Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 4, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It was the women first. In all four Gospels it was the women who saw him first. In all four Gospels Mary Magdalene saw him, sometimes by herself as in the passage from John that we just heard, sometimes with other women. But it was always the women who saw him first. That’s a striking fact about these Resurrection stories. The Gospels, all but Luke anyway, were written by and for Jews. All of them were written in a world where the dominant culture was Greek. Neither the Jewish culture of that day nor the Greek one had much time for women. They were strongly patriarchal cultures. Men ruled, women obeyed. Men were the human norm. Women were somehow less than that, sort of defective humans. Ancient sexism really was that bad. Men spoke with authority in the community. Women hardly spoke at all. People listened to men. No one listened to women outside the home. Yet the risen Christ appeared first to women. He made women the first Apostles when he sent them to tell the others of his resurrection. He appeared to the men and made them apostles too, but that was later. First it was the women.

Recently I’ve been wondering why. Why in all four Gospels is the women who see and recognize the risen Christ first? It could be mere coincidence, I suppose; but I don’t think so. Not in the highly patriarchal cultures that produced these stories. The Gospel writers would have had him appear to the men first if they could have. Apparently they couldn’t because everyone knew that he appeared to the women first. They had to tell the story that way because that’s how it happened. And because that’s how it happened there must be lesson in it for us. It must have some meaning for us. What might that meaning be?

Let’s start with what happened that day. A man rose from the dead. He had been dead, now he wasn’t. To say the least, that’s a bit outside of our normal human experience. It’s not what we expect. When people die, they stay dead; only he didn’t. The tomb was empty. Even the men could see that. When, in John’s version of the story, Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved looked into the tomb, they could see that it was empty. And they could see the grave clothes still there, which probably meant the tomb hadn’t been broken into by grave robbers. Grave robbers would have taken the valuable cloth. They couldn’t explain it, so they shrugged their shoulders and went home. They were the men. They knew how things were supposed to be. Their society had told them all their lives that they were the authorities; and it had told them all their lives how things are. They couldn’t explain it, but they weren’t really open to anything that wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. So they didn’t stick around to see what might happen. They went home, expecting things to be the way they knew things were. They were the men. They knew what was possible, and the strangeness of this situation, an empty tomb that hadn’t been robbed, wasn’t enough to shake them out of their certainty that they knew what was possible.

Not so with the women. The women were marginalized in their own society, but Jesus had not marginalized them. He had included them. Although the Christian tradition, in its own extreme sexism, turned her into a prostitute, something the Bible never says of her, Mary Magdalene clearly was one of Jesus’ closest disciples, a member of the inner circle, a fully accepted and valued member of the community. So she wasn’t invested in things the way they were. She knew that there were new possibilities in Jesus. Unlike the men, she was open to wonder. She was open to God doing a new thing. She grieved. Yes, she truly and deeply grieved the death of the one who had showed her the wonder, who had opened to her God’s new possibilities. But much more so than the men she was open to the possibility that even in the death of Jesus God might be doing a new thing. That’s how it was with her. That’s how it was with the other women who had followed Jesus. Unlike the men, who shrugged their shoulders and went home, they were open to wonder. Because they were open to wonder, they were the first ones who saw him. They were the first ones who recognized him. They were the first ones to whom he showed himself risen from the grave.

And here’s the important thing for us this morning. The Gospel stories of Jesus rising from the tomb, of the men shrugging their shoulders and going home, and the women being open to wonder and to God’s new things, aren’t just about something that happened to other people a long time ago in a place far away. They are about us. They invite us in and make us participants in them. They invite us ask: Who am I in this story? Which of these characters best describes me and how I am? All Bible stories do that, and a very wise person once told me that if, when we enter into a Bible story, we immediately identify with Jesus we’d better think again. We aren’t Jesus. But who are we in this story? Are we, whatever our gender, the men who shrugged their shoulders and went home? Or are we, whatever our gender, the women who were open to the wonder of it all?

If I’m honest with myself I have to admit that I am mostly the men who shrugged their shoulders and went home. I suspect that many of you are too. The story of Jesus’ resurrection is so hard to believe. It’s so much easier to shrug our shoulders and go home than it is to enter into the wonder, into the awe, into the glory of it all. It’s so easy, for me anyway, to go into my head and analyze it, parse it, dissect it, think about it too much. And then in our, or at least my, usual rationalistic way of thinking dismiss it. It’s really hard to be open to the wonder.

The story of Jesus’ resurrection this morning invites us to ask: What is it that is keeping us from being open to the wonder of Christ’s resurrection? Is it our overly rationalistic way of thinking? Or is it something deeper than that? I can’t say what it is for you, but here are some possibilities. Are you too deep in grief to see possibility beyond death? Many of us, myself included, have been there. Are you too laden down with the burdens of the day—illness, family troubles, money troubles—to look up and see life beyond the burdens? Many of us, myself included, have been there. Are you afraid of the newness of life that the resurrection promises, or perhaps with which it threatens us? Are you so sure that you know what is possible and what isn’t that there isn’t room for something new? Transformation can be scary, so comfortable do we become in our old ways of being and thinking. Maybe there’s something else that’s getting in the way of your being open to wonder.

Well, the challenge of Easter is for us to set aside whatever it is that is getting in the way and learn to be open to wonder. Learn to be open to the new things that God is always doing. Learn to stand not in judgment but in awe of what God can do in the world and in our lives. God raised Jesus from the grave. Who are we to say that God can’t do something new in our lives too? God gave Jesus live after the grave. Who are we to say that God can’t give us new life during this life? God seeks to lead us to new life no matter what it is that is keeping us from living fully and freely, the way God hopes we will live. But God can do that only if we can set aside all the barriers that we throw up to the new things that God seeks to do with us. God can do that only if we, like the women at the empty tomb, are open to wonder. Are we ready? Amen.