John 20:1-18

Back in 1984, everybody was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig. A dear friend said I should read it and it would change my life. I did; it didn’t; and I don’t remember much of it, but I appreciated Persig’s explanation of the Buddhist concept of “mu,” which means “un-ask.” If someone asks a question that limits the way you can look at things, or that can only produce an unhelpful answer, you can answer, “mu,” which says there may be a better question.

The celebration of the Resurrection tends to raise the kind of questions that make me want to answer, “Mu.” Did the Resurrection really happen? Do you “believe” in the Resurrection? Do you need to believe in a literal, bodily Resurrection to be a good Christian, or to be any kind of Christian? At the risk of sounding like the Easter cow instead of the Easter bunny, “Mu, mu, mu.”

People have obsessed about these questions for centuries. We want the facts, right? But even the four gospels tell the story four different ways. How many women went to the tomb: one, two or three? How many angels? Did the disciples meet Jesus in Galilee or Jerusalem or both? All of which is glorious affirmation that neither the precise facts about the Resurrection nor the truth it reveals depends on what we believe. Easter isn’t like the musical “Peter Pan,” where the audience is asked to clap if they believe in fairies to save Tinkerbell’s life. We don’t change anything by our belief, our unbelief, or by telling the story with conflicting details.

Besides, as Frederick Buechner pointed out, “…even if somebody had been there with a television camera and taken a picture of Jesus walking out of the tomb, what would that be except, for many people, an interesting historical fact, just as it’s interesting to know that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492? But what difference does that make to me? So what if a Jew in the year 30 A.D. was brought back from the dead? In other words, what’s important is not so much what happened in the half-light of daybreak on that day in 30 A.D., but what happens now. What matters is not what happened on Easter Sunday, but what happens in my life. Is there any sense that, for you and for me, Jesus exists, or the power that was in Jesus, the power that led people to see him as kind of transparency to holiness itself, to the mystery itself? If that is alive, that’s all that matters, and what happened on that day is of little consequence except in a minor historical way.”

We tell this enigmatic story with conflicting details every year not because Easter is the anniversary of something that happened 2,000 years ago. Easter is not over. It is ongoing. We see this in John’s Easter story. It’s Sunday morning and still dark. Mary Magdalene goes to tomb where she knows the body of the crucified Jesus was laid on Friday. She sees the tomb is empty and concludes someone has stolen the body. She runs to tell Peter and the other disciple, and they run to the tomb. The unnamed disciple “believes,” but we aren’t told what he believes. The disciples don’t yet understand; in any event, they turn around and head home.

Mary remains there, weeping. She sees a man she thinks is the gardener. He calls her by name, and something illogical, something impossible happens. The One who was certified dead greets her. Stunned, she can only say, “Rabbouni!” which is something like “Teacher!” She reaches for him, but Jesus says, “Don’t cling to me.” This seems harsh, but rather than a rebuke, try imagining it as a teaching moment. “Mary, you can’t cling to ‘Rabbouni,’ to what I was on Friday. You can’t hold on to what is dead and gone.” Jesus refers to “your father and my father; your God and my God.” He’s describing a new horizontal relationship, a new union with God that means new life. The point of Easter is not to believe something about the past, but to awaken to the gift of new life here. God is making us new, here, and now.

What does “new” look like? To the disciples, it looked like an uprising of hope. Brian D. McLaren imagines their conversation: “Do you realize what this means? Jesus was right after all!” “Not only that, but we never have to fear death again. And if that’s true, we never need to fear Caesar again.” “That means we can stand tall and speak the truth, just like Jesus did.” We see this awakening realization in all the post-resurrection accounts. Everything had changed. It’s not just that Jesus was resurrected. It felt as though they’d arisen, too. They’d been in a tomb of defeat and despair, but they were truly alive again, and a force to be reckoned with. But a force of hope, not hate.

“New” is for us, as well, but like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don’t actually deserve it. Nadia Bolz-Weber writes, “New looks like every time I manage to admit I was wrong and every time I manage not to mention I was right. New looks like every fresh start and every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn’t live without and then somehow living without it anyway. New is the thing we never saw coming – never even hoped for – but ends up being what we needed all along.”

The God who is love, who so loved the whole world, as John’s gospel put it, does not limit new life to people who can recite the Apostles’ Creed without crossing their fingers. “Do not cling to me,” said Jesus. God is free, and perhaps “new” includes recognizing the ways we have persuaded ourselves that God can be controlled by our own rules, creeds, and religious practices. John’s first witness to the Resurrection was a woman. It’s hard for us to appreciate how radical that is, but it affirms everything Jesus did in his earthly ministry to cross barriers and include outsiders. So not only can we no longer think of God as Protestant or Catholic, or white, Black or brown; we can no longer think God is more like nice middle-class folks or imagine that God prefers Christians to Muslims or vice versa. “New” means waking up to the fact that God is not on “our” side any more than God is on “their” side.

Easter – new life – is God’s ongoing work. It’s not just once a year and it’s not about church, although the church is the fellowship of Easter people. When Jesus sent Mary to go tell the disciples, in the Greek it says, “Continue to tell them.” Her never-ending mission, and ours, is to share her Easter experience and the things he taught. So while we do not corner the market on new life, we are the people who look for, celebrate and point to signs of Resurrection; signs that, as Desmond Tutu put it, goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death. When the Church gathers, it is to rise again, to believe again, to hope again, to live again. It is ongoing. We do not proclaim on Easter morning, “Christ was risen.” We proclaim, “Christ is risen!”

© Joanne Whitt 2025 all rights reserved.

Resources:
William Placher, quoting Herman Samuel Reimarus, in Jesus the Savior (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6IKaLF4Fqc
Frederick Buechner, from an extended interview, by Kim Laughton, April 18, 2003, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2003/04/18/april-18-2003-frederick-buechner-extended-interview/8658/.
Herman C. Waetjen, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (New York: T & T Clark International, 2005).
Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking (New York: Jericho Books, 2014).
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint (New York: Jericho Books, 2013).
John 3:16.
Ruth Burgess and Chris Pohill, Eggs and Ashes (Glasgow, Scotland: Wild Goose Publications, 2004).