The Misplaced Christ
Sermon
An Idle Tale Becomes Good News
Messages On Lent And Easter Themes
The various Gospel accounts of the first Easter bear similarities to each other, but there are also interesting and significant differences in them. The Gospel of John, for instance, instead of telling about several women coming to the tomb on the first day of the week, individualizes the account and centers it around one woman, Mary Magdalene.
Mary, of all women, is one we would have expected to come to Jesus' tomb on an errand of love. She had plenty of reason to love Jesus, for he had done something for her that had radically transformed her life. We are not sure just what her condition was, but we are told that Jesus cast seven demons out of her (Luke 8:1-3; Mark 16:9). In those times, demons were associated not only with physical ailments, but also with moral and spiritual defects. So shame would most likely have been associated with her condition. Jesus gave her wholeness of body and spirit, restoring a sense of dignity and worth, and gave her a new purpose for living and new motivation and strength for such living. We are not surprised to see her coming very early in the morning to Jesus' tomb.
She is surprised, however, and disturbed as well, not to find Jesus' body in the tomb. In great distress, she hurries to find Peter and John, saying to them, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him." In her view, upset though she is, it is a simple matter of someone having misplaced, moved to another location, the body of her crucified Lord.
Peter and John, not yet having the first kindlings of resurrection faith, share her concern and rush, even run, to the tomb to see for themselves. John is convinced by what he sees that it is not just a matter of Jesus' body having been misplaced. He believes that Jesus has been resurrected. The Gospel of John does not tell us whether or not Peter shares John's faith, but soon they return to their places of residence.
But Mary does not go with them. Instead, she tarries, leaning against the outside of the tomb, weeping warm tears of distress and occasionally looking inside the tomb in the hope that she has been mistaken.
Through her tears she sees heavenly messengers who ask her why she is weeping. She replies, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." Then she turns around and sees someone standing nearby. She says to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away."
The only possibility she could entertain was that the body of Jesus had been moved. In a moment a new possibility would dawn on her mind, but now she was obsessed with the thought of a misplaced Christ.
Misdirected Searching
One problem was that her searching was misdirected. She was trying to find Jesus where she thought he ought to be. He had been left in a certain place; she had seen his body placed there, and she thought he ought still to be there. She expected him to stay put, but he did not!
Is that not an expectation commonly held by us, too? We are not dealing with a dead body now, of course, but still we may expect that Christ will not move around too much. We want to keep him located where we can find him easily, which may mean in some quiet secluded garden, rather than in the thick of our common life.
But Christ won't stay put. He keeps bursting out of the bonds in which we try to bind him. He will not be confined to particular places. He will not be excluded from vital issues. He will not be restrained from selected situations. And if we assume that he will, we may find ourselves searching for what seems to be a misplaced Christ.
Mary's search was misdirected also because her focus was on the past. She is not to be faulted for that; such would be thoughtlessly cruel. It was because Christ had acted redemptively in her life in the past that she cared enough to tend his lifeless body now when there was no longer anything else he could do. She had no reason for thinking of him except in terms of what was past. But before long she knew him, not just as a lovely life of the past, but as a living presence encountering her anew.
We have the Easter story for our enlightenment, as Mary did not, but we, too, tend to look for Christ only in the past. We need to see and to know him there, but the Resurrection tells us that Christ cannot be kept there. He is our eternal contemporary. He keeps bursting out of the grave clothes of the dead past and confronting us as a living presence. To look for him, therefore, only in the past is to be misdirected in our searching.
Delayed Recognition
Dr. G. H. C. MacGregor called this story of Mary Magdalene's experience with the risen Christ "the greatest recognition scene in all literature."1 But when Christ appeared to her, it was at first a case of mistaken identity and of delayed recognition. Mary thought he was the gardener!
Two related factors delayed her recognition of Christ. One was her unexpectancy, and the other was her preoccupation.
Mary wanted to find Jesus, but she did not expect him to be walking around outside that tomb. When she had first come to Joseph's garden, she had expected to find Jesus' body in the tomb where it had been placed. But when it was not there, she did not know what to expect. So Jesus' appearance to her was totally unexpected, and at first she did not recognize him.
Carl Sandburg has a poem about a college teacher who has earned a doctor's degree from the University of Heidelberg, and has had a variety of experiences far removed from the university setting. Once, for instance, he lived for six weeks in a tent looking in the face of the Great Sphinx of Egypt. One morning as he was shaving, he asked the Sphinx to tell him something worth telling. The Sphinx broke its long silence and said: "Don't expect too much."2
"If you don't expect anything, you won't be disappointed," it is said. But that is a pretty drab philosophy by which to try to live. Yet at times, in part at least because of past disappointments, we may allow a spirit of unexpectancy to settle down over our lives, and Christ may be close at hand without our recognizing him.
Mary's preoccupation also contributed to the delay in her recognition of Jesus. It is true that she was there because she wanted to find Christ, but she was so preoccupied with the misplaced Christ that for a moment she could not recognize the living Christ.
Mary was preoccupied with a problem. She was blinded by her tears, absorbed in her grief. The Christian gospel tells us that Christ is eternally near, but it is not always easy to recognize him when life bears down upon us -- "when burdens press and cares distress."
There are so many things with which we may become preoccupied: our burdens and problems, our regrets, our guilt, our dreams and ambitions, pleasures, making a living, getting an education, succeeding, surviving ...
In T. S. Eliot's play, Murder in the Cathedral, the tragic end is approaching for Archbishop Thomas Becket. He has anticipated it, but still finds its approach to be unexpected. He says that when the "moment foreseen" comes, we are not expecting it because we are "engrossed with matters of other urgency."3
So often that is the way it is with Christ's coming, too. He would not have us to be perpetual idlers, yet sometimes our preoccupation -- perhaps even with good things -- prevents us from recognizing his living presence with us.
Unexpected Finding
But the gospel part of this matchless story of Mary's search for the misplaced Christ is that in the end it was not Mary who found Christ, but Christ who found Mary. Mary had been seeking him to no avail; then she discovered that he was seeking her, and she was found of him. His search for us always precedes our search for him, and when we find him, we discover that we have been found.
This is a marvelous gospel truth, permeating the whole of Jesus' mission and message. He talked about a seeking God, and his own life gave evidence of the depth of that conviction. John's story about the blind man whose healing by Jesus resulted in his being excommunicated from the synagogue is one illustration of this. John says that when Jesus learned that he had been cast out of the synagogue, he went looking for him and found him (John 9:35). He came to seek and to save the lost!
This is good news! If you are astray from God, you can be sure that God is not far from you. When it seems that you have lost all contact with God, when your spiritual life is dim, thin, drab, or meager, God has not gone off somewhere and left you alone. God comes seeking you in your lostness. And there is hope for the reestablishment of relationship with God, because God has already taken the initiative to find you and to restore you to Divine fellowship.
I remember seeing a cartoon once that pictured a man looking at a bulletin board that was supposed to have a "thought for the day" on it. It was a holiday, and the sign read: "Due to the holiday, there is no thought for the day." It may seem at times as if God has taken a holiday or extended vacation, but Jesus' coming to Mary outside the garden tomb tells us of a God who arises in the midst of death and seeks us out even in our sorrow and trouble and doubt and despair.
This means that at no time or in any place are we hopelessly shut off from God. Hence Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's New Year's wish for a friend is always possible of fulfillment for any of us. He wrote, "May the new year be kind to you -- that is, brimful of the presence of God."4 If our own faithfulness were all we had to depend upon, our prospects would be dim indeed. But God in Christ keeps arising in the graveyard of our doubts, failures, despairs, broken promises, and dreams, and he finds us and calls us by name and gives us hope and joy again!
"They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." To Mary he was the misplaced Christ. He may be that to us, too, at times. We look for him but cannot find him. We long for his fellowship, but he is nowhere to be found. What then?
Perhaps we should consider whether or not our search is misdirected. We may have expected Christ to stay where we put him, while he keeps bursting the bonds we try to wrap around him. We may be focusing on the past, while he wants to be a living presence with us. We may not be recognizing him because of the haze of unexpectancy or the blur of preoccupation.
In such times, it might be helpful if we would go back in memory and imagination to that moment in Joseph's garden when the risen Christ found this weeping friend and called her by name, and she was "surprised by joy,"5 the joy of the living presence of her resurrected Lord. He arises in the midst of any death that may surround us, too, and if we have ears to hear, we may hear him call our name, as he comes to us with love and forgiveness and joy and strength.
____________
1. G. H. C. MacGregor, The Gospel of John (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1929), p. 358.
2. Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1936), p. 20.
3. T. S. Eliot, "Murder in the Cathedral," in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), p. 203.
4. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Letters from a Traveler (New York and London: Harper & Row, Publishers; London: William Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., 1962), p. 296.
5. Title of C. S. Lewis' autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955).
Mary, of all women, is one we would have expected to come to Jesus' tomb on an errand of love. She had plenty of reason to love Jesus, for he had done something for her that had radically transformed her life. We are not sure just what her condition was, but we are told that Jesus cast seven demons out of her (Luke 8:1-3; Mark 16:9). In those times, demons were associated not only with physical ailments, but also with moral and spiritual defects. So shame would most likely have been associated with her condition. Jesus gave her wholeness of body and spirit, restoring a sense of dignity and worth, and gave her a new purpose for living and new motivation and strength for such living. We are not surprised to see her coming very early in the morning to Jesus' tomb.
She is surprised, however, and disturbed as well, not to find Jesus' body in the tomb. In great distress, she hurries to find Peter and John, saying to them, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him." In her view, upset though she is, it is a simple matter of someone having misplaced, moved to another location, the body of her crucified Lord.
Peter and John, not yet having the first kindlings of resurrection faith, share her concern and rush, even run, to the tomb to see for themselves. John is convinced by what he sees that it is not just a matter of Jesus' body having been misplaced. He believes that Jesus has been resurrected. The Gospel of John does not tell us whether or not Peter shares John's faith, but soon they return to their places of residence.
But Mary does not go with them. Instead, she tarries, leaning against the outside of the tomb, weeping warm tears of distress and occasionally looking inside the tomb in the hope that she has been mistaken.
Through her tears she sees heavenly messengers who ask her why she is weeping. She replies, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." Then she turns around and sees someone standing nearby. She says to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away."
The only possibility she could entertain was that the body of Jesus had been moved. In a moment a new possibility would dawn on her mind, but now she was obsessed with the thought of a misplaced Christ.
Misdirected Searching
One problem was that her searching was misdirected. She was trying to find Jesus where she thought he ought to be. He had been left in a certain place; she had seen his body placed there, and she thought he ought still to be there. She expected him to stay put, but he did not!
Is that not an expectation commonly held by us, too? We are not dealing with a dead body now, of course, but still we may expect that Christ will not move around too much. We want to keep him located where we can find him easily, which may mean in some quiet secluded garden, rather than in the thick of our common life.
But Christ won't stay put. He keeps bursting out of the bonds in which we try to bind him. He will not be confined to particular places. He will not be excluded from vital issues. He will not be restrained from selected situations. And if we assume that he will, we may find ourselves searching for what seems to be a misplaced Christ.
Mary's search was misdirected also because her focus was on the past. She is not to be faulted for that; such would be thoughtlessly cruel. It was because Christ had acted redemptively in her life in the past that she cared enough to tend his lifeless body now when there was no longer anything else he could do. She had no reason for thinking of him except in terms of what was past. But before long she knew him, not just as a lovely life of the past, but as a living presence encountering her anew.
We have the Easter story for our enlightenment, as Mary did not, but we, too, tend to look for Christ only in the past. We need to see and to know him there, but the Resurrection tells us that Christ cannot be kept there. He is our eternal contemporary. He keeps bursting out of the grave clothes of the dead past and confronting us as a living presence. To look for him, therefore, only in the past is to be misdirected in our searching.
Delayed Recognition
Dr. G. H. C. MacGregor called this story of Mary Magdalene's experience with the risen Christ "the greatest recognition scene in all literature."1 But when Christ appeared to her, it was at first a case of mistaken identity and of delayed recognition. Mary thought he was the gardener!
Two related factors delayed her recognition of Christ. One was her unexpectancy, and the other was her preoccupation.
Mary wanted to find Jesus, but she did not expect him to be walking around outside that tomb. When she had first come to Joseph's garden, she had expected to find Jesus' body in the tomb where it had been placed. But when it was not there, she did not know what to expect. So Jesus' appearance to her was totally unexpected, and at first she did not recognize him.
Carl Sandburg has a poem about a college teacher who has earned a doctor's degree from the University of Heidelberg, and has had a variety of experiences far removed from the university setting. Once, for instance, he lived for six weeks in a tent looking in the face of the Great Sphinx of Egypt. One morning as he was shaving, he asked the Sphinx to tell him something worth telling. The Sphinx broke its long silence and said: "Don't expect too much."2
"If you don't expect anything, you won't be disappointed," it is said. But that is a pretty drab philosophy by which to try to live. Yet at times, in part at least because of past disappointments, we may allow a spirit of unexpectancy to settle down over our lives, and Christ may be close at hand without our recognizing him.
Mary's preoccupation also contributed to the delay in her recognition of Jesus. It is true that she was there because she wanted to find Christ, but she was so preoccupied with the misplaced Christ that for a moment she could not recognize the living Christ.
Mary was preoccupied with a problem. She was blinded by her tears, absorbed in her grief. The Christian gospel tells us that Christ is eternally near, but it is not always easy to recognize him when life bears down upon us -- "when burdens press and cares distress."
There are so many things with which we may become preoccupied: our burdens and problems, our regrets, our guilt, our dreams and ambitions, pleasures, making a living, getting an education, succeeding, surviving ...
In T. S. Eliot's play, Murder in the Cathedral, the tragic end is approaching for Archbishop Thomas Becket. He has anticipated it, but still finds its approach to be unexpected. He says that when the "moment foreseen" comes, we are not expecting it because we are "engrossed with matters of other urgency."3
So often that is the way it is with Christ's coming, too. He would not have us to be perpetual idlers, yet sometimes our preoccupation -- perhaps even with good things -- prevents us from recognizing his living presence with us.
Unexpected Finding
But the gospel part of this matchless story of Mary's search for the misplaced Christ is that in the end it was not Mary who found Christ, but Christ who found Mary. Mary had been seeking him to no avail; then she discovered that he was seeking her, and she was found of him. His search for us always precedes our search for him, and when we find him, we discover that we have been found.
This is a marvelous gospel truth, permeating the whole of Jesus' mission and message. He talked about a seeking God, and his own life gave evidence of the depth of that conviction. John's story about the blind man whose healing by Jesus resulted in his being excommunicated from the synagogue is one illustration of this. John says that when Jesus learned that he had been cast out of the synagogue, he went looking for him and found him (John 9:35). He came to seek and to save the lost!
This is good news! If you are astray from God, you can be sure that God is not far from you. When it seems that you have lost all contact with God, when your spiritual life is dim, thin, drab, or meager, God has not gone off somewhere and left you alone. God comes seeking you in your lostness. And there is hope for the reestablishment of relationship with God, because God has already taken the initiative to find you and to restore you to Divine fellowship.
I remember seeing a cartoon once that pictured a man looking at a bulletin board that was supposed to have a "thought for the day" on it. It was a holiday, and the sign read: "Due to the holiday, there is no thought for the day." It may seem at times as if God has taken a holiday or extended vacation, but Jesus' coming to Mary outside the garden tomb tells us of a God who arises in the midst of death and seeks us out even in our sorrow and trouble and doubt and despair.
This means that at no time or in any place are we hopelessly shut off from God. Hence Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's New Year's wish for a friend is always possible of fulfillment for any of us. He wrote, "May the new year be kind to you -- that is, brimful of the presence of God."4 If our own faithfulness were all we had to depend upon, our prospects would be dim indeed. But God in Christ keeps arising in the graveyard of our doubts, failures, despairs, broken promises, and dreams, and he finds us and calls us by name and gives us hope and joy again!
"They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." To Mary he was the misplaced Christ. He may be that to us, too, at times. We look for him but cannot find him. We long for his fellowship, but he is nowhere to be found. What then?
Perhaps we should consider whether or not our search is misdirected. We may have expected Christ to stay where we put him, while he keeps bursting the bonds we try to wrap around him. We may be focusing on the past, while he wants to be a living presence with us. We may not be recognizing him because of the haze of unexpectancy or the blur of preoccupation.
In such times, it might be helpful if we would go back in memory and imagination to that moment in Joseph's garden when the risen Christ found this weeping friend and called her by name, and she was "surprised by joy,"5 the joy of the living presence of her resurrected Lord. He arises in the midst of any death that may surround us, too, and if we have ears to hear, we may hear him call our name, as he comes to us with love and forgiveness and joy and strength.
____________
1. G. H. C. MacGregor, The Gospel of John (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1929), p. 358.
2. Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1936), p. 20.
3. T. S. Eliot, "Murder in the Cathedral," in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), p. 203.
4. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Letters from a Traveler (New York and London: Harper & Row, Publishers; London: William Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., 1962), p. 296.
5. Title of C. S. Lewis' autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955).
