Thoughts from St. Andrew's Episcopal Church • Birmingham, AL

Easter Sunday Sunday, April 12, 2020

First Reading: Acts 10:34-43

or Jeremiah 31:1-6

New Testament: Colossians 3:1-4

or Acts 10:34-43

Gospel: John 20:1-18

or Matthew 28:1-10

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

“Why are you weeping?”

Jesus (from John 20)

Early and dark, Mary Magdalene went to the burial place of Jesus and found it different than she expected. It was as if she thought God to be on a time table and certain that God’s power is suspended and thwarted by tragedy and grief.

As Mary moves through her grief to the space in the Earth where Jesus would be contained, she finds the sepulcher vacated and her empty feelings of loss multiplied as the Unexpected One comes and speaks to Mary with in her grief.  Her tears, cries, and emotional pain are all impacted upon Jesus, who subsequently calls her by name, and renders the impact of these forces void.

Resurrection Sunday suspends my feelings of tragedy and grief similarly, as I am invited to reengage again with the One who conquers all of the “bad,” imperfect, traumatic injustices of this world. I am reminded yet again that it is within the dark, damp tombs that God provides dynamic wombs for new life and living, always!

We must continue to turn from our old ideas, old expectations, and former traditions that have sufficed, and totally consider, embrace, and imbibe the invigorating, ubiquitous way of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. Jesus will wipe away our tears when we chose to turn (repent) from anguish and anxiety to clarity and wholeness.

We too, like Mary, can enjoy, not just today, but for the next 50 days the new vision within and without, so we can proclaim we have seen the Lord, too. I am convinced that in the Resurrection encounter with Mary, Jesus gives and makes her solely the Church’s only one who is a witness to the resurrection and the Resurrected One. Had it not been for Mary’s tears and turning she would have missed this glorious moment.

Let us with haste consider our tears and listen for Jesus to calls us away and out of our blindness into the eternal hope of Easter. God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes, and Resurrection Sunday is the certainty that Jesus has already begun to do so.

Happy Easter!

The Rev. Dr. Tommie L. Watkins, Jr.