The Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D. '13, Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity. Photo by Jeffrey Blackwell/Memorial Church
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By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D. '13
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, April 9, 2023)
Happy Easter once again. Thank you for being here at the Memorial Church to celebrate Easter with us. Before I go into the sermon, I just wanted to start with a note of thanks. First, thank you for being here. I also wanted to thank the staff of this Memorial Church. We have had, I think since Palm Sunday, 11 services in this church. They have been beautiful and moving and wonderful, and it's all because the staff of this church are beautiful and moving and wonderful, so can we please give them a round of applause for our clergy, our regular full-time staff, our seminarians, our interns, It's been an all-out effort, and it's been wonderful this week. I also want to give special thanks to our music department, to Ed and David and Carson and the university choir and the Ferris Fellows for their beautiful singing for us. Another round of applause, please.
This is my second Easter with you all, and both times I sit there and I can't believe that this is our church, and we have these voices to make this day... to recognize the holiness of the day and make it holy. So thank you all. This is my second Easter. Some of you maybe were here last year when I preached on Easter, and so you might remember that I preached about how skeptical my kids are about this story in particular as it happens. And they're still skeptical, if I'm honest. We were talking about it this week. And rather than try to debate forensic detail when, really, I don't have any firm knowledge of the forensic details, this week kind of around the kitchen table, we just started talking. I tried to redirect the conversation toward what resurrection means, toward what new life means. What does it mean to us? What did it mean to these folks when they experienced it?
And in fact, where I wanted to redirect the conversation with Cami, in particular, my daughter, and what I want to talk about today, I think you might think it's a little bit of a dodge, but I don't think it is. I kind of want to avoid talking about what happened to Jesus. Something happened. It seems pretty obvious to me from the gospels that something happened. But what happened is pretty thinly described in the gospels. This risen Jesus is unrecognizable at times and untouchable and walks through walls and disappears and vanishes and all these different things.
What I want to talk about this morning and what I think is maybe more important for us to consider, especially in this gospel reading from the Gospel of John, I want us to think about what happened to Mary. I want to know, and I want to ask, how Mary came to be transformed by this experience, how in the face of that empty tomb Mary came to become what the tradition calls her, the apostle to the apostles, the first to bear witness to the resurrection, the first to proclaim it to her brothers, indeed, the reason we are here. If she does not have that vision, see Jesus risen, if she does not return to her friends and brothers, it ends.
For us, Mary is the one I think we should pay attention to. How can we see what she came to see? Allow me to set the scene a little bit. Those of us here in this church, we're almost 2,000 years... over 2,000 years, I guess, from Good Friday. For Mary, Good Friday is still fresh. The wound of Jesus' death is open and raw. This death was brutal and agonizing and cruel and torturous, and according to the Gospel of John, she and the disciples watched it. They watched him tortured and killed and taken down from the cross.
What's more, the Jesus who appears to Mary in this scene is not an especially comforting one. There isn't a ton of consolation here. She can't recognize him. She can't touch him. And this is true throughout the gospels as I already said. These appearances of Jesus, especially at first, are often quite abrupt. Jesus is often very challenging. There's one time when he opens with "Peace be with you." But in general, these are abrupt, arresting experiences. On this morning when Mary is at the face of this open tomb and her brothers, Peter and the beloved disciple, as they go and see the open tomb and leave, they are full of shock and fear and sadness and grief.
And that's why I want to turn to Mary this morning. Because any of us who pay much attention to our world should be familiar with feelings of shock and fear and sadness and grief. I don't need to tell you, you already know that there are intractable problems, seemingly intractable problems in our world that stir up in us justifiable feelings of shock and sadness and fear and grief. I feel fear every time I drop my kids off at school because we cannot reckon with gun violence in this country. It seems intractable. It's been three years since the Black Lives Matter marches and George Floyd's murder. How much have we reckoned with that open festering wound of racism in our culture? All sorts of violence we see all the time, lingering colonial violence, gender-based violence, transphobia and homophobia. These things seem intractable.
And so my question about what happens to Mary in the midst of her shock and fear and grief, what gets her to get up and move on, I have a reason behind that question. It's not just academic. I want to know what causes her to move forward. Now, the passage assigned for this year... There's a three-year cycle of readings, and this year we hear John's version of the gospel story. And John adds some interesting details about the resurrection appearance that don't arise in the other gospels, don't arise in Matthew, Mark and Luke. Namely, in John's gospel, the men go to the tomb also. In the other gospels, it's a group of women. In John's alone, Peter and the beloved disciple run ahead, and there's even some argument about who gets there first. Well, there's not argument, but scholars believe that the reason there is a description of who gets there first is because in the early Christian community, people were arguing about who should have priority and authority. And so did John get there first? Did Peter get there first?
And there's another reason that scholars think that the men were included in this first resurrection story. And the reason is that in first century Judea, women were not considered valid witnesses. If you were gathering evidence for something, a woman was not considered a valid witness. And so some scholars say that, "oh, the author of the Gospel of John put some men in there to lend some credibility to the story." This is an ugly rationale to acknowledge, but it's one we have to acknowledge because it's part of our history.
And although it is true that women were not considered valid witnesses by authorities in the first century, I don't think that's the only thing going on here. I actually think the gospel is doing something more radical with that fact, actually trying to flip it and undermine it and say something else. And let me tell you why. So Mary sees the tomb open, as we heard. Mary goes to her brothers and tells them they've taken his body. And then the men run, and they see that the body is taken. And it says they believe, but it also says that they don't understand the resurrection yet. So what they believe is what Mary said, that the body has been taken. And then it says they went home.
Now, this is a Greek idiom. What it actually says is they went to themselves. In the idiom of New Testament Greek, first century Greek, that was a way to say you went home. You go to your own, to yourself. But think about that. The men go to the tomb. They see this shocking thing. They're full of grief and fear and sadness. They see that the man they loved and who was brutally murdered has been stolen. And they go home. They turn inward, turn in on themselves. And home, by the way, is not Judea. It's in Galilee, far away. They're going back. Let's start over. This thing is over. We are in danger. Turn in. Turn into myself.
But that's not what Mary does. Mary stays there, stays right in the face of that empty tomb and stares inside of it. Mary lingers there with that sadness. The men get there first, but they don't have the courage to sit with what they find, with the awful grief and horror of what they find. But Mary does. Mary tarries with her grief. And because she looks directly at it, looks directly at that tomb, directly into the emptiness, a vision of a way forward rises before her. And instead of turning and running home and turning inward to herself, she runs to her friends and calls them out, calls them forward, forward into a future that they have not yet imagined.
That's part of what happens to Mary, but it's only half of what happens to Mary because when she gets to those friends and when she speaks to them and tells them what she has seen, they believe her. Against all the cultural norms and expectations of the moment -- she is not a valid witness, after all -- they believe her. They accept her testimony, they accept her message because they see the courage of her grief, and it gives her all the credibility that they need.
What happens to Mary on Easter morning? Mary braves the empty tomb, and the men who could not or did not do what she could do, they recognize the brave witness of a survivor. And then they follow her, and so she becomes the apostle to the apostles, the reason all of us are here. And now, perhaps we see how this 2,000-year-old-story can give us some real and useful advice about how we might face our own intractable problems. First, we have to face them. We are terrible at that.
Think about gun violence, which we all know is a scourge upon our lives and yet we cannot grieve, cannot face the fact of this violence in any direct or meaningful way. Think about this festering wound of racism, which we cannot face, cannot grieve. Gender-based violence. The climate crisis, which we turn away from, refuse to look at directly, refuse to acknowledge the grief and fear that accompanies it.
Like Mary, what we need is to look directly at what we have lost and what we are losing and what we are danger of losing. We need to tarry with our grief. We need to tarry with the cost of gun violence, racial violence, colonial violence, gender-based violence, with climate crisis. And the other thing we learned from the story is that doing so, tarrying with that grief, means listening to the survivors, to the ones who have suffered most and most directly, the ones who have been forced to sit in their emptiness and their grief. We need to listen to those voices which have been silenced, those whose suffering has been discredited or unrecognized like Mary's was in the first century. We need to let them call us out and call us forward. We need to let them become the apostles of our future.
This means listening to people marching in the streets for racial justice. It means listening to people staring into the emptiness of prison cells and their families. It means listening to children who survive mass shootings and call upon us to do something about it. It means listening to Indigenous communities who are displaced by rising seas, to communities grappling, rural communities grappling with crises and mental health and joblessness and addiction. It means listening to refugees and migrants crowding our border, to trans and gender non-binary folks who are crying out for recognition and basic care. The list goes on and on. We have a lot of challenges. We have a lot of grieving to do, which means we have a lot to face and a lot of listening we ought to be doing.
But if we do it, and this is what Mary's story tells us, if we do it, a way will emerge. It doesn't mean that way will be easy. When the early Christian community listened to the witness of its women, their problems didn't all go away. Mary called her brothers into a future, but it was a future which in many ways they would have to forge on their own. The risen Jesus inspired and transformed them, but he also bid farewell and disappeared again.
Their future was one in which they would make mistakes and struggle and sometimes suffer and sometimes fail, but it was a future. The Easter proclamation is good news then and now, not because it gives us a happy ending, but because it promises us a new beginning. There is a future for us, but it's one we will discover only if we find the courage to linger like Mary with our grief, only if we have the patience to listen to those who have visited empty tombs and returned to us to tell us their tales. Thank God Mary did. Pray God, when they come to us, we will listen and believe.