Episode Details

“Why are you weeping?”During my adult life, I have often sought a change of scenery during the working day and gone instead to coffee shops. In one coffee shop that I went to many times, I observed the behaviour of a rather eccentric man, who seemed to mutter ecstatically to himself, smiling and laughing. At points, he would grow so excited that he would rise from his seat and, as it were, begin proclaiming his message to the entire room with arms outstretched. Sometimes, he would even take the street outside, doing a similar thing, stopping passers-by to tell them whatever it was he had to say. I confess I couldn’t work it out. One day, I noticed what he had written on the laptop which he often left open in front of him: Christian writings, Scriptures, prayers. I can’t remember what exactly. But I recognised at this moment that, whatever it was he was happy about, had to do with that subject matter. And it occurred to me that I had thought him mad, and that probably everyone else did too. But I want to suggest this morning that, in the light of Easter, of Christ’s resurrection from the tomb, perhaps he is the sanest one of us all…“Why are you weeping?” asked the risen Christ to Mary Magdalen (John 20:15). (Though she, of course, did not know the bearer of the question.) On the face of it, there were all sorts of reasons to weep. Christ had been the victim of a brutal, judicial murder, a crucifixion. Without anything else to the story, Jesus’ message of God’s love, of the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation, of eternal life, and all the other things he said and promised (even though dimly understood) was fatally undermined.Moreover, his very presence had gone from the world. He was more than a bearer of good tidings to Mary. He was her friend, her comforter, her saviour, one who brought joy into the life of an otherwise lost and broken soul. And he was gone, taken from her by the inevitably harsh contours of human action and history.What Christ’s death had shown was only that real life is harsh and vicious: that life is a natural economy of existence followed by death, of competing forces violently cancelling one another out, of recrimination, hatred, bitterness, mutual accusation, of the ultimately meaningless struggle for power and survival. All Christ’s was was an affirmation of the immanent order of things with all of its tiring and dull predictability: nothing new. We had thought it might be. But, it’s just the same old thing. The same old disappointment. The same old suffering. The same old death. The same old world.The end has become the middleSo, how does the fact that it was Jesus himself who asked this question to Mary change things? In a word, it changes everything. The question changes from a request for an understandable answer to a rhetorical question with no answer: “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary” (John 20:15-16). At this she recognised who is was who spoke to her and recognised that there was no further need for tears, at least, not at that moment.There is a living theologian who coined a phrase to describe the significance of Jesus’ resurrection: In Jesus’ resurrection, the end has become the middle. It was true that certain Jewish believers had as part of their theology the belief that, at the end of history, God would raise the dead and judge the world in righteousness. This was a great hope that they clung to and would perhaps have sustained them under the occupation of the Romans, believing that the Empire under which they laboured was a temporary arrangement, one day to be eclipsed by the true empire: The Kingdom of God. That was what the end looked like.Nobody was expecting the resurrection to occur before that. And yet, in Jesus’ resurrection, it has. In Jesus’ resurrection, what was expected at the end of history, occurred in the middle of history, as p