No Going Back to Normal

Isaiah 65:17-25; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; John 20:1-18

The men disciples returned to their homes, but Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been.

As the Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber likes to say, when Peter and the other disciple looked into the tomb, they only saw laundry, but when Mary Magdalene looked into the tomb, she saw angels.

When something terrible happens, when someone dies, when life gets turned upside down, there is great comfort in doing what you’re supposed to do. Even when the death is expected, there is something comforting and reassuring about doing the things that you are supposed to do. If you’ve experienced loss in your life, I think you will understand.

It’s more than a dozen years now since my mother died, but I can still clearly remember my sister and I sitting quietly with her in the hospital room as she passed, and then after a few minutes of silence my sister turned to me and said, “Now what do we do?” But there were things to do. There were relatives to call, visitors to see, a funeral to arrange, picking out the clothes, and for me at least there was something calming about doing all of the things. Having things to do, and doing them, is how we learn to cope with loss. It’s how we adjust to the new normal, by doing the normal and expected things that people do when a death occurs. It's how we adjust to the shock that even an expected death causes in our lives.

For the disciples of Jesus, his death was anything but expected. It had been just a week since the crowds welcomed him to Jerusalem and acclaimed him as the long-expected king, come to bring peace and to fulfill God’s promises – and then suddenly it all went terribly wrong. And Mary Magdalene’s way of coping with her grief was to do what you’re supposed to do … to go and take care of the body, to make sure it’s properly cared for and respected.

Jesus died so close to sunset on Friday that he was buried quickly before the Sabbath began, and so Mary did what, as an observant Jew, she was supposed to do – observe the Sabbath – and then, early on Sunday morning, she came to the tomb even before dawn, to do what she was supposed to do. Hoping that fulfilling the obligation would help her start to find some peace, some comfort, some agency in the midst of the trauma, to find the start of some new normal, if that is even thinkable after such a disturbing loss.

And so Mary Magdalene was the first to discover the empty tomb, and for her it was not a happy moment. Her response was not “alleluia.” She had come to do what she was supposed to do, and now even that small comfort was taken away from her. The body is missing, and how is she supposed to take care of the body and pay Jesus her final respects if the grave has been robbed? For Mary, it’s another trauma on top of the one she is already experiencing. She runs for help, Peter and the other disciple come, but they have no explanation for what they see either. They see the graveclothes lying there in the tomb, but they don’t know what to make of it. Now what are we supposed to do? they asked themselves. And having no idea what to do, they went home.

But Mary stayed at the tomb. Distraught. Weeping. At a complete loss for what to do next. Finally, she bends down to look into the tomb. Where she sees angels. Why are you weeping, the angels ask. She pours out her complaint to the angels – They’ve taken away my Lord, I don’t know where he is, I can’t do what I’m supposed to do.”

And then she senses someone behind her. She stands up, turns around, and sees a stranger standing there. The gardener, perhaps. Why are you weeping, he asks. Did you take the body away, she asks? Tell me where he is, so I can do what I came here to do. Let me just do what I’m supposed to do. I can’t handle this. I need to do something normal – at least, the normal thing under these circumstances. Otherwise how can I cope with this loss? How can I get back to something like a new normal, if I can’t do what I’m supposed to do here? Please, tell me where he is, and let me take care of him the way I’m supposed to.

And the stranger looked at her and said, “Mary.”

We often think of Easter as a happy ending to a Hollywood movie. Things really looked bad there for a while, how is Spiderman – I mean, Jesus – going to get out of this one? Sure, Jesus died for a little while – like people who are declared brain dead and then within a few minutes are shocked back into life – but now he’s fine and everything is back to normal.

But the gospel narratives of Easter are not about things going back to normal. Mary Magdalene tried to get back to normal by performing the prescribed funeral rituals that had been skipped in the haste of Good Friday afternoon. It’s how human beings cope with loss – we do the things we know we are supposed to do, and this helps us reestablish a sense of equilibrium. After all, death is a part of life. We all experience the death of those near us, and eventually we all will experience death ourselves. It is normal. We eventually learn to live with death, even though the wounds don’t always completely heal. We learn to adjust. We learn to live in the new normal.

But when the risen Jesus calls Mary by her name, her desire to get back to normal, her desire to cope with and adjust to her loss so she could go on with life again suddenly changes. Don’t hold on to me, Jesus says to her. This is not about going back to normal. This is about the future that God is opening up for you right now that is so much better, so much more alive, than anything you have even begun to imagine.

And when Mary returns to Peter and the other disciples, this time she will not frantically ask them for help getting back to normal. She will tell them, “I have seen the Lord.” She will tell them about the future God has in store for them, too, the future that is so much brighter, so much more alive, than anything they had ever dreamed possible. She will invite them to see the Lord for themselves. And in short order they will.

All of our lives have been upended the last couple of years. Covid has changed so many things for all of us, and on top of that many of us have individually experienced profound changes. We have experienced health problems, we have lost loved ones to death, we have changed jobs or moved, lost friends, and many of us have had to do this without the connections and in-person interactions that we have been used to having. We have a profound desire to get back to normal. Maybe with a few tweaks, but basically we want to get back to normal. And like Mary finding the empty tomb, when our efforts to get back to normal are frustrated and thwarted for reasons we can’t see or understand, we get testy. We get anxious and maybe even weep. The gravitational pull of the normal is strong. Even when normal wasn’t all that great, it’s reassuring and comforting to believe we’re getting back to normal.

Easter is an invitation not to go back to normal, but to perceive the future to which God is calling each of us, personally, by name. A future in which we do not have to learn to cope with and adjust to death, a future in which we do not have to accommodate ourselves to all the powers in this world opposed to God, a future in which all of these powers have been defeated, as Paul says in the reading today, “and the last enemy to be destroyed is death” itself.  Once you have seen the Lord, there is no going back to normal. Alleluia.