Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb. Unlike in the other gospel accounts, according to John, Mary came by herself. Not to “do” anything, but perhaps just to mourn in the graveyard in the first morning light, and to process all she had seen and experienced. She saw everything with her own eyes. She was there at the foot of the cross. She may have helped to wash his skin and prepare him for burial. With the rest of his loved ones, she saw him placed in the tomb and left him there so that it could be shut behind them.

Mary could not have been more sure that Jesus was dead, and how often do we feel so certain that we are at our ending? How often do we feel like our lives are already over? Have things ever come crashing down around you so completely that tomorrow was something you couldn’t even imagine? There are moments in our lives, that we don’t think we could ever come back from; and in some ways, we don’t. Grief never really goes away; you just learn how to live with it. Life’s toughest lessons can’t be unlearned once you learn them. Our wounds don’t define us, but they do change us in ways that can’t be undone.

I wonder if Mary felt like the same person when she came to the garden. Even after all the times she’d heard Jesus talk about his death, there was still no way to really be prepared for it. But it had happened, and the last thing she expected was a resurrection. We can tell from her distress when she finds the empty and open tomb. They say that grief is like love with nowhere to go, and as she realizes that she cannot even go to his grave to visit him, there’s no indication that she sees a glimmer of hope in that. Maybe that’s why she stays there when the other disciples go home. Sometimes grief can root us to a place in such a way that the idea of moving our bodies or our minds to any other place feels simply impossible. This is just the kind of the despair that Rome was hoping for. The kind that makes even the biggest dreamers give up and go home. The kind that squashes your hopes so thoroughly that you wonder if any of what you felt was real.

I’ve been reading a daily devotional during Lent called God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us by Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail. I highly recommend this book and her if you’re a person who is rediscovering your faith and searching for new ways to relate to the Bible. In a lesson titled “The cross was a weapon” she reminds us that the cross was a weapon of war. Its purpose was to demonstrate who was in charge and to make you feel powerless to stop them. Though they hang harmlessly on our walls here today, they were as horrifying to the people then as a high-tech military drone is to us now. She says that Jesus died on the cross “not because the Father has to mete out some almighty punishment to make you personally feel bad but because we live in a world full of crucifixion.” God went to the most unspeakable and horrifying place where the most powerful humans of his day demonstrated the depths of their inhumanity.

Our government may not use crosses like Rome did, but it still crucifies people because of where they come from or what they believe, and all for the sake of demonstrating who is in control. Jesus endured what all the crucified of Earth are forced to experience. He accepted it in a divine act of self-sacrificing love and solidarity with the powerless. Rev. Lizzie goes on to say, “It is only by the grace of God that we can face the crucifixions of our lives, and our world. Because even from the cross, from the pit of death, Jesus says: I know what you have lost, what you have faced, what you grieve down to the bones of the earth and up to the stars in their courses, and I will never, ever let you face it alone.” Jesus knows how real our pain is. Life on Earth brought him up close and personal with the heartache that comes with being fragile and alive. Jesus saw the things we put each other through and felt them the way that human beings must. Yet Jesus does not give up on us. God never stops co-creating new life with us. The Spirit never stops trying to move us towards the love Jesus came to share, and would not shut up about.

It really doesn’t make any sense to think that a gardener would’ve moved Jesus from the tomb, and it makes even less sense to think that if he did, he would return to the scene of the crime, but Mary isn’t in a logical state of mind. She’s probably in shock. So, she reaches for first tiny thread of hope that appears. Maybe this person who looks like they work here in the garden can tell her something, but she isn’t looking at him closely enough to see that it is Jesus himself until he says her name. In some translations, the words he says are “don’t touch me,” but he is touchable. He specifically invites the disciples, like Thomas, to touch his wounds and believe that he has risen. I wonder if it was the look on Mary’s face, or the way he knows her, that prompts him to give her a different response, to tailor his words to what she needs to hear. The Greek verb he uses when he says “don’t hold onto me” can also mean to fasten or to cling.

Jesus is alive and there with her, but he has also fundamentally changed, and he knows that things are only going to keep changing. So, he says to her, don’t get attached. We can’t go back to how things used to be. The way things were is truly gone, but something new is being born. The revelation of the Word made flesh has been completed, but the revelation of God with us has just begun. “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God,” he tells her.  They were used to Jesus calling God his father, but now he calls God their father. Now, Jesus wants them to reimagine what it means for them to be God’s children. If his God is their God, then what might the disciples together be truly capable of?

Whatever Jesus sees in Mary’s eyes, he needs her to know that something new is happening. They are not going backwards, but forwards. None of them are the same as they were three days ago, and they never will be again, but their lives and the purposes for which they had been called to follow Christ were not over yet. This is how Mary becomes the apostle to the apostles; the first person to carry the good news! She is transformed and set on a new path to go and tell everyone that something strange and miraculous has happened. God has pulled a great reversal. Where the empire tried to place a period, God has turned it into a comma, as God so loves to do. Nothing threatens an empire quite the way that love does, because love doesn’t die, it rises again. Death could not contain love-incarnate, and what Rome meant to break his follower’s spirits, would instead start a new movement of God’s Spirit among them.

The resurrection reveals a great mystery. That even when everything seems like death, there is somehow more life waiting to be lived and more love waiting to be nurtured. Even when we are hopeless, God stays with us. Though we may be changed forever by what has happened to us, when we choose love, it will always draw near to us again. God undoes death with hope eternal and invites the disciples to be a part of what has never been before. They don’t get to keep Jesus as their teacher on Earth, but they also will not lose him. Now they will see him in each other, and they will each be connected to him in their own hearts. It’s their turn to step up, to be creative, and to imagine what will happen next. Jesus was empowering them and giving them something new to hold onto. They will now follow him, without having him there to follow. They will go and teach what is inscribed on their hearts, and he will go with them in a thousand different directions.

The resurrection is a revelation about how God goes on and on, steadfast and faithful, more powerful than evil, and relentless in making all things new. No empire can stand the test of time like the very Source of our Being who never leaves us nor forsakes us. The disciples will hold onto the resurrected Christ, the one who turns death into eternal life, because there is nothing that God cannot work through alongside us. God is made of endless possibilities. God is in all the places where we think there is no future anymore saying, “look just a little bit closer.” To follow Jesus is to be resurrection people. To have faith in the impossible and to try again after failure and loss. To believe in second chances even for the undeserving. To take people down from our crosses, and to fight for an end to crucifixions on Earth. From war-torn countries to the mental health of our neighbor, our call is to work for resurrection. Not just of bodies, but of lives and communities. Not just for the oppressed, but even for the oppressors who are bound by hate-filled vices. Resurrection hope is faith in what has never been but still could be: a kin-dom built on love like Jesus imagined. Something that feels as truly impossible as the resurrection of Christ, and when it comes into being will be no less of a miracle than Easter morning.

Don’t forget that it was still dark when Mary Magdalene came to the tomb. Though she didn’t know it, in that darkness, the resurrection had already started. Within the void of death, something new was already stirring. Rome was still in charge that morning. Ceasar didn’t know that anything had happened, but Jesus rose before the sun came up, because resurrection is on its way even when it is still dark outside, though we rarely expect it and often aren’t even looking for it. Christ lived when Mary was still sure that he was dead, and Jesus rose so that we would see that we can too. Even when we are sure that life is over, love for ourselves, and each other, and our God can bring us back anew. If we look closely the evidence is all around us, showing itself in ordinary miracles of all shapes and sizes.

When Jesus says don’t hold onto me, I see an invitation. An invitation to let go of what is behind us and to hold on for what is ahead of us. An invitation to be bold in co-creating the future we long for, a dream which God has long been dreaming with us. God invites us to deepen our faith, because what was intended for evil, God can turn toward good. Christ is risen and will never, ever leave us. There is no place we can go where the Spirit of God is not already waiting for us. Even now, our reckoning and our reconciliation with the Holy force that is eternal Love continues. Amen.