The Sunday of the Resurrection: Easter Day, rcl yr c, 2022
Acts 10:34-43; Ps 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Cor 15:19-26; Jn 20:1-18
She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).
It seems that Mary Magdalene gets something really wrong when she sees Jesus. To catch us all up: John’s Gospel picks up for us today in the aftermath of Jesus’s crucifixion. The last words we hear before this are the ones we hear on Good Friday: that the crucified, dead Jesus has just been laid in a tomb. And then we hear that Mary Magdalene, “early on the first day of the week,” has found the tomb broken open; Mary tells Peter and the Beloved Disciple, who run together to find the tomb empty, seeing only “the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head.” but then, Mary goes back again. And when she sees Jesus, and Jesus calls out her name, she recognizes him.
But Mary must get the next bit wrong. The one who was dead, has come back from the dead. The crucified one is now the risen one. What was dead flesh is now a living body. And this must be some sort of confirmation that God is at work in a very special way here. A little later on, another disciple does seem to get the importance of this event when he calls Jesus “My Lord and my God.” And so, this seems a moment of Mary Magdalene just not getting it, when “She turned and said to to the risen Jesus in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).”
Surely “Teacher” can’t be the right thing to call Jesus, not now, not now that the one who was dead, is now alive before her. To call Jesus simply “Teacher” just seems, well, like a small cup of pretty week tea at this point in the drama of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.
The Welsh poet and Anglican priest R.S. Thomas was known to be an extraordinarily crabby and difficult man, who would apparently give long, droning sermons to his tiny Welsh congregation on evils such as refrigerators and washing machines; though one of his kindlier bishops was able to see through this contrariness, at least in his Thomas’s poetry. The Archbishop of Wales, Barry Morgan, says this of him: R.S. Thomas was able to “articulate through his poetry questions that are inscribed on the heart of most Christian pilgrims in their search for meaning and truth.”
This is perhaps especially true of his poem “The Answer.” Bring to mind, for a moment, Peter and the Beloved Disciple entering the broken open tomb only to find “the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head.” In his poem, R.S. Thomas writes about knowledge, and what happens to the questions asked of God by a grumpy old priest praying in a draughty Welsh chapel. Thomas writes in that poem:
There have been times
when, after long on my knees
in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
from my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in a place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love’s risen body.
And if for Thomas, priest and poet, if a stone can roll from his mind, and he can see “the old questions lie folded and in a place by themselves, like the piled graveclothes of love’s risen body” then perhaps there may be some deeper connection between teaching, learning, and the resurrection of Jesus; between questions that are set aside like graveclothes, and “love’s risen body.”
George Herbert, another Anglican poet-priest—though perhaps not as famously grumpy as R.S. Thomas—writes too, in his poem “The Agonie,” about knowledge, learning, and Jesus. Herbert writes of philosophers and scientists who know how to measure mountains, the depth of the sea, and the space between the stars. “But there are two vast, spacious things,” writes Herbert, “The which to measure it doth more behove: yet fewer there are that sound them: Sinne and Love.”
We shouldn’t misunderstand Herbert here; he is not saying that there is no value in philosophy or science. But he is saying that there is knowledge of two things foundational to the world that can be overlooked very easily. For Herbert they are sin and love.
And if you know sin, Herbert suggests: look to Jesus on the cross, to “A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair, His skinne, his garments bloudie be.” If you know sin, look here, to the cross, where you will find sin’s answer, and its end. And for those who know not love? Look there, too. “Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,” writes Herbert, “Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.” It is this Jesus that teaches us what love is: the one who gives to us his blood, his body, as spiritual food.
So perhaps I’ve been a bit too hard on poor Mary Magdalene for turning to the risen Jesus that day in the garden and calling him Teacher. If it is “love’s risen body” escaping the tomb that teaches, that leaves behind old questions; or if it is Christ’s own bodily presence to us that teaches us of sin’s answer and its end, and of what love is; then to call Jesus “Teacher” means much more than we might first imagine.
And if we were to read John’s Gospel a little more closely, we would find there, too, the testimony that this Teacher teaches, in his own bodily presence about God’s way in the world: God’s way of love is the way of Jesus: skin and blood and bone. Right at the beginning of John’s Gospel, Jesus is said to bring understanding and truth as the Word made flesh, the Word made flesh that “enlightens everyone” and embodies “grace and truth.” And then, as John’s Gospel will put it: “No one has seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” To call Jesus “Teacher” in John’s Gospel is to speak of what Jesus shares in his own body: grace, and truth, and God.
And in the Garden with Mary Magdalene, Jesus the Teacher again embodies what he teaches. Love’s risen body teachers her that this love is stronger than any of our sins and failures. Love’s risen body teachers her that this love is sin’s end.
This is the Jesus who meets Mary Magdalene in the garden, and teaching what love is. Love is the end of death, your death and mine, and all promised in Jesus: in love’s risen body.
The Revd Dr Preston DS Parsons