Easter Morning


John 20:1-18

I always find preparing my Easter morning sermon difficult until I reach Saturday night and the early hours of Easter morning! So here it is finished while it was still dark!

“While it was still dark”

The thing that stuck me most powerfully this year as I read John’s account of that first Easter morning – an account I’ve read countless times without these words registering – was that Easter morning begins “while it was still dark”.

In John’s Gospel references to light and darkness are more than simply giving an indication of the time of day.

Remember the opening chapter:

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”  - a theme running through the gospel.

Now early on Easter morning Mary comes “while it was still dark”.

• Mary is in a “dark place” as that Easter morning dawns.
  
• It is hard, if not impossible, for most of us to even begin to comprehend what it must have been like for Mary to have witnessed the events of Friday – seeing the one she loved tortured before her eyes.
  
• For her that dark place is one of horror, grief, fear, profound loss, disorientation, and total uncertainty for the future.
  

But we have our ‘dark places’ …

·       Our dark nights of the soul

·       Times when we feel overwhelmed by what’s happening to us or to those we love

·       Times when the world seems a mad and even terrible place

·       Moments when depression sweeps over us

Our world too has its ‘dark places’ …

     recall the headlines of the last week's news

 

One cannot deny the darkness. Easter morning starts ‘while it was still dark’

Like me you have probable moved from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, but what about Saturday?

Where was Jesus?

In the tomb? Yes and no.

Our Christian theology and tradition speaks of him going to the place of the dead.

The Easter Saturday place

v  the fearful places

v  the ‘dark’ places

v  the inhospitable places

v  the lonely places

These are the places that so often grief takes us. They are actually important places. For they are places where the reality of loss is encountered in all its starkness and pain, where grief floods in.

The Saturday place is crucial too, for the pain and grief are the other sides of the coin of love – the cost of love. The Saturday place takes seriously all that sense of loss and it is a place where sometimes the darkness seems to be overwhelming.

Mary is still physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually in that ‘Saturday’ place as she journeys in the dark to the garden and to the tomb. “While it was still dark Mary Magdalene came to the tomb”

At the heart of the Easter Gospel is the fact that “while it was still dark” the tomb was empty!

But at this point Mary doesn’t understand. She thinks they’ve taken the body of Jesus away. She runs and fetches Simon Peter and ‘the other disciple’. But still she is in her dark place – the sense of loss and grief continue to overwhelm her. When the two disciples ‘return to their homes’ she remains and she weeps.

There is something incredibly powerful and moving about this scene in the early morning garden.

That second wave of tears. The Friday tears of the shock, the death, the awfulness of it all. The Friday tears of grief and possibly anger. The Friday tears give way to the darkness of Saturday when you are ‘teared-out’ – the grief, the pain, the loss, all weigh so heavily upon the heart and for the while tears may be impossible.

Then there comes that second wave of tears – as the daily reality and ramifications of the loss hit home. They come in waves. They come at unpredictable as well as predictable moments – welling up, flooding out.

So Saturday spills over into Sunday.

At the heart of the Easter Gospel, “while it was still dark”, the light of the risen Christ comes – comes into the darkness and into the shadows and “the darkness did not, could not, will not overcome it”!

The ‘dark place’ doesn’t have the last word.

• However awful it might be,
  
• however horrifying it might be,
  
• however inhumane it might be - and that’s what crucifixion was
• it is not a place from which God can be barred!
• Rather it is the place into which God in Christ-Jesus has fully entered

As Charles Wesley expresses it in that great hymn ‘God of unexampled grace’ (166)

Never love nor sorrow was

Like that my Saviour showed;

See him stretched on yonder cross,

And crushed beneath our load!

Now discern the Deity,

Now his heavenly birth declare;

Faith cries out: ‘Tis he, ‘tis he,

My God, that suffers there!

Our ‘dark places’, our world’s ‘dark places’, are not places unknown to God.

“While it was still dark” God was at work in resurrection power.

And it is the crucified AND risen Lord who comes and meets Mary in her ‘dark place’

• and he doesn’t simply draw along side – although he does do that
  
• he doesn’t simply accompany her in her darkness – although he does do that
  
• he also whispers her name! Mary! Mary!
  

For me that is the most amazing moment.

For me that is what Easter is all about:

• a God who loves so much, as to enter into our ‘dark places’
  
• a God who is so powerful as to empty the tomb – to rob it of its content, its power, its hold
  
• a God who enters our ‘dark place’ and dispels the darkness by speaking our name
  

The image of the one who comes ‘soft-footed’ and ‘whispering my name’ is the gentle presence of Christ who is there, whether acknowledged or not, sharing each and every moment. The dark moments, the senseless moments, the Saturday places. But also coming ‘soft-footed’ and drawing close, at first ‘unawares’, but then ‘whispering’ my name, your name.

Whispering our name and in so doing reminding us of the resurrection, of that new and fuller life, set free from all the constraints.

However dark it might get, or it might be, may you know “while it is still dark” the crucified AND risen Lord entering that darkness and in love speaking your name. For he is risen – alleluia!