God's YES

Today is the day that God’s NO to the powers of darkness and destruction becomes God’s YES to life. All the promises are true, the truth comes out in a loud shout, leaving behind its grave clothes, shaking death off like dust collected on a long journey. Easter is the great day that doesn’t make sense… that cannot make sense, because it is the day that is too good to be true. But it is true.

Mary, approaching the grave, was still in her mourning clothes.  Anointing the body was the last loving act she could perform. It was the last thing she could do to honor the man who turned her life upside down and taught her how to imagine a new future, unshackling her from the titles those in her society – and those in ours – would give to her. Sometimes, I think we forget how jarring it is to experience Easter right in the middle of our broken Good Friday world.

The other disciples were in the same place as Mary, with Good Friday being all their imaginations could hold. John says “He saw and he believed,” but it wasn’t that he believed that Jesus had been raised, though we would expect as much from the beloved disciple who seems to be one step ahead of everyone else in John; he believed Mary that the body was gone. So the disciples went home. What were they going to do about it? They’d hoped that Jesus would be the one, the one who would change the world, but he didn’t change the world; he was its victim. John helpfully reminds us “as yet, they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” Of course they didn’t. Resurrection is fundamentally not understandable. This is the Event that turns everything on its head, that makes everything and nothing make sense all at the same time: it is the end that God decided to turn into a beginning.

Mary, unable to make sense of it all, does the only thing she knows how to do in such a situation: she cries, helpless. Perhaps it was because it was dark, the fingers of morning light just starting to streak across the sky. Perhaps it was because her salt-blurred eyes couldn’t focus properly. Perhaps it was the cloud of her grief. “Who are you, sir?” Seeing the man she had seen a thousand times, hearing the voice that she imagined hearing – if only for one last time.

“Mary!” In a moment, it all comes flooding back. Go and tell, Mary, go and preach. Preach the Gospel.

Mary is the first person to tell the good news that God’s “no” to the powers that threaten to destroy the world is for the sake of God’s “yes,” that brings new life. The end, the no of the grave, cannot be held by the yes of the resurrection. Indeed, it bursts all chains asunder. This good news comes from the unlikeliest of voices, the voice that future generations of church fathers would label variously as “prostitute,” as “sinner,” as “possessed.” But there she was with the command: “Go and tell.”

This is not a message that can be confined: not to a gender, not to an age, not to an ideology, not to a political stance, not to anything. This is the good news that cannot be confined: we cannot compress it into something small enough for us to digest or simple enough for us to understand. The gospel blows all of our distinctions out of the water.

Truly, God shows no partiality. The yes is unequivocal. God’s yes to humanity – to life – makes for a messy, inconvenient, awkward gospel. It is the most difficult thing to explain to someone else. Well, you see, we have this savior: his mom was a virgin, he miraculously healed a lot of people, upset the religious establishment, was killed as an insurrectionist by the Roman government and then rose from the dead. You have got to be kidding me.

And yet, this good news begs to be told, over and over again. This is the revelation of the ridiculousness – yes, ridiculousness – of our God. Where we see an end, God sees a beginning. Where we see a sinner, God sees a saint. Where we see death, God sees resurrection. Where all we can see is our grief and our doubt, God gives us a message of joy that defies measured, careful, logical explanation. We will spend our lifetimes trying to make sense of it and someday we will realize that the power of the message isn’t in our capacity to make sense of it, but in its capacity to make sense of us.

“Mary!” he names her, and echoing in her name are all of our names, all of the broken-holy people who God draws to Godself and sends out to proclaim the message that frustrates our attempts to understand or contain it. Its refusal to be understood or contained is precisely the power of the Gospel. It is the word that comes from outside of us and names us.

You, beloved, are a child of God. You are my YES. Now go and tell your brothers and sisters: death does not have the final word, and it never will. Alleluia.