Easter Sunrise Reflection
April 08, 2012
Easter Sunrise Reflection
John 20:1-18
The novelist Marilynn Robinson has written commentary upon this story from the Gospel of John. She writes,
The accounts of the resurrection famously differ from one Gospel to the next, and this fact enhances the interest of an element they share, the skepticism of the earliest witnesses. Mary Magdalene, when she finds the tomb empty, simply assumes someone has carried the body away, perhaps the gardener she does not recognize as Jesus. Others of his followers do not recognize him when he is among them, in large part because they believe he is, in the way of mortals, dead and gone. In every case the angle of vision is a skepticism based on the expectation that with Jesus' death things will have taken their ordinary course.
Even after Mary has spoken with angels, she explains the body's absence to herself in just the way any rationalist might do, not even pausing to wonder.
The risen Christ does not rebuke Mary for her error. He seems rather to enjoy the occasion of her surprise. . . . The holy in all its otherness is addressed to and profoundly loyal to this world. That the two realities, earthly and divine, are simultaneous rather than opposed is a central assertion of the Bible from the creation to the resurrection.
We pause here to wonder. If we were the strictest of rationalists, we wouldn't get up this early in the morning and come stand in a public park and wait for the sun to rise, all in order to worship God and encounter the holy. We are pausing to wonder.
And we come here because we recognize that the earthly and the divine are simultaneous. That all the elements of this physical nature and all the sublimity of the spirit are connected. The landscape, the trees, the breeze, the faint lights of the sun remind us of these things.
This Lent our Sunday morning worship has included readings from the poetry of Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer, who reminds us that God is present with us as we farm and garden and "tend the soil," which was our Lenten theme.
So, listen once again to a Wendell Berry poem, as he pauses on Easter Sunday to wonder.
Read "Another Sunday Morning Comes."
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