Fr Dennis Smith, Easter Day, Sunday,
April 16th, 2017
The story of Easter has to be seen and wondered at. It has
to be told and retold, lived out, in life and in death, in
time and into eternity. This is what Mary of Magdala and the
other women came to know in their Easter experience as told
by Matthew and John. They see. And through them, others also
see. They become windows into the wonder of resurrection.
They become icons of Easter. The Eastern Orthodox tradition
has treasured icons at the heart of their spirituality,
worship and prayer from the earliest centuries. They believe
icons to be windows into heaven, opening up the life of
eternity for human hearts and minds to perceive and to
embrace.
This is exactly the gift that Mary and the other women have
offered to Christians throughout the centuries. They have
become windows into the risen life of Jesus, enabling us to
see Easter truth which mere words can never fully grasp.
Take Mary herself as an example. She is for us an icon of
the presence of the Risen Jesus at the heart of human
despair. Her master, her Lord, in whom she had placed her
love and her hope, had died. She had witnessed that dearth,
had remained with the other women at the foot of the cross
and had heard the final cries of agony and acceptance as
Jesus had died.
Now she comes to anoint his body as a final sign of her love
and devotion – and the body was gone,. She was in despair.
Her agony was compounded. But Mary sees her lord. He lives.
Many women (and men, of course) still share the same
despair: seeking to pay their final tribute of love to a
disappeared husband or wife, father or mother, son or
daughter, brother or sister. Searching among dead bodies.
Mothers in despair around the world, searching for weeks and
months for their dead sons among hundreds of dead bodies.
Then suddenly they stop searching and stop weeping for they
realize that all the bodies they have seen are their sons,
embraced by love and by the friendship of all the women and
men who are friends in this struggle; It’s as if they
experience resurrection. Mary becomes an icon of this
transforming, renewing and restoring miracle of
resurrection. It’s not a response to words spoken but of
seeing beyond and beneath the surface of things.God’s
resurrection miracle at work in human despair, hopelessness
and loss. Jesus, the risen Lord, still stands among us in
his risen power. We may not always rccognise his presence
among us as we despairingly search for signs of him around
us, but he calls our name, he addresses us in person, by
name, and we know that it is he who has come to us. In this
powerfully gentle presence s our hope and joy, our future
and freedom. “I have seen the Lord!” Mary becomes an icon of
resurrection, enabling us to see beyond the surface of
things, beyond the surface of our lives, and to discern in
the depths the power and presence and promise of God in
Jesus offering the world new life and new hope. But Mary is
also an icon of the love, forgiveness and renewal of God,
transforming our sinful and fragile lives. There are many
traditions surrounding Mary. Among them is an image of Mary
as someone “possessed by demons”, by the powers of evil. She
is seen as being in the grip of internal and external forces
that throw her into turmoil and threaten to shatter her
life. So she becomes an icon of the power of evil in human
lives and of the brokenness and powerlessness that results.
But here, on the morning of resurrection, she is changed.
She has been held and embraced by love. She knows the power
and energy of the love and forgiveness of God in her
crucified and risen Lord. She is made whole again and knows
the power and victory of love at work in her life. She
is restored to humanness and belonging, to love and peace.
The battle with evil forces at work in her life is over for
her: She is embraced by love. Here in the resurrection
garden she knows the fulfilment of that embrace and energy
of love. Though she herself must not embrace! She is
accepted, forgiven, loved, made whole – in the risen Jesus
alone. And her world is new!
She is still a icon of God’s transforming and renewing
resurrection love for us and for our world. In this sense,
we are called to be Mary: to see her as a window into
eternity and so to rejoice in hope and be embraced by love.
Mary, however, isn’t alone. The women who are her companions
on this journey of discovery – as we see if we look at St.
Matthew’s account of the resurrection story – also become
icons of Easter. They enable toe others to see and so be
transformed by the resurrection story.
On that resurrection morning they too are invited to “Come
and see": to be witnesses of the resurrection, of the
fulfilment of Jesus’ promise. They are invited to “go
quickly and tell his disciples” to follow him to Galilee,
for “there you will see him.” And on their hurrying journey,
suddenly Jesus was there on their path. There Jesus himself
gives them a word of reassurance, “Do not be afraid,” and
sends them on their way to tell the disciples to go to
Galilee for “there they will see me.”
Again then it’s about meeting Jesus unexpectedly on the way
to unexpected and challenging places and “seeing” him there.
So now the women become not only icons of hope and ove – as
Mary was – they become icons of companionship with Jesus as
he calls his friends to bear witness to what they have come
to see and to know and to believe – in all the challenging
places of our contemporary world. And to go on with that
journey of discovery and witness as companions of Jesus and
of one another. They have become icons for our journeying
with Jesus, for they enable us to see – in ways that mere
words cannot always express – what it is to be embraced by
resurrection and to open the promises of eternity to others
as we make our journeys through a perplexing world in which
faith is often questioned and believing becomes fragile and
threatened. In the world of Galilee, where economic and
social injustice often undermined human potential, Jesus
would meet his disciples and there they would become – in
their living and in their speaking, despite all their
frailties and failures – proclaimers (even icons) of the
Kingdom. They too would see – for they had contemplated
these icons of Easter on their journey – into the truth of
resurrection and enable others to see and believe and trust
God’s promises in the risen Jesus. This iconic journey
continues in our own day and beyond, as we, in Bishop David
Jenkins words in his book “The Calling of the Cuckoo” says
“Go on with God: We are called to join in God’s amazing
agenda of unending love with all the grace, guts and
intellectual, spiritual and moral energy and insight we can
muster … God goes steadfastly on but it takes time to catch
up with where he has moved on to.
So go on with the risen Jesus … And you too will see – and
be glad!”