Barrier Breaker

“Early on Sunday morning, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance. She ran and found Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved. She said, ‘they have taken the Lord’s body out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have put him! Peter and the other disciple started out for the tomb. They were both running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He stooped and looked in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he didn’t go in. Then Simon Peter arrived and went inside. He also noticed the linen wrappings lying there, while the cloth that had covered Jesus’ head was folded up and lying apart from the other wrappings. Then the disciple who had reached the tomb first also went in, and he saw and believed; for until then they still hadn’t understood the Scriptures that said Jesus must rise from the dead. 10 Then they went home. Mary was standing outside the tomb crying and as she wept, she stooped and looked in. 

She saw two white-robed angels, one sitting at the head and the other at the foot of the place where the body of Jesus had been lying. ‘Dear woman, why are you crying?’ the angels asked her. Because they have taken away my Lord,’ she replied, ‘and I don’t know where they have put him.’ She turned to leave and saw someone standing there. It was Jesus, but she didn’t recognize him. ‘Dear woman, why are you crying?’ Jesus asked her. ‘Who are you looking for?’ She thought he was the gardener. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him and I will go and get him.’ ‘Mary!’ Jesus said. She turned to him and cried out, ‘Rabboni!’ (This is Hebrew for “Teacher”). ‘Don’t cling to me,’ Jesus said, ‘for I haven’t yet ascended to the Father. But go find my brothers and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ Mary Magdalene found the disciples and told them, ‘I have seen the Lord!’ Then she gave them his message. (John 20:1-18) (Also read Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26)

A darkened garden, an empty tomb, abandoned grave clothes: we begin there. But John offers more. A grief-stricken woman, a footrace between rival disciples, a mysterious gardener. And yes, more. A bolted room harbouring terrified men, Jewish all of them, betting and losing on the failed blasphemer and crucified criminal, Yeshua of Nazareth, as Moshiach, each fearing vengeance from their more orthodox religious compatriots. Then, in that bolted room, the presence of Yeshua with words, wounds, a mandate. Just as Father allowed death to visit the first-born and “Passover” the Israelites and then led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, which is also celebrated at this time, so Yeshua assured us to have life and led us out of bondage of sin. Some story! What’s it about? A ghost? A resuscitated corpse? Is that why we sing and celebrate Passover? DNA reconstituting itself? The rising into the sky of the executed Yeshua, as my grandfather used to say, “Body, boots and britches”? Is that what Passover is all about? Is that what resurrection means?

I.) No way! For John resurrection means, among many other things, that a new community confronts our current communities. For John, himself writing from within a tight, loving, persecuted commune, Passover means a new realm of mutuality and trust making its way amid this world of brokenness and division, just as in the days of old with the Exodus. For John, Passover means breaking barriers. John’s images tell all. Remember? Yeshua, as HaMashiach, breaks into that locked room. Barrier broken. But even more. When Mary Magdalene turns from the tomb, she turns to face Yeshua. She fails, at first, to recognize Him. Why? She’s known Him, loved Him and followed Him. She fails to recognize Him because she turns to face a new quality of existence. She finds Him unrecognizable because she looks at an alternative to life as we know it. When “the gardener” calls Mary by name, she turns again. She turns, first of all, away from our world of tombs and crucifixion. She turns to face life asserting itself against death.

In truth, she grasps HaMashiach as true community breaking into the communities and status quos we structure to kill the likes of Yeshua and to fragment the loving, trusting communities he embodies. When Mary joyfully falls into HaMashiach’s arms, unconquerable love asserts itself as victor over death; triumphant over all that would splinter, throw us into chaos and separate us from one another. And yes, we discover even more; and it’s at the core of the Passover message. The event we celebrate provides us not only with an announcement about unconquerable love binding us together, breaking barriers; reason enough for rejoicing; it challenges us to exercise loving and just community among ourselves. Passover is not some mind-boggling event taking place in a Palestinian garden two thousand years ago; Passover for Christians affirms the ground of our hope today, the root of our future as a human community. It challenges us, you and me, to serve as “Resurrection Community,” barrier breakers, in and for the world. It challenges us to live differently for one another; now!

II.) Our question then, in this teaching as we face the empty tomb: Can we live this radical Passover hope? Can we signal Resurrection Community? Can we bear our discipleship as barrier breakers? Friends, living the Passover hope mean first of all, the possibility of healing; of barrier breaking; in personal relationships. When our Adonai stands among those terrified disciples and asserts, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained”; when John reports Yeshua’s saying that, he means that by living the Passover gift we can begin again with one another. No relationship is so injured, no tie so broken, no bond so mutilated that in the dimensions of unconquerable love it cannot be recreated. Heaven knows most of us need such new beginnings. Our ties to one another are all too tenuous and brittle. We find ourselves in circumstances trying our patience, our tolerance, our goodwill. Many of us with families identify with that classic mother who, trying to hold her family together, finds herself shouting, “We’re going to have some family togetherness here; even if I have to chain you to the bed.” We live with tensions illustrated by the caustic repartee between Winston Churchill and another parliamentary representative, Bessie Braddock. Remember? As Churchill emerges from an indulgent dinner, Braddock observes, “Winston, you’re drunk.” “And Bessie,” Churchill counters, “You are ugly.

But tomorrow morning, at least, I shall be sober.” Barrier breaking cleanses our relationships. It forges forgiveness. It heals wounds bleeding most among and within us. I’ll never forget a memoir Alan Paton wrote after the death of his wife, Dorrie. Paton remembers a particularly painful occasion when Dorrie bluntly tells him she could never love him as much as she loved her first husband. Paton is crushed. But within the mysteries of human relationships and under no small duress, forgiveness for the injury is begged for and offered. And as Paton closes his reflection on that occasion, he writes, “What strange creatures we humans are. Just how we come to love one another and to care for one another for all of our common life and to grant one another territories on which the other does not trespass and to bear with one another’s foibles and weaknesses and to grow closer and closer until we have but one mind on all the things that matter to us most and to have children and to put their welfare and happiness above all other things and to give them safety and security until it is proper for them to find these things for themselves, how it ever comes to happen in this imperfect world, only YAHVEH knows. Indeed! Only YAHVEH, the truly miraculous barrier breaker knows.

III.) But the barrier breaking of Resurrection goes beyond the personal walls we build between and among ourselves. Passover proclaims the radical dissolution of social barriers as well. The powers of politics, commerce, religion; those powers finally conspire to nail Yeshua to the cross. On Passover we confess the love of YAHVEH in charge of those powers as well. The barriers we build; the structures we nurture; the ideologies we pursue cutting us off from one another, marginalizing, dividing or thrusting human beings in powerless, third-class, personally demeaning circumstances; these have no place within the future of YAHVEH. Do you remember John’s gospel telling us about Yeshua confronting those disciples in a room locked against the world? HaMashiach dissolves locked doors. HaMashiach turns closed societies into open societies. To John, HaMashiach bears the reality of peace born of justice. On Passover we celebrate the Exodus and the saving of the first-born of Israel when death “Passed over” them AND we attend to the discipleship of breaking down barriers of injustice, opening closed societies also.

IV.) And last, we confess on Passover our Elohim who finally breaks those barriers splintering the human race into creeds and tongues, races and nations. We reaffirm the glory of creation designed as a rainbow. If the Passover promise and its barrier breaking mean anything, they transform the human race into the human family. Isn’t this the gospel hope, the Resurrection promise amid the stress and violence of cultural, national and ethnic conflict? Do we live with Israelis and Palestinians at one another’s throats forever? Passover says, “No!” Do we struggle with the great powers of Russia, China, India, the United States, each claiming regions of interest, struggling against one another for political or economic hegemony, selling arms by the megaton in a world where vast populations starve and fight to stay alive? Passover says, “Enough!” Do we countenance human trafficking, millions without health care, brutal civil conflicts among people where the lives and health of children, women and the aged are always at stake? Passover promises a world healed and whole, again. A Passover barrier breaker! For you! For me! For this troubled yet glorious world of YAHVEH’s. What can we say but “Come ye faithful, raise the strain of triumphant gladness” in gratitude, in joy, in service. Amen.