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The Sabbath began at sundown on Friday and lasted until sundown Saturday. Jewish Law forbade travel and work during that time, so the first opportunity that Mary Magdalene had to come back to the tomb, to attend to Jesus' body properly, was early on Sunday morning.

It must have seemed incomprehensible to her that life could go on, when her beloved Jesus was dead. The world must have seemed torn apart to her, and all of life with it, as is true for all recently bereaved people. Like all who suffer the shock of grief, she probably felt that she needed to place her feet carefully when she walked, for fear that one careless step might cause heaven and earth to split in two. Worst of all must have been the fear that this man who was so important to her would be forgotten, that neither his life or his death would make any difference to the world, would have any meaning, would be remembered.

All she could think of was getting back to the tomb to take care of his dead body. Maybe there -- as she applied ritual spices and oils and knew that the death was real and final -- maybe there, she could begin to figure out how she was supposed to go on living.

And so on Sunday morning, before it is even light, Mary arrives at the tomb. Like most of us most of the time, Mary is consumed with the finality of physical death. Neither the empty tomb nor the vision of Jesus lift Mary's veil of grief and confusion; only the words of Jesus do. When she recognizes Jesus' presence, it is not by seeing him, but through hearing his words, hearing herself called by his words.

When Mary does recognize the presence of Jesus, she wants to throw her arms around him and hang on for dear life, just as any of us would give anything to embrace a deceased loved one again. But in her vision she is told not to try to keep holding onto the old reality. His body is dead and gone. An ordinary human relationship is no longer possible.

His relationship with her is moving into the spiritual realm. She must now move into the future with the memory and influence of the past to guide her, but she must accept a new reality, a new life different from the one she once knew.

Devoted as she has been to Jesus in the living flesh, Mary does not understand the resurrection or the new relation of her risen Lord to her and his other followers. She has lots of company, doesn't she?

The children in a Sunday School class, so a story goes, were learning about Holy Week. The teacher asked, "What happened on Palm Sunday?" "Oh, that's when Jesus rode on a donkey and people waved palm branches," came the reply. "That's right," said the teacher. "Do you know what happened on Good Friday?" "That's when Jesus was killed on a cross, crucified."

"Very good," said the teacher. "Now, what happened on Easter?" A hand shot up, and a little fellow said, "That's when Jesus got up from being dead and came out from where they had him buried -- but if he sees his shadow, he has to go back in for seven more weeks."

That's not much more confused than many of us are about Easter, is it? If we compare the different gospels' accounts of the events surrounding and following Jesus' death, and if we try to read them literally, we soon realize that they don't agree in details, and we can get terribly confused.

So what are we to make of such a story as this one from the Gospel of John about Mary Magdalene in the garden? First, we need to recognize that the gospel accounts were written to tell about the significance and importance of Jesus to the writers, not to give historical facts.

These stories contain themes familiar to the writers and their readers both from the dying and rising myths of the surrounding cultures and from Hebrew scripture. They would have been understood by people in that time as mythological treatments, similar to parables, which may not be factual but in which truth is embodied.

It's one of our modern failings that so many would-be Christians have given up on the faith because they ask the wrong questions and can't get past a literal reading, missing the great truth that the stories tell. The question we really need to ask is not what the facts were but what do these stories mean?

The gospel accounts are more like sermons or poetry than historical reports, and they weren't even written down until a generation or two after Jesus life and death. The earliest writings that we have about Jesus in the New Testament, the letters of Paul, don't have any resurrection appearances of Jesus or stories about an empty tomb, so scholars tell us that these stories developed late in the tradition.

The gospels are highly mythologized treatments, which vary from writer to writer in detail. But these gospel creations do tell us some facts almost indirectly.

They all agree that Jesus of Nazareth came to Jerusalem at the season of Passover and confronted the domination system of his time, the Roman empire. They agree that he was arrested and crucified and that his followers then had experiences that led them to proclaim that he had been raised to new life with God. That's what the Greek text actually says, by the way, that he was raised by God, not that he had risen.

The gospels all agree, further, that the cause of his execution was political, not religious. Crucifixion was a torturous death that the Roman empire inflicted on insurrectionists, those in conquered territories who defied the authority of the emperor, who was called Lord and Son of God. For Jesus' followers to assign those titles to him was to make the statement that Jesus' authority was of a higher order than that of the emperor. His refusal to accede to Rome's authority over his sense of God's calling to justice for the people is what got him killed.

Further, what they all attest to is that this Jesus, this man once put to death in a cruel and humiliating way as a criminal, this Jesus has been vindicated, raised to new, eternal life by the love of God. No longer can his disciples think of Jesus without thinking of God, and no longer can they think of God without thinking of Jesus. The two have become inseparable in their minds.
What the gospels all testify to in different ways is that Jesus, as the risen Christ, is no longer bounded by place or time, but is available in all times and places. His spirit lives now in his followers and gives a sense of his abiding presence.

An earmark of this particular gospel, the Gospel of John, is that faith is not considered to be an intellectual exercise, and people don't have to understand perfectly. All they have to do to be disciples is to confess Jesus as Lord (as opposed to the Emperor) and commit themselves to follow his Way.

Mary of Magdala, even with her imperfect understanding, is the first in John's gospel to announce, "I have seen the Lord." With that proclamation, she is the first to attest to the Resurrection, to the continuing life of Jesus among his followers. The Gospel of John's claim is that we too can experience the risen Christ by listening to Jesus' words, by hearing ourselves called by them to new life.

John's gospel also takes pains -- not to deny that Jesus died a real, human, and final death -- not to hold out hope to us that our deaths will not be real, human, and final -- but to show that Jesus is now present in the world in a new way, among those in whom his Christ Spirit lives.

What we celebrate at Easter is not the resuscitation of a corpse, but the Resurrection which was experienced by Jesus' disciples and is still available to us today and in the future. And so, the question to ask is not "What really happened in that tomb?" One question to ask is "What would it mean to us, what would it look like, to accept wholeheartedly the reality of resurrection, in our own lives right now?"

Would it perhaps mean finding ourselves in new relationships with persons who have died, and who are now whole and complete and with us always, in our hearts, no longer bounded by place or time?

Would it perhaps mean finding ourselves in new relationships with persons who are still living but with whom our past relationships are now dead?

Would it perhaps mean the developing of a new identity, discovering new meaning in our life when a former role comes to an end -- as a mother or father, husband or wife, son or daughter, young person, working person, member of a particular trade or profession, an athlete, a pastor -- however we have defined ourselves in the past? Would it perhaps mean the discovery of unexplored, unrecognized gifts and talents when age or illness takes away a former ability?

Moving from the personal to a wider view, a related question we can ask is "What would it mean to accept the reality of resurrection, of new life, in our society?" Would it mean the end of greed and selfishness as motivators, and their replacement by an ethic in which we all truly took care of those who are the least able to care for themselves?

Paula Kahler's friend Betty Frank, a UCC missionary in Turkey whom many of you met a couple of years ago when she was here with us, said at the conclusion of a recent email: "As Easter comes into view we see all the violence and intolerance of this world in Jesus' death on the cross. Whenever people are able to act with wisdom, tolerance, genuine respect and love we join Mary Magdalene in experiencing Jesus as raised from the dead!

Could taking resurrection seriously mean the institution of a new society in which people were no longer divided by race, ethnic identity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, economic stratum or political persuasion?

Could it mean the development of a peace-oriented technology and industry, to replace the militarily-related jobs which would then be disappearing?

Finally, let us ask, "What would it mean in the life of this church to take seriously the reality of resurrection?" Would it mean celebrating the dying of an old time and the rising of a new time, with a new pastor? Would it mean dying to attachments to the past that hamper and constrict, and rising to a new sense of the future's possibilities?

Would it mean allowing old hurts and griefs to die so that new life can flow into the congregation? Would it mean grieving the loss of old members but welcoming new people into membership and receiving their gifts and ideas and needs?

Would it mean dying to some old assumptions, examining the present needs of the surrounding community, and rising to a new sense of mission and purpose, in response to those needs?

Would it mean seeing the death of some old ways of doing things -- some old programs, some structures of organization and administration, maybe even some worship practices -- and the rising of some new ones?

One of the many possible meanings to take from the gospel story as parable is that there are possibilities for new life in every death, for a dying to the old and rising to the new, for a new beginning.

When we are at a tomb of despair, facing our fears that maybe life just comes to a dead end and makes no sense, and that maybe faith is just a lot of wishful thinking, then -- if we look with our hearts, if we listen with all of our being and imagination -- then what we see through our tears may be Christ. And what we hear may be the faint sound of a voice addressing us by name, saying that there is a purpose and meaning in this life, in our lives, whether we can understand it completely or not.
That voice may say that this purpose can come to us, and unfold in us, through all of our doubting and our being afraid and not understanding. Then a moment can happen when we know for sure that everything does make sense, through the eyes of God, one of whose names is love.

For the good news of Easter, the true miracle that Christianity has to proclaim, is that love has no limits, not even the limit of death. The good news of Easter is that Jesus as the Christ was the love of God alive among God's people, and that not all of the cruelty and blindness of humanity could kill that meaning and that purpose.

Christ still lives as the love of God among followers of Jesus. When we understand that, then we can truly say Christ is risen! Risen indeed! Alleluia!