“The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”

“A promise was given to us,” writes poet Czeslaw Milosz.
though it was two thousand years ago.
And you did not return, O Savior and Teacher.
They marked me with your sign and sent me out to serve.
I put on the burden of ecclesiastical robes
And the mask of a benevolent smile.
People come to me and force me to touch their wounds,
Their fear of death, and the misery of passing time.
Could I dare to confess to them that I am a priest without faith,
That I pray every day for the grace of understanding.
Though there is in me only a hope of hope.
There are days when people seem to me a festival
Of marionettes dancing at the edge of nothingness
And the torture inflicted on the Son of Man on the cross
Occurred so that the world could show its indifference.
If on this morning I am to touch your wounds, your fear of death, the misery of passing time and by grace turn you in hope toward the promise we have been given by the God who lives, we must begin our prayers for understanding Easter morning, says John, in the dark. In Matthew, the first day of the week was dawning as Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. In Mark, the sun had risen when Mary Magdalene and Mary the Mother of James and Salome went to the tomb. In Luke, on the first day of the week the women came to the tomb at early dawn. But in John’s gospel, early on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb while it was still dark.
It is no secret to our hearts that we join her in the darkness. On the surface, which does not feel like a surface… more like dancing on the edge of nothingness…there is the question of life after the daily onslaught of death: not only the death that is the every day fare of peoples in Somalia and Haiti, in Afghanistan and Gaza, in North Philadelphia and Camden and now in L’Aquila, Italy; but now the fact is a paycheck has not been in your hand for over a year; just this week you were told to clean off your desk, never to return; two years after graduation you have yet to find the intersection between a livelihood and a life; “till death do you part” turned out to be a promise you could not keep, turned out to be a promise that has broken your heart; the child you once cradled in your arms at the font now inhabits your house as a stranger; the dining room soon to be filled with a multitude of guests cannot make up for the one missing whose grave you visited yesterday morning; the physical ills and financial anxiety of retirement are about to land you in the home and on the home stretch far too soon; the cancer, though in remission, haunting your consciousness, the heart kept beating by a battery, the slipping of your mind or the lost memory of the dear one who stares into space have worn you out with beseeching. These beg the quantum question of the morning, of course, the question of life after death. So we open John’s gospel on Easter Sunday because John alone says what must be said of our lives: it is still dark.
Dark! As many of you already know, John’s use of the word is never casual. Its meaning for him begins in the beginning of the Bible where God separated the chaos from the cosmos, the darkness from the light, calling the light alone “good.” This first light, a light that precedes the sun and moon and stars, is both created and given in the Old Testament only by the word of God. Wherever God’s word is spoken, light shines, pushing back the darkness.
According to John, this same Word that was in the beginning and made the light to shine became flesh for the sake of a world where darkness and chaos reigned. To the light some brought their wounds—their blindness, their infidelities, their sickness unto death. He made them whole, that the world might see in him the light that is light, the light that is all we have to go on in the meantime. While he lived, darkness and the chaos that have threatened the edges of God’s good creation with nothingness from the first did battle with the light. For John on the first day of the week, therefore, the dark was cosmic.
But John saw more: saw a second sort of darkness close at hand. “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him,” John wrote in the first chapter, “yet the world knew him not. He came to his own and his own received him not.” This, it seemed to John, was the willful darkness of men and women—a darkness that is the distance we keep from God and ironically coincides with religion, with what we believe in instead of God. Therefore priests and politicians conspired to extinguish the light that shines wherever God’s Word is spoken. Paradoxically, as the story goes, God used precisely the means darkness had devised to do Jesus in, in order to reveal the Light that shines in the deepest darkness, in the misery of passing time, in the hopelessness of a borrowed grave.
The means culminated in a poll taken by a politician named Pilate on Friday. He asked simply for a show of fear and hatred so as to confirm the world’s preference for darkness. He ordered Jesus crucified dead and buried. By three in the afternoon, people believed they were rid of him. That is to say, in John’s understanding of human believing, they did not just think but began to live and move and have their being as though they no longer had to do with the God whose Word spoke light into the world. They preferred the darkness, really!
But on the first day of the week, when it was still dark, John had to do business with a third sort of darkness, the darkness of our disbelieving. Again, John almost exclusively uses the verb of believing rather than the noun of belief because he understands faith not as “an internal disposition” says Raymond Brown, “but as an active commitment” and, with one exception, the active commitment is to a person: the person of Jesus Christ. For John “The commitment is not emotional but involves a willingness to respond to God’s demands as they are presented in and by Jesus,” the primary demand being the one Jesus mentioned at table this past Thursday: the command to love one another.
Such love also was not an emotion but an act of self surrender. “Love could succeed,” writes theologian Robert Jenson, “only as death and resurrection. Only as I give myself up to my beloved, and just in that self surrender become my true self for my beloved, can I succeed in loving. Nor will I have reached the test of love,” he goes on “in some metaphorical death; for until the final condition is called, self-surrender remains, in an alienated world, only an unreliable intention. Only one who had lived for his fellows unto death, and just so not been taken away, but rather made present to them as his own living and free self, would have finally succeeded at love. To say Jesus…died and rose again is to say…there now exists one successful lover.”
Known in her life as a different kind of successful lover, Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus invited her into a way of love and a way of believing that leads a person to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Yet this morning she had come to the tomb certain the last part of her believing involved a commitment to the dead body of Jesus. The image that comes to mind and the sort of religious behavior that follows is that of e.e. cummings “…Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls/are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds…/they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead….”
Paul said as much when he wrote that if Christ has not been raised, then our faith—the believing that follows—is in vain, useless, banal because we are living as though darkness had trumped light, as though finding Jesus’ dead body would give us cultural closure concerning the death of him whose values and ethics we will try to keep alive. Meaning, like the Cambridge ladies and in the words of theologian Robert Jenson, we will set out again this afternoon “to be moderate in our loving—which is the same as hate…[because]…love can succeed only as death and resurrection.”
Do you not see that even if we give ourselves as completely as we can to a disembodied set of values severed from the story of our salvation, if we commit ourselves to an ethic distilled from the discarded body of a first century Jewish rabbi, then we will rise in the dark of any given morning with our joblessness, our lovelessness, our grief, our mortality and will see, in the dark, only evidence of death at the last and nothing more. For without doing business with the God who lives, we cannot help ourselves by ourselves from dancing on the edge of nothingness.
But if we linger and look again, as Mary Magdalene did on the first day of the week, the reflective light of two angels begins to dispel the darkness and an incorporeal something or someone first puts the question: Why are you weeping? Mary speaks for us, saying in so many words that our believing has come to an end; that we cannot even locate in our memory the dead body of doctrine to prove it. Why are you weeping? a second voice asks, a voice we remember from so long ago that we cannot place it, a voice so real and alive that we turn to see who is speaking.
And as we turn we are surprised…which must mean that voice is attached to someone who is alive. Alive, Jenson says, because “the minimum difference between a live man and a dead one is that he can surprise us: a dead man is dead in that he cannot.” Mary supposed that the one who asked after her weeping was the gardener and responded to him as though she were talking to nobody in particular, as though she were saying what anyone in her situation would say to a perfect stranger. She inquired after the whereabouts of a dead body.
But then the one who was dead calls her name: “Mary!” “Rabbouni” she cries to him whose voice she now knows because “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out…and goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.” “The surprise of his aliveness,” Jenson proclaims to those of us who live believing we dwell in darkness, “will be how he includes all our follies and triumphs…in the [future] wrought by his hope and acceptance.”
He is risen! He is risen indeed! A priest without faith, I live believing in Christ’s resurrection not as one assenting to a dead doctrine. Rather as I have been sent to touch your wounds, your fear of death and the misery of the passing time, I live believing that the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness” has shone in our hearts. Even now God is shining the light of life itself into the darkness of your days with no prospect of a job, a marriage at risk, a child in pieces, a heart of grief, ailments unlimited. And because the promise given us two thousand years ago is true and he lives, I live believing he will surprise you with a future, will come to you not as you expected, but will appear to you as the gardener who is, after all, just your unemployed neighbor…except that when he calls you by name, everything in you will shout, “He is risen! He is risen indeed!” Thanks be to God!

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