April 9, 2023, Easter 6:00 Service, John 20:1-18

“Whom are you looking for?” Jesus asks Mary Magdalene.  She’s looking for him, of course!  But in this somewhat comic scene from John’s gospel, she doesn’t recognize him.  There is a lot behind that question though.  It is a question for us as well.

“Whom are you looking for?”  Who are you looking for when it comes to Jesus?  Perhaps another version of that question is, what do you expect from Jesus?  It is a question for all of humanity and for all of time.

“Whom are you looking for?” is a question that comes up a number of times in John’s gospel.  It is first asked by Jesus all the way back in 1:38.  He asks it of his very first disciples when they come to him.  Though the NRSV translates it as, “What are you looking for?” it is the same question. 

Whom are you looking for when you come to Jesus?  Various people in John’s gospel come looking for various things.  Those first disciples are looking for the Messiah.  Some say he is: the Son of God, the King of Israel, the Lamb of God, the Savior of the World.

Indeed, he is all of those things.  What no one looks for though is the Crucified One.  That one is beyond human imagination, and really beyond human comprehension.  What sort of a God is it who gets himself shamefully arrested and killed, after all?  What does that say about God’s power and God’s ways?  What does it say about a God who will go through all this?

When Mary is in the garden looking for Jesus she is looking for the corpse of her dead rabbi.  She had been living in some sort of hope that Jesus was more than just a rabbi who would get killed.  But she had seen it.  He had lost.  He had failed.  End of story.  He must not be who she hoped he was. 

There is little wonder then when the resurrected Jesus meets her face to face she doesn’t recognize him.  It is only when he calls her by name that she does.

And yet, does she even then truly recognize him?  Right after she calls Jesus “Rabbouni” his next words are, “Do not hold on to me…”

Why?  Why should she not hold on to him?  Has he suddenly developed an aversion to hugs?

“Whom are you looking for?”  She is still looking for Jesus as she has known him, the old Jesus: the charismatic preacher and teacher, the worker of miracles, the great promise for the future, the triumphant one through power.

She is not yet looking for Jesus as the triumphant one through loss and death.  The crucified Jesus has revealed something new about God that has to be grasped.

I suspect that many people, us included, are looking for Jesus as someone who is somehow above the struggles and trials of life.  We are looking for a Jesus who is someone who will make everything better.  We want a Jesus who will take away our pain.  We want a Jesus who will –poof- make our struggles disappear; because we are good… because that is what God does for faithful people.  Just make life better, sweeter, more pleasant.  To this list my colleague Rev. Johanna Rehbaum adds, “We want a Jesus who makes sense, who doesn’t act against our logic and our scientific brains.”

When I was a child growing up my grandparents and many of that age from the World War 2 generation loved the hymn In the Garden.  It is a little hymn about a stroll with Jesus in a garden.  It is a sweet and gentle time.  The refrain goes, “And he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own.  And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.”

That hymn was written by Justin Miles in 1913.  It is based on the encounter Jesus has with Mary Magdelene in the garden.  While I respect the way it had helped people develop faith and understand a relationship with Jesus, the hymn itself is theological garbage.  Jesus does not tarry with Mary.  He says not to hold on to him.  He sends her off with a message for the other disciples.  And she goes.

The hymn has pretty much fallen out of favor these days, and it is so theologically flawed that I’m not aware of any attempts to rework it into something better.

Ironically, the hymn’s greatest theological flaw is what made it so popular.  Mary Magdalene would have liked nothing more than to stay there with Jesus for the day gently walking and talking.  It would have been pleasant time with: nice Jesus, sweet Jesus, protective Jesus.  I think that is a yearning we all have deep within ourselves.  We’d like life to be a pleasant time with our loving God – a close walk in a peaceful garden with contentment and safety and goodness.  That indeed would be a nice life.

Whom are you looking for?  If that is the god you are looking for you won’t recognize the real Jesus.  The real Jesus does not rescue you from life’s problems, nor does he solve them.  Instead of that Jesus willingly gets down with you wherever you are in whatever state you are in.  God never says come up to my level.  God comes to your level.

Whom are you looking for?  That’s a very different version of God than we would expect.  God is bigger and better than anything earth can provide.  God is mysterious, perplexing, enigmatic, and wonderful all the same.

Whom are you looking for?  How about the Abiding One?  One of the key words in John’s gospel is the word abide.  It appears 34 times!  People are always asking where Jesus is abiding, dwelling.  He is always abiding with people… wherever, however.

The resurrected Jesus does not save us from the problems of the world.  The resurrected Jesus abides with us in those places.  God came to save the world, but not by erasing its principles and making it into a sweet nice place for everyone.  God is saving the world through authentically entering it and inviting his followers to live by love, even when it makes no sense.

There are a lot of hymns based on John’s gospel.  While In the Garden gets John’s gospel wrong, one that gets it right is Abide with Me.  We sang that at the 8:30 service a few weeks ago.  We’re going to sing it again this morning.  It is also a sweet hymn but one that has solid theology behind it.  And despite being a couple hundred years old it is showing it has what it takes to endure the test of time.  Though it is not an Easter hymn, it is proving to be an abiding hymn.

Whom are you looking for?  Who is Jesus?  Who is this resurrected Jesus?  How does he work in our lives?  What does he do for us?  This hymn answers those questions.  He is the Abiding One.  Because he is the Abiding One we are, like Mary Magdalene, sent to proclaim his resurrected abiding presence.