By Sarah Jacoby Murphy
Sarah earned a B.A. from Houghton University and M.Div from Duke Divinity School. She has spent most of her career working in the nonprofit sector and has a particular interest in the areas of immigration and the environment.
Scripture: I Corinthians 13:8-13; John 20:1-2, 11-18
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be pleasing to you, O God. For you are our Rock and our Redeemer, the one who redeems our words and our thoughts.
I spoke last week about how we live our lives with only partial knowledge; but how our love is something that remains between this life and the next. This week I am going to talk about the resurrection of the body, and what it means to know in full.
If you read the four gospel accounts of the resurrection side by side, you’ll find that they all vary in their details of the resurrection of Christ. I find that John’s gospel, which we read today, is characterized by the lack of immediate answers.
For starters, John’s version begins with the protagonist literally in the dark. If you read the accounts of the resurrection in Matthew, Mark, or Luke, you’ll hear that a group of women came to the tomb at dawn, or just after the sun had risen. But in John’s account, Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb alone while it is still dark. She woke up before the sun rose–or perhaps she had not slept at all–and began to make her way to the graveyard to prepare her teacher’s body for burial. And she couldn’t see what was in front of her–figuratively or literally! She had to feel her way down the path. Because it wasn’t dawn when she set out. There wasn’t a lightening on the horizon. It was just dark.
Mary’s lack of clarity continues when she discovers the empty tomb and realizes that Jesus’s body is not there. In the other gospels, clarity about the resurrection comes right on the heels of the discovery that Jesus’s body is gone: Jesus’s resurrection is announced almost immediately by angels. In these accounts, when the female disciples first arrive at the empty tomb, there are divine messengers waiting to greet them, and they deliver a divine message: “He is not here!” they say, “he is risen!” The women are given supernatural insight into the resurrection right off the bat. And while they still may be confused about the truth of the message, the angels’ message itself is very clear: Jesus’s body is gone because Jesus is no longer dead.
But in John’s gospel, Mary doesn’t receive a divine pronouncement. There are no angels present at the tomb when she first arrives on the scene; there is no one there at all. She runs back to find the other disciples and tell them that the tomb is empty, and when they all run back to the tomb together, there are no angels then either. There is no divine voice, no divine messenger, no indication of what this empty space means. The men leave baffled, and Mary is left sitting at the tomb alone, weeping.
It is only after Mary is left alone that she bends down to look into the tomb and sees two angels sitting where Jesus’s body should have been. But even then, the angels don’t tell her what’s going on. They simply ask her, “Why are you crying?” And she says: “they have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they have laid him.” John is 13 verses into the story and Mary is still in the dark about the resurrection.
At this point, if this were another gospel account, the angels would finally tell Mary exactly what happened. But John does something unprecedented. Because instead of Mary hearing about the resurrection from an angel, Mary begins talking to a stranger and then suddenly realizes that she’s speaking to Jesus. He says her name, and all at once, she recognizes him.
Her knowledge of the resurrection doesn’t come through a grand announcement from the angels. Her knowledge of the resurrection doesn’t come through words. She never even hears that famous line, “He is not here, he is risen!” Instead, the good news about the resurrection comes through that visceral, ordinary way of knowing that we call recognition.
Think about that feeling of recognition. It’s the feeling of picking up the phone and immediately knowing the voice on the other end. It’s the feeling of smelling a sweet scent and knowing it belongs to a lilac and not a rose. To recognize something is to know that thing again. It’s not something that you can be told. It’s something that you experience.
Think about the first time you made a loaf of bread; you read the recipe carefully, or you listened to the person teaching you. You contemplated the dough–has it doubled in size? Has it been kneaded enough? Is it too wet? Is it too dry? The first time you make a loaf of bread you rely on knowledge that is outside of you. But the third, tenth, or hundredth time you make a loaf of bread, you know that the dough is ready because you recognize its readiness.
When you learn to swim, you move your body as your teacher tells you to–even if it’s not working!–because that’s all the knowledge that you have to bring to the task at hand. But with practice, with stroke after stroke after stroke, your body starts to recognize the movement and the timing required to move through the water.
Recognition is one of the most basic and essential tasks of human consciousness. It’s one of the first things that babies do cognitively–they begin to recognize the voices and faces and smells of their caretakers. We tent to think of knowledge in terms of reasoning, but recognition–literally, to know again–is the most common form of knowledge. It is knowledge in its most experiential and intimate form.
In the gospel of John, the knowledge of the resurrection does not arrive immediately. But when that knowledge arrives, it comes through recognition–a bodily knowing, a non-verbal knowing, that holds the most profound theological truth: that God’s love is stronger than death.
I shared with you all last week that my father died this past spring. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about the resurrection these days. We tend to only talk about resurrection at Easter, but the idea of bodily resurrection sits at the very center of the Christian faith. All the earliest creeds proclaim the belief that Jesus’s body was resurrected and that our bodies will be resurrected too. We’ve been repeating the story of Jesus for two thousand years because those early Christians claimed to know something that our reason and experience can’t yet confirm: that death is not the end of our lives.
And you and I are here today because we have caught glimpses of that hope, and we affirm that hope with our lives, even if we cannot fully understand it.
When I was in high school, my father preached a sermon on the resurrection: he recited a list of all the creatures and people that he had seen die in his life, from raccoons he trapped as a teenager to watching his own mother die after a stroke. And after my dad recited this list he acknowledged, “I’ve never yet seen any one of these rise from the dead.”
I now have my own list of animals and people that I’ve seen die. And I haven’t seen anything rise up from the dead yet either. But I’ve been told that Jesus did. And I’ve been told that we will too.
When I think about the resurrection of the body these days, I think less about angels making a divine proclamation, and I think more about Mary Magdalene, recognizing Jesus in the garden. I think of that beautiful, extraordinary moment when we see her knowledge move from partial to full. Her faith in the resurrection isn’t some sort of intellectual assent to something she’s been told, but it’s a response to something she has seen and deeply knows.
She has seen someone again that she never thought she would see again. Something she thought she had lost was returned to her.
Right now I can only understand what I have been told about the resurrection—I believe in something that I cannot fully see. But I trust the words of Paul from 1 Corinthians 13: “Love never ends.” And I have faith that will experience Mary’s moment of recognition in my own life; when a truth that I can only see dimly right now will be learned face to face.
We can only partially understand what resurrection means because our experience of death is so final. But I trust that someday we will all know in full. And our fullest knowledge of the resurrection will not come from the mouths of angels, and it will not come from the words of a book. Instead it will be as clear and as ordinary as hearing your sister’s voice on the phone, or tasting a tomato…we will simply recognize it.