…
and kept her from living fully…

She’d trusted Jesus…made herself vulnerable to him…
accepted the healing he offered…and from that time on …Mary of Magdala…dedicated her time …
and her resources…in support of Jesus.

Along with other prominent women… all of them liberated and restored by Jesus… Mary Magdalene follows him with the disciples…and cares for them all… right to Jerusalem and the execution. [pause]

And while Gospel accounts of that third day do differ…
they all agree on one thing…This Mary is the only one named as a witness to all three events…
the crucifixion, the burial and resurrection.

So close is her relationship with Jesus… that two days before… Mary stands with his mother at the foot of the cross…accompanies his body to be buried …

and now John tells us …
Mary’s the first to discover the empty tomb.

She runs… to tell Peter and John

…they confirm her report of the missing body…
and they go home…[pause]

But Mary stays there… waiting and weeping… alone.

As she weeps… the story tells us…
she bends down to look again into the tomb…

and in her waiting…and her weeping…Mary Magdalene sees something… beyond the limits of imagination…
she sees two angels in white…sitting…
where only two days before she’d laid out the body of Jesus…

And she hears them speak… words… full of irony…

"Woman, why are you weeping?"

All she can tell them,,, through her tears…
is the body of the one she loved…has disappeared…
and she has no idea why... or where…
or who… might have taken it.

And at this Mary turns… and… behind her in the dim light of dawn… speaks a stranger…

Woman, why are you weeping?
Who are you looking for?

Assuming it’s just the gardener… Mary demands …
tell me where you put him, and I’ll take him away. [pause]

But then… the stranger speaks her name…

and through her tears… Mary recognises her beloved rabbi … and how she longs… to hold on…
to this precious moment …

But ever so gently Jesus… sends her back to the others with the good news…

'I rise…Jesus says…

tell them I’m ascending…I’m making my way…
to my Father and your Father,
to my God and your God.'"

And somehow… in this place of remarkable joy
warmth and relief…Mary gathers the strength
to leave Jesus in the garden… to wrench herself away…

And so the story goes…Mary is sent out from this
place of intimate encounter with the risen Christ…
with a mission… to tell the others how she’d seen him and touched him and what he told her. [pause]

And what about us?

Well, in the story of Mary Magdalene…
we discover a sequence of events… that might actually parallel and transform… our own journey with Jesus.

Just like Mary…somewhere along the line in our own lives… Jesus has attracted our attention…
 … maybe that’s the reason we’re here today…

And others will be here… because… like Mary…
Jesus has rescued them from a dark place…
And some of you have followed him like Mary did
and become part of his life…just as Jesus became part of theirs.

Still others of you… having experienced the exhilaration of such a close relationship…just like that it seems to die …We speak of this as the ‘dark night of the soul’ And in our sorrow we… wait by the tomb…
but that in itself doesn’t give us life

As we linger in this dark place…things come to us…
we see images…we hear words of consolation…
but we can’t understand them
because we’re still caught up in the world of death.

And like Mary it’s… only when these things reach deeply into our very identity…into who we really are… reaching into that place…
which lies even deeper than our grief…

its only then…that we discover who has greeted us.

It is the Christ!
The one we loved and lost… has returned to us transformed. And like Mary…male or female…
we fall into our brothers arms…

But the story doesn’t end there…

For that love to be truly fulfilled… both of us have to return to our source of loving. And our paths seems to diverge again…as Jesus finally ascends and as we are sent…to create the community that bears his name.
And in this community of faith…
new dimensions of love open up to us.

One of the gifts of the reflecting on the resurrection
is that it shows us dimensions of love we never thought possible.

Mary’s thought she’d reached the higher limits of love. She grieves the end of that love… by going to the tomb. To her surprise she finds it open and empty…and she is bereft.

And on our journey with Jesus …when we come to that place of emptiness…like Mary we are asked to wait and di you notice it’s when  Mary waits…
that the Christ comes to her.

Waiting in the emptiness… as even Jesus did on the cross…forces us to let go all our preconceptions…
of how love can present itself.

So when the risen Christ appears to Mary… she doesn’t recognise him…she thinks he’s the gardener.

You see…the resurrected Christ doesn’t re-appear in the high courts or throne rooms of worldly powers …neither does he attempt to dazzle Mary with special effects. The risen Christ doesn’t seek to impress
or to terrorise.

He just appears… in a simple ordinary way.
Whether Mary recognises him or not…he is there…

Mary is looking for Jesus…
but the risen Christ finds her…

My prayer is that where ever you are on your journey with Jesus…

If he’s just barely managed to get your attention…

or you’re maybe you’re waiting outside the tomb in despair…or if you’re enjoying in the presence of the Risen Christ

I pray that something in Mary’s story… will have touched your heart…warmed your spirit and brought you hope. 

[My thanks to Monty Williams SJ for the inspiration from his book The Gift of Spiritual Intimacy]