Preached by Michael Cheuk
March 23, 2008, Easter Sunday
John 20:1-18
“Good Morning!” Have you ever had someone say that to you while you were still deep in sleep? I remember as a boy when my mom would have to repeatedly call out my name and shake me from my slumber in order to get me to wake up for school. It can be a hard thing waking up in the morning, and while some of us get over that as we grow older, I daresay that there are a few of us here who still have trouble getting up early in the morning-right Margaret Stombock?
Now, there are many ways to be awakened from sleep in the morning. One can use the old standby alarm clock, the one that beeps incessantly until you turn it off. Or you can use the clock radio-there’s nothing like letting Francis Wood wake you up. Or you can try the gentle, soothing approach to waking up. In the last ten years or so, engineers have designed alarm clocks that make gentle nature sounds to slowly draw you to an alert state, clocks that gradually infuse the room with light to help your body adjust to morning, clocks that plug into your I-pod so that you can wake up to a different song every day of the year, etc. And then, there are masochistic ways to get up. I remember attending youth camp where counselors scream out, “O what a beautiful morning . . .” or trumpet out “reveille.” In our family, as some of you may remember, we have … the infamous bunny alarm clock! Now, if that doesn’t annoy you into getting up, almost nothing will!
But as we all know, there is a difference between being up and being awake. This past week, Beth and I have been recovering from the flu, and I tell you, there were mornings when it was nearly impossible to get up out of bed, but once out of bed, it didn’t mean we were fully awake either. And in our Gospel lesson this morning, it seemed that Mary Magdalene was having the same trouble becoming awake on that first Easter morning. In those pre-twilight hours when it is darkest before the dawn, it was almost as if Mary was groggy and sleepwalking through a fog. She went to the tomb expecting to find a sealed tomb, with a dead Jesus inside. She went probably to pay her last respects, to revisit the past, to remember Jesus as He was, and to grieve for her own loss. But instead of finding what she had expected, she found the stone of the tomb rolled away. Rather than going in to check things out, she ran back to the other disciples to tell them what she found. And surely she would have seen both Simon Peter and the beloved disciple going inside the tomb and then head back to their homes. But Mary stayed outside the tomb crying. Finally, she got up the nerve to look inside, and there she saw not only an empty tomb but two angelic beings dressed in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head, and the other at the foot. She saw strips of linen lying about and Jesus’ burial cloth neatly folded up by itself, separated from the linen. But in the darkness of the hour, Mary could not perceive what had happened. Where was Jesus? Who are those two beings dressed in white? They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” And she answered, “They have taken my Lord away, and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this she turned around and saw another man who also asked her, “Why are you crying? Who are you looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
It is interesting that, on that first Easter morning, at least for Mary Magdalene, her approach toward an open and empty tomb did not arouse her faith in Jesus’ resurrection. Furthermore, the apparition of two angelic beings did not assuage her fears. In fact, even the appearance of Jesus himself did not make her realize that the Lord had risen. Remember, this was the same Mary who earlier in this Gospel, sat attentively at Jesus’ feet and soaked in every word of her Lord’s teaching. This was the same Mary who witnessed Jesus calling her dead brother Lazarus to come out from a similar tomb. This was the same Mary who anointed Jesus by breaking open an expensive bottle of perfume worth a whole year’s wages, and pouring it out on Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair. And yet, neither an empty tomb, angelic beings, nor even the appearance of Jesus himself was enough to bring Mary to faith in the resurrected Christ.
So often, in our struggle to believe in this miracle called the resurrection of Christ, we envy those early disciples and their personal experience of the risen Christ. We say to ourselves, ah, if we only could have been there at the open and empty tomb, if we only could have examined the linens and neatly folded burial cloth, if we only could only have seen and heard the angelic beings, if we only could have witnessed Jesus himself in the garden, then we could truly believe in the resurrection! But the fourth evangelist reminds us this morning that neither an empty tomb, angelic beings, nor even the appearance of Jesus himself was enough to awaken Mary to faith in the resurrected Christ. What brought Mary to recognize her Lord and led her to faith in His resurrection was simply one spoken word: “Mary!” Only when Jesus spoke Mary’s name did it dawn on her that Jesus was alive.
Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus is the One who speaks into the lives of people to elicit faith and life. In our worship service on February 24, we learned that Jesus approached a sinful Samaritan woman, a person no one would speak to, a person who waited until the middle of the day to draw water from the community well. But Jesus spoke to her and when she mentioned the coming Messiah, Jesus said to her in John 4:26: “I who speak to you am he.” And on March 2, we learned in worship about the man born blind who received his sight by Jesus and was asked by him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” “Who is he, sir?” the man asked. “Tell me so that I may believe in him.” And Jesus said in John 9:37: “You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.” Two Sundays ago, we learned that when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead in John 11:43, Jesus called out Lazarus’ name in a loud voice: “Lazarus, come out!” Throughout this Gospel, Jesus fulfills the role He claims for Himself, the role of the Good Shepherd who, in John 10:3-4, calls his own sheep by name, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.
In the same way, on that first Easter morning, Mary was awaken to faith in the resurrected Christ when Jesus called out her name, “Mary!”, a word that opened the flood gates of her memories of the abiding relationship she had had with her Lord and Teacher. The Eternal Word spoke a personal word that finally aroused Mary from the darkness of her night and brought her into the light of the new morning. Mary thought that she was waking up to one reality, but when she finally saw the risen Christ, she had awaken to a whole new day and she saw a whole new world.
Last January, at the New Baptist Covenant celebration in Atlanta, I heard Tony Campolo tell a story about when he was 19 and started going to Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in West Philadelphia. His college friend, Clarence Eaton, had been killed in a subway-train accident, and Campolo went to his funeral. Campolo said that he was never before so aware of the glory of eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord as he was at that service. He’d never been to a black funeral service before; he’d always been to Italian funerals where, Campolo says, they scream and cry and pretend to be hysterical. But black funerals, man, this was a happy time. And the preacher was incredible. Old Dr. Hoggard got up and for fifteen minutes, he talked about the life after death. He made it sound so good, that halfway through that talk, Campolo said he wished he was dead! Then the pastor came down and spoke words of comfort to the family-personal, intimate words. The last thing he did was he went over to the open casket, and he preached for twenty minutes to the corpse. He said, “Clarence! Clarence!” And he said it with such authority that no one would have been surprised if there had been a response. He said, “Clarence, there were a lot of things we should have said to you, but you got away too fast, Clarence. We’re going to say them to you now.” And he went down this litany of beautiful, wonderful things that Clarence had done for people, and when he finished he said, “Well, that’s it, Clarence. That’s it! There’s nothing more to say. And when there’s nothing more to say, there’s only one thing to say. Good Night, Clarence!” Campolo told us non-black preachers not to try this because it won’t work in our churches. But Dr. Hoggard said, “Good Night, Clarence!”, and he grabbed the lid of the casket and slammed it shut. Boom! Shockwaves went over the entire congregation. And as the pastor lifted his head, you could see there was a smile on his face as he said, “Good night, Clarence! Cause I knooooowwww God is going to give you a Good Morning, Clarence!” And with that, the choir stood and started singing, “On that great gettin’ up morning, we shall rise, we shall rise!” And the congregation was all up on their feet and joined in the singing, dancing and hugging in the aisles. People were clapping and crying, but they were crying tears of joy.[1]
And Campolo knew right then that he was in the right church! It was a church that can take pain, suffering, darkness and death and make it into a celebration because its members took Easter seriously. For Easter means that Jesus also went through pain, suffering, darkness and death, but on that third day, when a new morning was dawning, God opened up the tomb and said, “Good Morning, Jesus!” And Jesus came out of that tomb victorious over sin and death, and a new day had begun for all of God’s creation!
And now, more than two thousand years later, if we are to take this Easter morning seriously, then we will never awake to the same old world again. Because God is remaking the world, a new creation is coming and we’ve just begun to see and hear what God is doing. And while we can’t revisit that empty tomb on that first Easter morning, while we probably won’t encounter angels or the risen Christ in bodily form this morning, my prayer is that we will hear the voice of our risen Lord calling out our name: “Michael! Amanda! Anita! Mc!” I pray that we will recognize the voice of our Good Shepherd as He awakens us to a whole new day in a whole new world-a world where the power of sin is broken, a world where pain and fear no longer bind us, a world where even death itself is overcome by life. And may we respond to Christ’s call by waking up and opening our eyes saying, “Good Morning, Jesus! Good Morning, Jesus! Alleluia! Alleluia!” Amen.
[1] This story can also be found in print, Art. E. Christmas, Who Needs Me? The Christian Answer for Grief, (Infinity Publishing, 2003), p. 46.
