Mary Magdalene met the challenge to change. She had been driven mad by a mad world, mad with oppression, mad with suffering. Her mad way of coping with the madness needed to end. She needed to make changes if she was to have a new life. Moving from no longer insanely coping with demons of deadliness to transforming the world that produced them. She could only do so with others. She decided to join with Jesus and his Community of God. But now that demon world was subjecting Jesus to madness, oppressing him, inflicting suffering on him. So much so they crucified him. The sane healer who drove the demons from her and showed her how to change, how to transform herself and the world was murdered by the world’s insane oppressors. What is to become of her new emerging life? Will she change back and revert to madness once again? She has come this day to the end result of madness, “to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark.” Will she linger here and let its madness for death overtake her? But death is not here. Life is here instead.
Life presents us with the challenge to change. Can we meet the challenge? Can we do so in little personal ways and in great social ways? It is so very difficult to change in great social ways. Great social ways are often presented as traditions needing to endure and not to be changed. But they are often, in truth, simply old oppressions and deadly sufferings; old and deadly gods, religions, values, politics, and more. They oppress us and they make suffer. They must no longer endure and we are challenged to change them. We live in a mad world, a world that would make us mad to cope with it. But like Mary Magdalene we are called not merely to cope. We are called to transform. We have not been given a mandate for death. We have been given an experience of life. We face an ultimate challenge to change from the cross to the Resurrection – from every cross to every Resurrection. It is the challenge to die to what is old and deadly because what is new and life-giving within us and within the world is waiting to be born.
“I have a life that did not become, that turned aside and stopped, astonished: I hold it in me like a pregnancy or as on my lap a child not to grow but dwell on. It is to this grave I most frequently return and return to ask what is wrong… to see it all by the light of a different necessity but the grave will not heal and the child, stirring, must share my grave with me, … the child in me that could not become, was not ready for others to go on into change… now, I say in the graveyard, here lies the flurry… and I yell as far as I can, I cannot leave this place, for me it is the dearest and the worst, it is life nearest to life which is life lost… it is a picture-book, letter-perfect Easter morning: I have been for a walk: the wind is tranquil… the birds are lively with voice. I saw two great birds… but then one bird… veered a little and the other bird did not notice… the circling… the other bird came back… and then together flew on into the distance… it is a sight of bountiful majesty and integrity… fresh as this particular flood of burn breaking across us now from the sun.” Easter Morning! (Easter Morning – A. R. Ammons)
Prayer: Spirit of Life, burn bright through us.
Question: What sane change for society will I not let linger with at the grave and instead join with others to resurrect?
April 1, 2018 Gospel John 20:1-9 Easter