John 20:1-18
“Turn Around”
April 12, 2020 – Easter
A new comet is plunging toward the sun, and us. That ball of ice from outside our solar system was discovered back in December and named “Atlas.” If it holds together, astronomers think it might be bright enough to provide a spectacular show here on earth, visible even during the daytime. But the latest observations suggest that it is breaking up, and the possible cosmic fireworks will likely be a cosmic fizzle. It won’t show up in our skies, much less come round again like more famous comets such as Halley’s, which is due back in our neighborhood in 2061.
Holding together while it turns around is the key to a visible comet. A comet is a big ball of ice and dirt. Beyond the orbit of Pluto, there is a huge collection, about a hundred billion, of those big dirty snowballs. It is called the Oort Cloud. Mostly the Oort Cloud stays where it is, way out where ordinary folks do not notice it. But every once in a while, one of these snowballs gets bumped or nudged and is captured by the sun’s gravity. It begins to fall into what we call the solar system, toward the sun.
By a marvelous trick of God’s design, the huge force of the sun’s pull draws a comet in for all that distance—a trillion miles or more. Then, an incredible display of the laws of gravity turns it around on a dime and sends it speeding back out again in a blaze of glorious reflected light. The sun is an anchor for the turn. The comet is like a roller skater grabbing a pole and swinging round it to shoot back off the way she came. A comet falls within cosmic inches of the sun, whips round it, and soars back out again. If it happens just right, it is now in orbit, held by the sun’s gravity in a huge elliptical path that will bring it back again.
The Gospel of John, chapter 20, verse 14 says, “she turned around.” On the first Easter Sunday morning, Mary made a turn that reversed a fall she had begun on Friday afternoon. Though she did not expect it at all, she met again the person around whom her whole life had been turning for the past few months. She turned and saw Jesus.
This morning you and I wait for any number of things to reverse in our world, most of all the spread of Covid-19. We hope for the numbers of cases and number of deaths to go down instead of up. We hope for the stock market and the economy and jobs to go up instead of down. We look for the day we can go out instead of stay in. The hard thing is that we have no clear idea when all that will turn around. Mary didn’t either.
The rest of verse 14 says she did not realize that it was Jesus. This was, for her, a completely unexpected turn. The last thing she thought to find that morning was a living person. She had come with other women to a grave. She was there to anoint the dead Jesus, to honor His body in death, not to greet Him in life.
No one, it seems, expected it. The first part of the text tells how Mary ran to Peter and John, who in turn ran to the tomb. John, the beloved disciple, got there first in verse 4, but only bent down to look. Peter, arriving seconds later, barged on in. Then John went in too. They saw the same thing Mary saw, an empty tomb. They were baffled, but surprisingly it says John “believed,” in spite of the fact that John wrote in verse 9 they “did not yet understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”
There is much that we do not understand this morning. Oh, we know the Easter story. We know and we’ve repeated even on-line that “Christ is risen!” Yet our church building stands empty like that tomb in the garden was empty. We’ve gathered flowers from our yards and maybe even, like these lilies here, some from the store. But there are only a few. Our floral cross sits outside, and instead of ringing with our shouts and songs, our sanctuary is quiet now. Maybe we are getting a taste of the kind of strange and empty circumstances in which John still managed to “believe,” despite everything.
The witnesses of the first Easter did not expect it. It did not matter that Jesus told them several times that He would die and then rise. They were too stupefied by the Crucifixion to remember they had seen Jesus raise other people from the dead. They were so distraught and miserable on that Sunday morning that they could see nothing but more trouble in the fact that the tomb was empty.
One week before, these same people believed Jesus was the master of any situation. They had shouted His praise in a procession into the holy city of Jerusalem. They even dared to flaunt the Roman empire by naming Jesus as king. But major events stretch time. Four weeks staying home seems like forever. We look back and say, “It feels like months have gone by.” It felt like that to the disciples of Jesus. Palm Sunday was a dim memory of long ago, though it was only a week in the past. The man they had proclaimed a king was now a corpse.
They did not know what you know. They had not had two thousand years to tell the story over and over until it is so familiar that we are no longer surprised. We read how many times Jesus told them what would happen, and we wonder how they could be so dense. But these are men and women who went from Palm Sunday to Good Friday without knowing how it would turn out. They did not expect their Lord and Teacher to die as a condemned criminal. How could they have expected Him to rise from the dead?
If you can appreciate their perspective, how inconceivable it would have been for them to understand, then you can understand what a turn it was for Mary when she turned and saw Jesus, why at first she did not know it was Jesus. She only turned for a glance. Even when He spoke, asking her why she was crying and for whom was she looking, she did not recognize Him. She thought He was the gardener, the keeper of the cemetery, and that perhaps the body she had expected to find had been carried away somewhere else.
Mary was weeping, not really looking. Her head was bowed, her voice broken with sobs. She could not see through the salt of her tears. Then, it was, that Jesus spoke with a gravity that pulled Mary into His orbit forever. He spoke her name, “Mary.” And the pull of that single word was so great and so tender that she had to turn again. This time the turn was complete. She looked again and this time she saw. As she turned, the whole world spun around that garden, and nothing was ever the same.
In response to hearing her name, Mary cried out the name which she called Jesus, Rabbouni! “Teacher!” He had named her; now she named Him as her master. To Mary Magdalene, this exchange of names was a complete reversal of everything she had expected the morning would be. She had thought that she was visiting a lifeless body. Instead, the Lord of life visited her and he drew her to Him again.
Hearing your name can change your course. Entry to stores is limited now, but you can remember shopping when they were crowded. You walk along, intent on your list, on your cart, on the shelves. It is time to be home making supper and your mind is focused on chicken, peas, rice, and bread. But let someone speak your name, call to you in a familiar voice, and you will stop and turn. You forget the frozen vegetables in your hand and look up to greet a friendly face and turn away from your cares for moment.
The sound of your name can also make major changes in your course. It can change your whole life. In 1982, my wife and I left South Bend, Indiana so I could attend seminary in Chicago. We had attended a Covenant church for five years in South Bend. Yet it had never become clear to us that we should stay in this denomination. We loved that particular church, but we had no great commitment to the Covenant as a whole.
At seminary in Deerfield, Illinois, we began attending a local church where many seminary students and faculty attended. It was not a Covenant church. But it was large, and active, and full of people we rubbed shoulders with all the time at school.
After about three months, it became clear that despite all that was good about that church there was one big thing missing for us. No one really seemed to know us or care about us. Not even the pastor seemed to remember us, even after we sat in a membership class with him for several weeks.
One Sunday morning we woke up, looked at each other, and said, “Let’s find a Covenant church.” We did. A small one, with a brand new building and a big mortgage and quite a few empty seats: Libertyville Covenant. The worship service was just O.K. The choir could have used a little more rehearsing and the sermon was not particularly memorable. But the red hymnal was familiar and the pastor was friendly when we talked with him for a few moments after the service.
We were out of town the next weekend, so it was two weeks before we returned to Libertyville Covenant. But that morning, after we parked our car and walked up the hill to the church front door, we were met by the pastor and he said, “Good morning, Steve and Beth.” We had not talked to him but a minute, but he remembered our names.
We have never since left the Covenant church. It completely turned us around. We were drawn into an orbit where we have remained. I transferred to North Park Seminary the next year. I wish I had Pastor Eldon Johnson’s gift for remembering names. Sometimes, I am afraid, I do not do nearly so well. But I know personally what a transforming experience it is. To hear your name from another person is a wonderful gift.
The gift to Mary on Easter morning was to hear her name spoken by a mouth she had thought was silent forever. It was a voice from the grave, but it did not come from the grave. It came personally from the lips of the Lord Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, and there to speak her name with love and grace.
Jesus voice is still not silent. Jesus continued to meet and call by name those He was drawing completely into His orbit. The eleven remaining disciples and other women who followed Him heard His call. Peter, John, James, another Mary, a woman named Joanna. Jesus said that sheep know their shepherd because he calls them by name. Risen from the dead, that is what He did. He called one after another by name and they each turned from despair and death and followed Him to a new life.
I heard Jesus call my name when I was ten years old and gave my life to Him as my Savior. I heard Him call me again when I was 16, to be a pastor. He used Pastor Eldon to call Beth’s and my names into Covenant ministry. And then He used some of you to call our names to this church nearly 27 years ago. Jesus calls us and turns us around.
Over and over, through the ages, the living Lord has spoken His people’s names, just as He spoke to Mary on the first Easter. The new life of Easter is not a renewal of spirit that comes from our own selves. It is not a celebration of the earth’s power to bring new life out of the ground. It is not an abstraction. It is not a myth. It is a personal encounter with a living Man who will never die because He is the living God. And He calls our names. He is calling your name to turn around and orbit your life around Him once again.
Because Jesus calls our names, because He rose from the dead and called Mary’s name, I have no doubt that He can turn us around. I have no doubt that He can turn the troubles and sorrows of this world around. Like a comet diving toward the sun, Jesus went to the Cross and turned death around. He can turn anything around.
Return to that image of a skater swinging round a pole again, but imagine that it is Jesus on those skates and that the Cross is the pole around which He turns. Though it seems drawn out in the Gospels, our Lord fairly rushed to the Cross. He was only in His early thirties. His ministry was a bare three years. The whole time He is careening headlong toward the Cross, diving to His death. Yet it was only so that He could grasp the wood of that tree, swing round it, and rush back out again, to greet us on Easter morning. Jesus turns it all around; just like He turned the Cross; just like He turned Mary.
One of the most beautiful expressions of how Jesus can turn around our lives, can turn around the hard times we experience, is a pattern poem by George Herbert. In the 17th century, Herbert himself had once been a member of parliament, headed toward a career in politics at the king’s court. But the king and two patrons died almost at the same time. So Herbert turned away from all that and turned toward his faith. At age 36, he decided to become a priest and the next year became the pastor of a small rural congregation. While there he wrote poetry, including this:
Easter Wings
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
My tender age in sorrow did beginne
And still with sicknesses and shame.
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel thy victorie:
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
In an innovative bit of printing for those times, Herbert wrote and published this poem turned sideways, so you can see the shape of wings in the words. The shape plays off the idea of flight in the last line of each verse. But the shape also shows how Christ turns life around. The first verse speaks generally of the fall of human beings, from our original creation in paradise, then narrows down as it tells how we by sin lost that first glory, and kept getting worse and worse,
Till he became
Most poore:
But then Herbert declares,
With thee
O let me rise
to say how we may be raised with Christ. Each line then broadens out to close with the thought that the fall of human beings actually gave us opportunity in Christ to fly.
The second verse talks about the first part of Herbert’s own life, full of sorrow, sickness and shame, God’s punishment for sin, again narrowing down to this:
That I became
Most thinne
Then the turn starts as Herbert prays,
With thee
Let me combine,
and he goes on to ask that he may feel for himself Christ’s great victory over death. When he says,
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
he means to say that he wishes to imitate with his own wings, his own life, the victorious wings of Jesus on which He flew from death and the tomb. And so he concludes in the final, again broad line,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
That last is what Christians have always understood about Jesus’ death and resurrection. Our lives are so joined to the Lord Christ that when we suffer, even when we die, the result will be the same as it was for Him. God will raise us. We will fly. The suffering, the death only furthers that, advances that victory, that flight of glory, just as it did for Jesus. That’s the big turn around which we are celebrating today on Easter.
I’ve no idea when all this isolation and sickness and economic downturn will turn around. But I know that Jesus has already turned everything around and that is all the turn we need, all the turn I need, all the turn you need.
It’s hard to understand the last bit Jesus said to Mary in verse 17, “Do not hold on to me.” In the King James it sounds like social distancing, “Touch me not.” But Jesus was not forbidding touch. In just next bit in this chapter He invited the other disciples, including Thomas to touch Him. No, He really meant for Mary not to hold onto Him there in the garden. Jesus was not yet ascended to His Father in heaven and in the meantime He needed Mary to go, to go and tell the others about it before He was gone. They needed to see, they needed to turn to Him like she had.
So when Jesus told Mary, “Do not hold on to me,” He meant it like that roller skater cannot hang onto that pole very long, like a comet cannot get sucked into the gravity well of the sun for very long. You can’t just be by yourself as a Christian, “me and Jesus,” as they say. You touch and are turned by Jesus to head back out, to share the good news of His great turn around with others waiting to have their own lives turned around.
When a comet turns around the sun, it glows. The heat of the sun melts some of the ice. Dust and gases are released that become the tail of the comet, glowing and reflecting the sun’s own light. Its turn around the sun turns it into a beacon in the sky.
Mary went back to the other disciples glowing with the new life of the Lord. He turned her into a messenger of the Good News that He had risen and that He was drawing them to God. As Jesus turns your life around in His grace, He is also sending you out with the same Good News. You too are sent with the message, “I have seen the Lord!”
If we were at church together, I would soon literally turn you around and send you back out, telling you to go out into the places where you live and work and go to school and let the light of Christ blaze out from you. I can’t say it quite the same today, but I know the day is coming when you will be able to do that, when this affliction of a virus will advance the flight in us and we will wing our way out to love and serve others again in the name of Jesus.
In the meantime, turn where you are toward Jesus. He is calling your name, He is turning you around. The pain, the sadness, the stress, that’s just the turning point, your share in the Cross. Don’t break up like the Atlas Comet, but grab hold of this hard time and swing round it toward Jesus, and, when the moment comes, be ready to fly. I promise you will, because Jesus Christ promised you will. He is risen indeed!
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj