John 20:1-16

When Jesus Calls Your Name

          The authors add different details according to their perspective or according what they want their readers to remember.  For all our work at trying to harmonize the Gospels two thousand years later, it’s a bit surprising that the writers themselves seemed to see no conflict in their differences.  Today, we tend to want all authors to get their stories straight, but -- if all the stories were exactly the same, we’d look back and say, “It’s obvious they were simply copying one another, and the whole thing to me would then wreak of fiction.  In real life when something so drastic as the death of a public figure takes place, so many people are in a state of turmoil that events are cloudy and chaotic – and the Gospels reflect that very real confusion.

          Those of us who remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the death of Marilyn Monroe know there are still different theories and different witnesses disagreeing on what they saw in our lifetime.  That’s why this story of Jesus is so believable to me, the disparities of the Gospel without any effort by the different witnesses to give the same account of the same basic event saying, “Hey, let’s be sure to give our stories straight.”

          When you are convinced you are telling the truth, you don’t have to get together with other witnesses to get the story straight.

          There are other reasons why I find the ending of John’s gospel not only credible, but really quite easy to believe. I don’t mean to knock anyone’s favorite passion play or Easter drama, but in some depictions of the resurrection, people hear the news, “He is risen,” and start singing and dancing just before Jesus is lifted up by cable to heaven.  To me – no matter how elaborate the production – that just goes flat.  Someone comes in and tells me the man I saw killed is “risen,” and, sorry, but my first reaction is not a song and dance.  My reaction is more, “So what have you been smoking?” Believing too quickly smacks to me not only of fiction, but of cheap fiction.

          But these characters in John’s Gospel don’t respond by singing the Victory chorus. They have all the doubts, all the hesitancy, even the out and out cynicism that people today might have when they hear, “He is risen.”

          As John describes the account, it’s difficult even for the people who had spent three or more years with Jesus – to believe that he is risen. For many people, probably most of us, we are going to argue with ourselves about whether or not this could happen.  We are rationalists, most of us.  I would hope so – that we agree that we are thinking creatures.

          I was raised to be a rationalist, especially about the business of life and death. In school we studied life cycles in fourth or fifth grade. By fourth or fifth grade, many of my crowd growing up had lost either a puppy or a kitten to a car.  Some of us had lost a grandparent. 

I’d lost my grandfather when I was in the fourth grade. And when he died, rationalism didn’t give me any comfort. When the pet dies, you bury them. And when your grandfather dies, you put him the ground. Cover him up.  Never see him again.  Ever.  It was a choking reality – maybe more so for a fourth grader than for the big people.  It caused me to consider the story I read in church.  I read in church. During those interminable glimpses of the eternity that the church bulletin called “The Sermon,” I read in the back of the hymnal “The Order for the Administration of the Sacrament of Baptism,” and “The Order for the Administration of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion,” and  “The Order for the Burial of the Dead.” When my father stepped on our kitten and killed him when I was in  fifth grade I went out and buried him in the vacant lot and did a fairly credible funeral service – my first one.  Had my parents seen me conduct it, they’d have either said I was morbid or worse than that I was in danger of growing up to be a preacher.  “Do you think we should get someone to talk to him?”

I could recite the Apostle’s Creed by heart. I knew from the order for the Burial of the Dead that Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life,” and, “Let not your hearts be troubled, in my father’s house are many rooms.” 

I knew that “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” I knew all that in fourth grade, and wondered how it all sort of panned out the day my grandfather’s casket was lowered into the ground.

          In the days after that funeral I had this fourth grade notion that if after three days we’d go back to that cemetery and dig up that grave, my grandfather would be gone. There was something comforting about it, but something disturbing as well and it was why for a long period of time I was afraid to walk past the Negro graveyard not far from our house -- because you never could tell when for some person lying in a freshly dug grave it might be the third day.

          And yet as I grew older and saw more and more upturned graves I began to realize that the only thing different three days after the burial was that a few of the flowers were missing and by then they might have taken down the green tent.  Though, of course I was still a rationalist, fighting between this idea of the creed of faith and the science textbooks.

          I became a complete rationalist for a period of time beginning with the morning of my father’s murder.  It was just a few weeks before I started the tenth grade, and I had tried mouth to nose resuscitation on him after he was already dead and it created such questions within me on how long a person could be dead and still recover that I instigated a tenth grade science project on resuscitation. Mike Beatty shared my fascination and together he and I set to work to see if there could be any sort of resuscitation after death, and how long some living creature could be dead and return to life.

          We were not scientists.  We were athletes, and I’m ashamed to admit what we did, but we got a couple of his neighbor’s baby chickens.  We poured ether into a cloth and covered the chicken’s head.  The chicken never did completely go out, but Beatty and I were swaying a bit inside the garage.  Beatty said the problem was the chicken didn’t know how to count backwards from ten.  Then we injected saline solution into the jugular vein, popped the chicken into a round ice cream container filled frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice), and put the ice cream container into the freezer in my grandmother’s garage.  As cold as possible, as quickly as possible. Then Mike cranked up his old white Plymouth and we rode down the hill to the drug store and each had ourselves a fountain drink until Beatty looked at his watch and said “that chicken ought to be dead by now.”

          So we rode back up the hill and attached the wires from the transformer of an old electric train set and turned up the juice on that poor chicken, but no matter how much juice we gave that chicken, there was no response.  As Beatty said with all scientific clarity, “Hoard that chicken is dead.”

          Scientific inquiry means trying something again with a slight variation and seeing if that will work, but to our credit, we were not sadists and Beatty said, “Let’s don’t kill any more chickens,” and I said, “Beatty, we can’t turn in a science project based on one experiment. We’re going to have to kill at least one or two more.”

          And he said, “No, we don’t have to.  We’ll just say that we did.”

          So we figured out what we would try differently if we were going to have to kill one more chicken. Acclimating a chicken to the dry ice container before injecting the saline solution, using his jumper cables to the car instead the electric train transformer, and Beatty even added a nice detail to our fiction by saying that we got a response on the second chicken, but that it was more than likely a muscle contraction.

And the result of our project.  We won the school science fair.  Had to take our show to Dahlonega. My star was set for an academic path. No, I would go on to write more fiction.  And Beatty used his ability to persuade to become a politician.

          But by tenth grade, it had been ingrained in me that when you’re dead you’re dead and any sort of reversal after you’re dead doesn’t add up to what we know to be true.  That’s why any sort of Easter drama where Mary rushes from the tomb and everyone starts clapping and singing just doesn’t come across to me as very real.

          What makes John’s story so believable to me is that when Mary goes to the tomb and sees that the stone has been rolled away, she doesn’t rush back to the disciples saying, “He is risen.  What Jesus said was true all along. We should have known he wouldn’t stay dead.”

No, she comes back to tell Simon Peter and the other disciple, John. “Someone stole the body. They have taken him away and we don’t know where they put him.”

The reaction of Peter and John I also find believable. If you hear that someone has stolen your friend’s body, you either go looking for the body or you go looking for an explanation.

These two disciples go looking for explanations.  They go running off to the tomb and one of the disciples looks inside and sees the grave clothes and John says he believes Jesus is risen, but that he doesn’t understand. Peter looks in and he doesn’t believe at all.  Peter starts playing detective taking in the details -- which is what most of us would have done. There are the linene wrappings still inside the tomb. There is the face cloth rolled up in a place by itself.

What does this mean? Jesus having suffered the trauma of a severe beating and then nailed up on a cross. He was dead, bound up in these cloths. If he somehow survived there’s no way he could lie in a tomb too weak to rip through that clothing. He wouldn’t have been able to breathe well enough to revive.  Mary’s right, someone must have stolen the body, and yet why they take the time to undress him?

Peter doesn’t understand. John believes, John says, but he doesn’t understanding.  And I suppose I don’t really have any problem with that idea. Many people believe without understanding.

Maybe you’ve felt that way.  I believe, but I have questions about the faith. None of these people were disqualified because they had some doubts. As long as the doubts cause us to ask honest questions and not cling to our cynicism, and blindly insist that this never happened, you’re right up there with the rest of these disciples.

But you notice that to get answers for their questions, they go to the place where he was placed and where he arose.  The bests place to get answers is in a place where we believe He has been and where He has been witnessed to by others as being alive.  And you go back again and again.

Mary goes back to the place again.  She didn’t get it the first time.  But she goes back. Why go back? She’d already seen what there was to see? Why go to the place where you last saw him unless there is something about the place that is holy and which draws you there.  Jesus had been there, and maybe to Mary Magdalene that made the place holy. And while she is there again, it doesn’t become a holy place. An angel begins to engage her in conversation.  “Woman, why are you weeping?”

“Because I don’t understand,” she says. She still thinks the body has been stolen. “They’ve taken away my Lord,” she says, “and I don’t where they’ve put him.”

Then she turns around and she sees Jesus, but doesn’t know its Jesus. Of course not.  I suspect that if you went to the funeral home you could pass right back without noticing the deceased if he were standing near the coat rack.

Mary thinks he’s the caretaker.  Maybe even the thief who stole the body. She tells him if he’ll help her understand what happened to Jesus, she won’t press charges.
          But this is when the moment of change came to her.  It was when she realized that this presence, this person, this entity, could speak her name.  Mary.

Even if you’ve moved from doubt to hope, from misunderstanding to recognition, and have had talks with Him unawares, when you ever catch him saying your name, it’s the moment of belief.

If you catch yourself doubting and still wondering, if you catch yourself inquiring and recognizing that you can’t help but return to those places where you last heard of him, you put yourself in position to hear him call your name.

It happened to me when I was sixteen.  I felt myself drawn to the church on a Saturday night.  Nobody made me go.  But the room became a holy place for me that night.  When I realized that yes he knew my name.

I don’t know all the reasons or any of the reasons all or any of us would show up here today.  But I don’t have to understand it. I don’t have to understand how it happens to find it not just credible but even easy to believe that this could be the moment  someone realizes, “He is calling out my name.”

When he calls it may even take you a while to figure out exactly who is calling you, but when you recognize him, like Mary, it really makes you want to cling to him.