During our years in Russia, we celebrated Easter with our friends there according to the Orthodox calendar. This year, Easter on that calendar is this coming Sunday. Easter blessings to all of you who are in the midst of awaiting Easter Sunday on April 12.
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| Screenshot from Mary Magdalene. Source. |
A few days ago, Friend Ellerie Brownfain sent me her thoughts about Easter. I loved them! I hope and imagine you may find them as insightful and helpful as I did. With her permission, here they are:
Easter Message
There is a moment in John's account of Easter morning that I keep returning to. Mary Magdalene has come to the tomb before dawn and finds it empty. She weeps. Not for joy. Mary weeps because she believes someone has taken the body of her teacher and she does not know where they have laid him.
Turning, she sees a man standing nearby and assumes he is the gardener.
I have to say, if I had been there, I might have made exactly the same mistake. Though probably for different reasons. I cannot grow anything. Not even succulents. I buy the seeds and I read the instructions and I have genuine hope every single spring. And then somewhere between hope and harvest the plants just give up on me. But I keep trying. Every year. Because there is something in me that believes growth is worth the effort even when I have clearly lost the argument.
So when I read that Mary looked straight at the risen Christ and saw a gardener, I feel a kind of kinship with her. I know what it is to show up hoping something will grow and be surprised by what you find.
Mary says to him, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him and I will take him.
This is a deeply human impulse. She is not looking for a miracle. She is looking for a way to say goodbye.
And then the man says her name.
Mary.
And she knows.
Mary reaches for him. And he says something that has always struck me as one of the most important lines in all of scripture. He says, do not hold on to me.
Do not hold on to me.
I want to sit with that for a moment because I think it is near the center of what Easter asks of us.
Mary came to the garden looking for the Jesus she had known, the teacher who walked the roads of Galilee, who ate with her, who taught her, who died on a Roman cross. Wanting to recover him. Wanting things to go back to the way they had been.
And the risen Christ says, do not hold on to that. I am not returning to what was. I am going forward. And you must go forward too.
. . .
This is the thing about resurrection that we can miss if we are not careful. We can treat it as a restoration story. The happy ending after a terrible Friday. The tomb is empty, the crisis is over, and life resumes. But life did not resume. Not the old life. The resurrection did not restore anything. It transformed everything.
But resurrection is not restoration. It is transformation.
Paul makes this plain in his letter to the Romans. He writes that we who have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into his death. We were buried with him. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
Newness of life. Not the old life resumed. Not a return to what was before. Something genuinely new.
Paul is talking about baptism but he is also talking about the shape of the Christian life itself. We do not follow a historical teacher who is safely in the past. We follow a living Christ who is present and active and always calling us forward.
George Fox understood this in his bones. When he spoke of Christ having come to teach his people himself, he was not speaking metaphorically. He meant that the risen Christ is here. Available. Present in the gathered meeting, present in the conscience, present wherever two or three are gathered in his name. The resurrection was not only a past event for Fox. It was a present reality. Christ is alive and moving in this moment.
The resurrection is not just something that happened to Jesus. It is something that is always happening in this Society of Friends. Christ is always being raised in us and among us. And we are always being called to walk in that newness.
So what does this mean for how we live? I want to name three things.
. . .
The first is this. Resurrection frees us from the tyranny of the way things were.
Mary could not have gone and told the disciples if she had stayed in the garden holding on. Letting go of what she came looking for was the only way to receive what was actually being given. And then she went. The first preacher of the resurrection. That is not a small thing. The first person sent to announce that Christ was risen was a woman whom the other disciples initially did not believe.
She carried the news to people who would not even believe her. She could only do that because love recognized love. She heard her name and she knew him. And knowing him was enough.
We do this too. We hold on to how things used to feel. How our families used to be. How our faith used to be simple and clear and certain. We come to Easter looking for something to retrieve rather than something to receive.
The risen Christ says, do not hold on. Something new is being offered. And it requires your hands to be open.
This does not mean that what we have lost was not precious. Mary's grief was real. The disciples' grief was real. Ours is real. But resurrection says that grief is not the destination. The garden is not where we stay.
. . .
The second thing resurrection means for how we live is this. We are sent.
Jesus does not tell Mary to stay in the garden and rest in the warmth of this moment. He tells her to go. Go to the brothers and sisters. Tell them what you have seen. You have been given this not only for yourself but for the community.
Easter is not a private experience. It pushes us onto the road to speak and to act. But what action? That is the question we must bring to God in prayer and carry into the silence of our own hearts. The risen Christ commissions us but he does not hand us a script. He trusts us to listen for what we are each being called to do and to go do it.
What have you seen? What has the risen Christ given you that was meant to be shared? That is an Easter question worth sitting with in the silence.
Because the risen Christ does not appear to Mary so that she can have a beautiful private moment. He appears to her so that she will go. So that the news will travel. So that the locked room where the frightened disciples are hiding will have its door knocked on by someone who has seen something they need to hear.
You have seen something too. This community has seen something. The question Easter puts to us is whether we are willing to go and say so.
. . .
The third thing I want to name is perhaps the most personal. Resurrection means we are not defined by our worst moments or our deepest losses. And if you doubt that, look at who Christ came back to. He came back looking for his disciples. The ones who had run. Peter had denied Jesus three times and wept bitterly over it. They were in hiding, behind locked doors, afraid and ashamed and probably not sure what to do next. Easter morning does not erase any of that. The gospel does not pretend Friday did not happen. But the risen Christ did not seek out the faithful and the steady. He went looking for the ones who thought they had failed him.
But it says that Friday is not the last word. Death is not the last word. Failure is not the last word. Grief is not the last word.
The risen Christ appears first to the ones who are weeping. He shows up in locked rooms where frightened people are hiding. He walks alongside two disciples on the road to Emmaus who are so deep in their grief that they do not recognize him until he breaks bread with them. He meets people where they are and then he moves them forward.
This is not cheap comfort. It does not minimize the weight of suffering. It does not tell us our pain is not real. It says our pain is real and it is not the end of the story.
Paul puts it this way. If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. United with him. Not observers from a safe distance. Participants in the same movement from death to life. That is what we are being invited into this morning.
I want to close by coming back to Mary standing in the garden.
She heard her name spoken by someone she had believed was dead. She recognized him. She reached for him. He told her not to hold on. And she went.
There is a whole life of faith in those few verses. We come to God carrying our grief and our need and our desire to make things go back. We encounter the living Christ in ways we did not expect and often in places we did not think to look. We want to hold the moment. And the Christ we encounter is always sending us forward into something we cannot yet see.
Do not hold on. Walk in newness of life. Go and tell what you have seen.
That is the Easter message. Not a return to the garden we remember but a commissioning to become people who have met the risen Christ and cannot stop talking about it.
— Ellerie Brownfain
You may have experienced a deluge of writing concerning the war with Iran and the events of the last few days. In lieu of a list of links that's no better than what you no doubt already have, and will inevitably go stale in a matter of hours, I'll just offer you this fascinating and disconcerting conversation on Donald Trump's "wishcasting."
Diana Butler Bass: "Don't let the tomb overtake the resurrection."
Heather Cox Richardson on journalism and an unhinged president.
Sergey Radchenko renounces his Russian citizenship, and why, and what next....
Consider supporting this Kickstarter campaign to fund art for the Friends Incubator for Public Ministry's new book, Constellation of Witness: Quaker Stories in Public Ministry.
Gospel blues from Kee Eso Pitchford, with thanks to Daniel Smith-Christopher for the introduction.
"If you want me to love my enemies, I'll say yes."
